The Family That Wrestles Together (Fighting With My Family, 2019)

Fighting_With_My_Family_PosterFighting With My Family is the story of wrestler Paige.  Coming from a lower class family obsessed with wrestling, Zayara and Zak dream of the big time wrestling.  When they try out for WWE, only Zayara is selected, crushing her brother.  But when she tells him she won’t go, he lets her know he cannot take this away from her.

And so, Fighting With My Family takes us on Zayara’s journey to becoming the WWE Diva Paige.

As someone who has little knowledge of Wrestling beyond knowing who the Rock is, I cannot verify the accuracy of the film.  What I can confirm is that this is a fun film with a lot of heart.  Florence Pugh is incredibly sympathetic and lovable. The film does not make her pure of heart, she learns some hard lessons, like not seeing the other women as enemies.  As she grows, she pulls others with her.

The relationship that becomes most strained is Paige and her brother Zak.  He struggles with the idea that he cannot be where she is at.  And it drives him away from everything good in his life for a time. The Rock is charming as usual.

This is a good little inspirational sports film worth a watch.

Rules of Survival (The Lost World: Jurassic Park, 1997)

Jurassic_Park_Lost_World_posterThe Success of Jurassic Park made a sequel pretty inevitable, but Spielberg took time to craft a new adventure, rather than rush out something that just met the obligatory requirements of a sequel.

This film focuses on a second island…the real labs of InGen. When the park went out of business, so did site B.  And the dinosaurs thrived. Hammond fought to leave the island alone and let the dinosaurs live in piece. To help his agenda, he has sent a team to simply observe and report about life on the island.

He requests the help of Ian Malcolm, who refuses, until he finds out his girlfriend Sarah is already on the island. His hope is to bring her right back. In the meantime, his daughter Kelly is upset by Ian dumping her off with a family friend. She stows away to follow her dad to the island.

Team Ian soon discover they are not the only ones on the island. The company wants to push Hammond out and capitalize on the dinosaurs. They bring a crew to capture dinosaurs to be returned to the States for a small scale version of the Park in San Diego.

The general idea of there being no park is a somewhat interesting change. Goldblum is highly entertaining here. Pete Postlethwaite plays a variation on the first film’s Muldoon. He is a big Game hunter who is there for very mercenary reasons, but is providing professional guidance. The effects are excellent, with some exciting new dinosaurs not seen in the prior film. The primary villain is more in the vein of the original book. A Corporate raider looking to exploit, Peter Ludlow is the example of corporate hubris believing it can control what others could not.

The film’s big finish is a T-Rex chase through San Diego. It is a bit of a shame that they squander such a great notion as “dinosaurs loose in a city” in a brief twenty minute sequence. I also really found the whole “daughter” subplot more annoying. The inclusion of kids in the first film actually made sense, here it seems forced and unneeded.

But when you get down to it, Spielberg can make most anything work, and the Lost World is a lot of fun.

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