Quick takes on 5 films

The Heiresses is just interesting enough to be a step above watching paint dry. To say this one moves slowly is an understatement, but it has elements that the critics eat up, thus its big rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It follows Chela, a just-past-middle-age woman who comes from money, but who is now fallen on hard times. She and her long-time girlfriend, Chiquita, are selling off household furniture and crystal to pay the bills, but Chiquita is arrested for the debts and sent to jail for a couple months. Chela has relied on Chiquita to make all the decisions for years, and now is forced to take care of herself. She starts driving her elderly friends around for cash, and in doing so, meets a young, attractive, carefree woman named Angy. Chela begins truly living her life for the first time in decades. It’s an art film all the way, which is generally my cup of tea, but perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood today.

Fighting With My Family, on the other hand, has less art and more fun. The previews I saw for this film before it came out hyped up the laughs and I thought maybe it was a straight-forward comedy. It is undoubtedly funny, but it is much more than that too. Based on a true story, it follows the Bevis family in Norwich, England, and specifically, youngest daughter Saraya. The Bevis’ are a family of wrestlers, with the mom and dad running a small wrestling club in their hometown. Saraya and her brother Zak have dreams of making it big and becoming WWE stars in the USA, but when they get their chance in an audition, only Saraya is picked to train and move further in the audition process. Depressed, Zak goes back to England, while Saraya continues working in the high-stress world of wrestling hopefuls. The film leans hard towards sentimentality but isn’t entirely heavy handed, and the acting by all involved (including some familiar faces) is top notch. Very entertaining movie.

Shazam! is good, I’d say much better than the average DC film, but it still didn’t blow me away like Marvel is often able to do in their film series. This one takes place in the same universe as DC’s Batman and Superman films, but features a lesser known superhero. Billy is a teenager who has drifted from foster home to foster home, but is always searching for his birth mother. He is given superpowers by a desperate wizard who knows a great evil will be unleashed soon, and all Billy needs to do to access his powers is yell out “Shazam!” In doing so, his body morphs into a big muscular man who has all kinds of powers from super speed, to flight, to the ability to shoot lightning from his fingertips. While Billy is coming to terms with his new powers, he is also facing his personal struggles in his new foster home, bullies at school, and a powerful supervillain who wants to ad Billy’s powers to his own. Lots of funny sequences involving Billy learning his new powers with his one friend in the world, but the ending really started to drag, with the final fight scenes seeming to go on way too long. Still, not a bad superhero flick.

Transit is as much of a gut punch as you’re going to get from a quiet, independent film. It is a German film, based on a book that was written and took place during World War II, but the film has shifted its time frame to today. Instead of an occupying Nazi army, the governments are the increasingly nationalist ones currently spreading throughout the world. Georg is a German citizen living and working in France, but he needs to get out before being rounded up and deported. He has paperwork for a writer named Weidel, who is just famous enough to maybe help him leave France before the government closes all ports. Visas and travel documents are getting hard to come by, and even stop-overs in other countries are hard to get, as those countries don’t want to risk letting foreigners in who may not leave. But when Georg gets to Weidel’s apartment, he finds that he has just committed suicide, and the landowner has used connections to dump the body anonymously so as to avoid the police’s attention. Georg heads for the port city of Marseille, where the occupying police have not yet reached. Attempting to inform the Mexican consulate there that Weidel is dead, they think that Georg IS Weidel. Seeing an opportunity to get himself out of the country, Weidel plays along. A wrench pops up though when he meets a girl he is instantly smitten with, and she refuses to leave France without her estranged husband, who just so happens to be the missing Weidel. A deep and emotional story, directed by one of the best current German directors, Christian Petzold, and starring two great actors, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer (who has been in several films I’ve seen lately, including Frantz and Never Look Away).

Alita: Battle Angel received more attention for the big eyes of its lead actress (computer enhanced Rosa Salazar) than its plot, which is never a good thing, but we all know my love of future dystopian films. This film takes place in a future where an intergalactic war (referred to as “the Fall”) between Earth and colonies on Mars has left most of our planet as a junkyard. 300 years later, a single floating city called Zalem houses all of the elite, whereas the rest of the population fights over the scraps on the ground. Technology is still advanced, but mostly just from the leftovers of the previous generations, as these days people can only re-use and re-purpose existing tech. In the rough society, most humans have cybernetic arms and/or legs, and Dr Dyson (played by Christoph Waltz) is a man who specializes in attaching these robotic limbs to those who need them. He finds a cast-off cyborg in a pre-war junk heap and is able to resurrect her, naming her Alita. Alita has no memory of her past, but in battle, her instincts as a soldier in the war take over, and she is lethal. She falls for a local human named Hugo, who unbeknownst to her, is attacking people and night and ripping off their cybernetic limbs to sell on the black market, in hopes of raising enough money to bribe his way to Zalem. Though the movie has a little too much of a young adult flare (some cheesy dialogue, a forced romance, etc.), I still really enjoyed it. The visuals are stunning, the battle scenes are frenetic but well made, and the plot, while not all that deep, is engaging. While the film did just OK at the theater (400 million on a 170 million budget), it probably didn’t do well enough to get the sequel, that was so obviously set up, made. But even on its own, a fun film.