Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Fun and entertaining fluff. DC finally gets a good villain. And a good story. And a good hero. Ok, that’s not entirely fair, Wonder Woman was good too.

DC Comics has gone the comedy route with “Shazam!” and has largely succeeded. It is a very welcome change to their all-darkness-all-the-time motif that they have been following. The movie takes a very silly premise and recognizes that it is silly and runs with it. Serial foster home runaway Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a teen who is whisked away to a lair where a Wizard (Dijmon Hounsou), the last of 5, tells him that he is the pure of heart person necessary to wield the wizard’s power and defeat the Seven Deadly Sins. Somehow, this transfer of power turns him from a 13 year old boy into a prototypical adult superhero complete with silly costume instead of a wizard, but who cares. Given zero instruction on how to be a superhero, Billy, along with the help of his foster brother Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), proceeds to do what any teenage boy with superpowers might do: run amok.

As I have often commented on the good Marvel movies, what makes a good superhero movie is a good villain and Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong) is wonderful. Thaddeus met the Wizard when he was a child too, but he was incredibly meanly rejected which sent him on a quest to find the Wizard once again and get the powers he believes he should have been given. Childhood trauma informs both Billy’s and Thaddeus’ world view, but only Billy was given the nurturing to overcome that trauma even if he routinely rejected it. Morals. This movie contains them.

Another moral and my personal favorite of morals in movies is that of family. You bilogicals may suck. You have no control over that. Screw them. Find your family where you can find them. The ones that treat you well and you want to treat well back. If that’s a foster family, so be it. One of my favorite parts in the movie is a throwaway scene in which the foster mom Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans) and foster dad Victor Vasquez (Cooper Andrews) swing into action and back mom’s car out of the driveway to reveal a closeup of the bumper sticker “I’m a foster mom: What’s your superpower?” which is just perfect.

“Shazam!” also happens to be really funny. It takes a while to get going as it seriously develops the villain and establishes the plot, but once it gets going, it’s all smiles. I mean, come on! Think of being a teenager and discovering you have superpowers. That’s not the only source of comedy, but it’s an infinite well of which they tap wisely.

It may somewhat be benefiting from low expectations, but “Shazam!” was a delight. The re-watch value is strong with this one, methinks. A good mixture of story and comedy and morals. Is it just me or has the last year or so been a goldmine of comedies of varying sorts? Regardless, “Shazam!” is fluffy fun for the whole family. Ok not really, it’s kind of violent and deserves its PG-13 rating.

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A heartwarming true story of a victory against racism in the Deep South when segregation was illegal, but still widely practiced by racists. Brilliantly acted. Could use with some trimming of length.

If you aren’t going to watch “The Best of Enemies”, do yourself a favor and read about Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell). Atwater was a single mom and community activist fighting for equality in a place where doing so was still pretty dangerous. Ellis was a father and gas station owner and unabashed racist and president of the local social club known as the Ku Klux Klan. When the Black school burns down, they are both chosen to represent their side as the community decides whether to integrate the remaining school. Both are absolutely fascinating individuals and their similarities brought them together at a fortuitous moment in history to bring some good to the world.

“The Best of Enemies” is wonderfully acted and both Taraji P. Henson and Sam Rockwell deserve nominations for their portrayals. The movie could have portrayed Ellis as evil, but Rockwell and the script bring out his humanity and show that he’s really just another human being trying to get by in the world. That’s the big secret. Racists are like you and me, only racist. It may seem incongruous, but you can be a decent person and a racist and C.P. Ellis is just that. The difference between C.P. Ellis and most racists, though, is when Ellis is confronted with the sheer incongruity of his racism, instead of doubling down on his racism or denying his racism, he does some real honest to goodness soul searching and knows that his views cannot stand up to scrutiny and he does the most amazing and difficult thing a human being can do: after a lifetime of being wrong, he accepts that he is wrong, he changes his views to what is right, and he actively expresses his changed views despite enormous social pressure and ostracization. We should all try to be like C.P. Ellis. This is not at all to take away at how amazing of a human being Ann Atwater appears to be. She fights the fight and has absolutely no fucks to give. She grows as an individual too throughout this ordeal, but she started clearly on the side of right so her story is slightly less dramatic than Ellis’.

The movie does run a bit longer than it needs to. There are some weird montages throughout that don’t really much serve a purpose. There are also a couple “women in danger” scenes that don’t really add to the story and are of questionable authenticity. This shouldn’t take away from the amazing story but it does take away from the movie, though it is still easily worth watching.

Depressingly, this movie can be seen as how massive an effort the people on the right side of an issue need to attempt to change just one person’s mind. That’s all that happened in this movie. One person changed his mind. In this case, that person happened to be in a position to actually effect positive change. This is an exception. This is why we are at where we are.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: Towards the end of the movie, Alan Arkin exclaims, “This is a disaster! Let’s go get some hot dogs.” This summarizes my take on the movie better than anything I could write. Of course, this is not going to stop me from writing about it anyway.

How do you make a live action film out of a beloved Disney classic cartoon? Well, first you take everything good about the cartoon and throw it out the window and now that you have the skeleton of the original story, you fatten it up with a whole bunch of good actors in really crappy roles and have them act as over the top as possible while throwing in some lessons about science or something. There you have “Dumbo”! On the plus side, while they were throwing everything out, they also threw out the casual racism.

There isn’t a single character in this film that I didn’t wan’t to punch in the face at some point or another in this film. Including the child actors. They, at least, can be forgiven because they are too young to know any better. All the adults, I am just going to assume that their own children forced them to take their roles under punishment of ostraciization from the family. It is the only explanation. The best of the bunch, such as it was, is Eva Green as the trapeze artist Collette Marchant. The rest? Ugh. Danny DeVito: horrible. Colin Farrell: revolting. Michael Keaton: 2,000 feet over the top. I like to believe that the only person cognizant of how bad a film they all were in is Alan Arlin and his “This is a disaster!” line was adlibbed and he refused to do another take so they had to leave it in.

There are quite a few homages to the original cartoon which ranged from appreciated to crimes against nature. Timothy Q. Mouse is present, even though he doesn’t have a speaking role. They do a short tip of the hat to the racist crows, replacing them with a Black jazz band. They also completely bastardized “Pink Elephants” into a gaudy and stupid CGI-ed circus show, which I really could have done without. Some of the original soundtrack was remade for the movie, most prominently “Baby Mine”, but also “Casey Jr.”, “When I See An Elephant Fly”, and “Pink Elephants”. Danny Elfman did the rest of the score and, well, he’s Danny Elfman so you know it’s enjoyable.

This movie was directed by Tim Burton, but I can only imagine that Disney kidnapped him, shackled him, and waterboarded him any time he came up with any uniquely Tim Burton idea that didn’t fit with the Disney persona. This is all Tim Burton ideas so I don’t understand why he was captured to direct.

The elephant was legitimately cute and the off-the-wall-ness of all of the characters might be something that kids these days go for, I guess. The kids in my showing seemed to be enjoying themselves, at least. There is certainly better children’s entertainment out there, though. Go see that instead.