Litte Women (2019)

Little Woman (2019) - The fun twist in the many-times-made-adaptation of Alcott´s book Little Woman

"Just because my dreams are different than yours,
it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant."

I went to see Little Women the day it came out, but the thing is, I had a very small idea of what the movie was about, I didn't want to see the trailer beforehand and went there simply because of the powerful cast that was in it. Thanks to living in Brazil, I had never heard about Louisa May Alcott’s book when I was growing up. And I am glad they made another version (apparently the 4th American adaptation), cause otherwise, I would have never had gotten in touch with such an amazing story. The movie goes back and forth between past and present during the 1860s and it is set during the American Civil War. It tells the story of four sisters: Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, showing these four girls with such different personalities while making us not exactly dislike any of them, but more like understand each of their perspectives. We see them separated in some scenes, and that’s where we do acknowledge them as individual people, having their own lives, being happy, sad or frustrated and making their own mistakes.

Since the movie is set in the 1860s, we can clearly see throughout the movie how much of a patriarchal society they were living in, the women still had very little rights, were these huge corsets and were expected to marry a rich man. Or at least marry someone. As I said before, while watching this movie we can see that the director (and writer) Greta Gerwig wanted to show us each of their motives, and make us understand their reasons. We can see that with Amy March (Florence Pugh), the second youngest of the girls and a character that starts off in the movie as a joyful girl hanging out in Paris, and to whom we immediately have sympathy for, “oh, she looks so much fun” we think. But as the story goes we see Amy in one of the scenes in the past, burning the writings of one of her sisters, and that’s when we think that she must be an evil person. So later in the movie, when the character makes her great speech to Laurie, one of the family friends, about how in this society she'll have no option but to get married, and even if she did make her own money with her paintings, the money wouldn't be hers, that’s when we understand how much pressure she must have had, and how each of the girls were going through something.

While Amy understands that she's the “hope of her family”, as said by her aunt, her sister - Meg - decided to be one that marries for love. We watch Meg (Emma Watson) meeting and falling in love with her husband as the movies go on, and going through money difficulties but still not regretting her decision. Someone might say that this part is almost the cumulus of feminism because her one and only dream is to get marry and have a family, while one of her sisters is to paint and the other is to be a writer. Still, another thing that this movie portrays beautifully it's how her dream (of having a family) it's just as important as being an "independent woman" (in the 21th century meaning of the word), at least seeing from a 1860s perspective, which is obviously the perspective that the viewers should be looking at while watching Little Women. And while Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is just as important as the other sisters, she doesn't get as much screen time, probably because in the books the character is still supposed to be about twelve years old, even though the actress was already in her twenties. Yet the character still had it´s importance, being the lovely and quiet one of the four as well as the pivotal point in some plots in the story.

But besides all that, there is Jo. Josephine March (Saoirse Ronan), a character that fairly represents what we know today as feminism, she goes after her dream of writing, knowing that her short stories were being printed were enough for her at first, and then while writing her novel (based on her sisters and her) she made sure to get all the rights she could possibly get with the publishing of it. When it comes to love, Jo was quite a complicated character, we see her and Laurie (or Teddy, as she called him) always together in the scenes in the past, but since the begging of the movie we already know that at the present time they are not together anymore, and later found out they were never more than friends. When Jo says no to Laurie proposal, we learn that she never intends to get married, but we know that just like in the stories that Jo used to write, Louisa Alcott would have to have her character to meet a great guy and get married (because it´s the 1860s we are talking about). 

Now talking about how smart was to Greta Gerwig to make her own twist on the retelling of the story, while the other film adaptations (from 1933, 1949, and 1994) followed a straight line while telling the story of girls, this time the writer/director decided to tell the story from two stages, starting from the present, going back seven years in the past, going back to the present and doing it all again various times throughout the movie. So at the same time that we know some things that are gonna happen later in the movie, we are still really just getting to know how certain things turn out the way they did, why is one of the characters in Europe? Why is the other one alone in New York? Not only that directing was extremely well thought, but also the acting. It's no surprise that when we see Laura Dern (Big Little Lies), Saoirse Ronan (Ladybird), Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name) and Meryl Streep in the same movie a big movie it's going to come out of it, and in addition to how astoundingly Florence Pugh delivered her role as Amy.

I would recommend this movie to “little women” as well as little girls and boys, people from all ages and as I don't really fancy rating movies that I watch, but usually give it more of a “would watch it again” or “nope”, Little Women is a movie that you never get bored while watching it and could watch a million times again and again. You laugh, and cry, and get mad at the characters and relate to a few of the characters on so many levels I can't even explain.

written by a non-native English speaker trying to study for the Cambridge exam while having fun.

Shazam (2019)

Shazam: The superhero movie that is so relatable that it´s gonna make you actually want to be a superhero just because of all the fun

"What are your superpowers?
Superpowers? Dude, I don’t even know how to pee in this thing!"

Don't even ask me why I am writing this, because I don't completely know it myself. But the thing is, for some time now, I've been wanting to write not really reviews, but more like thoughts about the movies I watch (because I have been going quite a lot to movies since I've got into college a year ago), and there are two reasons why I never did. First, I usually don't pay enough attention to the movie so that I can write something about it afterward, or (in most cases), I just forget, and then when I remember a few days (or weeks) later, I end up not being able to write a fair text about it.

But for this movie, also known as Shazam, I feel like it's time to put my thoughts into the paper, or even better, on the computer. I confess that at first, when I saw the trailer a few months ago, I was extremely excited about this new movie, mainly because it didn't look like a dark movie at all, like other DC Universe movies (which I actually do like, by the way), but it looked like a really good comedy instead, like a fun superhero movie. But then, the moment finally came, the movie came out in theaters, and I was very uneasy to watch it. Not only because I was afraid I was not gonna enjoy it, cause there was always that chance that the trailer would be better than the movie itself (like Suicide Squad, #sorrynotsorry), but also because I don't know how it is where you live, but here in my city the movie ticket can be quite expensive. Nevertheless, I decided to go for it and watch the movie.

And what a movie. I reckon that it´s been a long time since I laughed so much and got (kind of) scared at the same movie. I feel like for the first time I´m watching a superhero film and it actually felt like it. It was realistic (or as realistic as it could be), funny but also dark, and extremely relatable, especially for teenagers and young adults, which I think were the main viewing target of the film. I believe that what it mainly separated this movie from other superhero movies was the fact that the hero was ecstatic to be who he was, he was given this powers and, unlike a lot of other superheroes, he didn´t manage to find it as great burden or anything like that, he was a happy as a kid on Christmas day is and probably reacted the way many teens (and kids) would react if they got superpowers out of the blue.

Not only did the hero, Billy, not know how to manage all this power that was given to him, since he was so overwhelmed with everything he could do and was pretty happy to have all the attention he was given, but he had his own life to piece together throughout the movie. By adding bits and pieces here and there, the movie was able to focus not merely on the Shazam´s powers but also on every other secondary character on the story. We know a bit of everyone´s personalities and that´s something really comforting in a big movie like that, that usually just focus on a maximum of three main characters and doesn't really bother to give anyone else an actual personality. But in here, we know that his bigger sister got into an excellent college (so she's probably really smart), one of his brothers really likes videogames, another is really into comic books and the younger sister is just the sweetest little girl, who has a lot more lines than you would expect for a movie like Shazam.

Although I really did enjoy all the comedy, I have to take a small space in here to say just how happy I was to see another movie that showed a foster family. I feel that, especially when I was younger, I used to see a lot of films where if there was a foster family, they resembled a terrible environment and the last place a kid would want to be. But thankfully, looks like Hollywood has been watching some youtube vlogs and realized that not every foster home is like that, showing that it might actually not be a nightmare to have a bunch of brothers and sisters and parents who love you and that they definitely deserve that classification since even not being blood-related, they can love the person just as they truly were.

Even though the movie does talk about some serious issues, such as the plot with Billy and his mother, I think that another great point in the movie it´s its comedy. Cause as well as making use of simple jokes that anyone could catch, it made implicit jokes in the way that only adults would possibly understand, and that plus all the dark and action stuff happening throughout all the movie just makes the views entertained during the entire movie. And since I am normally really bad on making a conclusion, I´ll just go straight to the point. It was better than I expected, definitely better than the last DC movies I´ve seen, with a great cast and delightful script, it is able to keep the viewer from going to the bathroom during the entire two hours of the movie.

written by a non-native English speaker trying to study to the Cambridge exam while having fun.