Movies seen

*  Hereditary (on Netflix):   this apparently had a cinema release last year, and received enthusiastic reviews but didn't make much money.  (Although it looks pretty modestly budgeted. and probably was profitable.)     I thought it was a terrible, terrible screenplay:  intended as a spooky/horror family drama, it inspired no tension or frights at all in this viewer, and moved very, very slowly for nearly the entire thing.  The climax became just sillier and way more over the top than necessary.  I said to my son that if he wanted to see a movie that properly built up a sense of mystery and dread as to whether something malevolent is going, he should watch Rosemary's Baby, and when I checked the negative reader reviews on Metacritic,  a few said exactly the same thing.  The one professional critic listed at Metacritic with whom I agreed was Rex Reed - he really disliked it too.

*  Shazam!   Pretty enjoyable, but the more I think about it, the more I realise how much was derivative of other movies and stories.   Like the last Spiderman movie, it featured an overweight Hispanic student (I would be complaining about Hollywood if I were Mexican) and ended with a Ramones song over the credits.  The doors into other dimensions were rather Narnia, as was the ultimate role of the foster family.   The bus falling over the rail had a sequence that was well done, but very reminiscent of the second Jurassic Park movie.  At least the debt owed to Big was wryly acknowledged with a brief floor keyboard bit.  I also thought that some scenes were probably a bit too violent for young kids for whom the movie seeming intended as part of a family audience.   Kids of all ages can handle characters having their head bitten off these days, apparently.   I have to say that some of the human/CGI interactions looked pretty unconvincingly done, too.

Sounds like I didn't enjoy it, but I did for the most part.   I think it could have been better, but had enough laughs to keep me going. [Update:  I also kind of liked that there was one key aspect of the story which was not sugar coated - which was a bit of a novel approach, I thought.]