Even though I was in two awesome countries this past week, doesn’t mean I didn’t make time at least for a couple of movies!
Shazam! Fury of the Gods – Admittedly, I would have liked to have seen the fourth installment of John Wick given that I had just been in Paris the night before its release, but sadly there were no showings late enough to fit into a packed travel schedule. Thus, we landed on the long-awaited Shazam! sequel. While it had plenty of charms like the original, something about the overall story was lacking. I know that several months down the road I won’t remember much of this film. It was enjoyable enough and pretty much on par with the stuff coming from Marvel lately so you can’t really go wrong giving this your time though. Now that the whole family has superpowers, Billy makes it his mission to keep everyone together. That’s harder than it sounds. Oh yeah, there’s also some old gods who are looking to take back the powers that were stolen from their father. I loved Helen Mirren in this movie. I thought it was completely random for her to be in it, but I think she had a blast making it. Given the whole shake-up at DC, it’s hard to tell if any of the teaser’s will ever come to fruition, but they were fun nonetheless.
The Son – I never got the opportunity to watch this prequel film from Florian Zeller, based on his play of the same name, when it came to theaters briefly. Given how well The Father did, I was nervous I was going to miss this film and then it would be nominated for tons of awards. That ended up not being the case at all and the film was panned by critics almost universally. Crazy. Well, I had a long plane ride home and I was still curious to check this drama out, so I did! While it wasn’t as psychologically interesting as The Father, this drama touched on mental illness. Kind of. To me it spoke more about a teenager’s parents lack of knowledge and emotional capacity to deal with mental illness. Nicholas is clearly suffering from a deep depression but instead of getting him help, his mother Kate sends him to live with his mostly absent father, Peter. It was strange to me how much Peter seemed to care about Nicholas, but then came to understand that it was all surface-level. They attempted to get him help but folded almost as soon as they did. Naturally, it didn’t end well. My biggest complaint with the film was that a lot of the interactions felt super awkward. Sure, some of them were meant to, but all of them did and it just made for an even more uncomfortable watch.