"Shazam!"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

Shazam! is the most fun and delightful super hero movie since Superman in 1978, and that's saying something. It's not as complex and complete as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is in a class by itself, but it's up there.

Shazam! can be enjoyed entirely on its own, outside of the exhausting, meticulously curated super hero mythos -- or, at least, almost. The movie's few stumbles come when it tries to please its corporate overlords by weaving in other elements of the DC "franchise." Those parts feel inorganic and clunky.

Otherwise, Shazam! is its own thing, and gloriously so. After two unnecessarily long prologues, it begins when 14-year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is summoned to the underground lair of a wizard named Shazam (Djimon Honsou), who not only bestows super powers -- but also turns him into a 30-ish grown-up (Zachary Levi) with a ridiculous light-up costume. So, Shazam! becomes like "Big in Tights," a comparison it recognizes and embraces wholeheartedly.

Billy is part of a foster family, which includes disabled Freddy (Jack Dylan Graser), who starts acting like the hero's manager. These two guys (three, really) have insanely great chemistry. Less exciting is the "super-villain" angle -- Mark Strong's baddie lacks the charm of the rest of the proceedings; the final battle is overlong and overdone. But Shazam! is otherwise good -- really good. We don't need a single new super hero movie, but since we're gonna get 'em, can they please all be like this?



Viewed April 6, 2019 -- AMC Sunset 5

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"Pet Sematary"

 ☆☆☆ 

True confession time: I have never seen the original Pet Sematary from 1989, nor read Stephen King's book on which it was based, so whatever I thought of this version has nothing to do comparing what has come before. I just sat and watched the story unfold.

It's a pretty good story, though it takes a long, long time to get where it's going, and once it gets there it finds there actually isn't a whole lot to do, which means it runs only an hour and 40 minutes. It's the perfect length, because while Pet Sematary does meander a lot, it never wears out its welcome, though it's awfully padded and probably would work best at "Twilight Zone" length.

A doctor (Jason Clarke) moves his family to rural Maine to get away (ha ha) from the stress of the big city. When the family cat dies, a neighbor (John Lithgow) shows the doctor a place beyond the local "Pet Sematary" where what gets buried doesn't stay dead. When the doctor and his wife (Amy Seimetz) lose their daughter (Jeté Lawrence) in a terrible accident -- well, see the previous sentence.

The movie is moody, scary and efficient, with some nice unexplored metaphors about parts of our lives that never really die, and being unable to let go. Those might have made a great movie. Instead, Pet Sematary is just okay, exactly good enough. Besides, if you're looking for metaphors in a Stephen King movie, you're probably in the wrong place.



Viewed April 4, 2019 -- AMC Burbank

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