Heavens to Betsy

I was pleasantly surprised by the lead's performance. She was really fantastic, and I hope that she will continue to appear in faith based films. The story had a very cute and poignant ending, but overall, it was slow and at times, it was hard for this viewer to stay focused. I watched this on pureflix so I did not see the alternative endings.

This Christian movie has leading lady Karen Lesiewicz as an aspiring children's book author who has been disappointed in life. She's prayed for a lot in life and the Deity has not answered her prayers.

Well one fine day she wakes up in strange surroundings and finds that all those things she took in prayer to the Lord have come true. She's a success as a children's book author, she's rich, she married the boy she was crushing out on in middle school. What more could a girl want?

There's more than a theological reason for the old adage of be careful what you wish for, you might get it. There's an all seeing and all knowing Deity who knows what's best for us in his divine scheme of things. That would be the Christian interpretation of what we see.

One wish that comes true is that a sister who died young is now living. That's more than Lesniewicz could possibly hope for. But Ariana Lexus as her sister Sally is not all she seems either. And Brian Walsh as her school girl crush and now husband is not all that great a catch.

I don't want to get all metaphysical, but this film while sincere provides easy answers that just aren't that easy.

Let me start out by saying I'm not a big fan of Christian movies -- not because I have anything against their usual messages, but I usually find them to be rather simplistic with limited filmmaking quality. But then, I'm not a big fan of movies in general these days anyway.

"Heavens to Betsy" isn't great cinema, but it does have a rather quirky sense of humor that's atypical of "Christian movies." Plot-wise it's sort of a cross between alternate-reality stories like "It's a Wonderful Life" (i.e., what if things had gone *this* way instead?) and "Bruce Almighty" (i.e., God wouldn't really do this to someone, but you might not blame him if he did).

This has a plot that keeps you watching to see what happens next, as twists are revealed to both the viewer and the main character. As Betsy reacts to her "alternate reality," though, one might wonder why it never occurs to the other characters to suspect she has amnesia, and never occurs to her to fall back on this as her own explanation.

My only other comment is that I ended up wishing the ending hadn't been as rushed as it is. (This is not the alternate ending, which I haven't seen.) I was left wanting to see, and not just hear about, how things were resolved.

Made with what looked like 40 dollars, this film comes lurching onto your screen with the ambition of a film that doesn't even try to justify any of what's happening within the film. This is why it's bad that filmmaking has become so accessible, you end of with terrible films that take money and effort away from films that are actually trying to do something and not just feeding someones ego. Looks like it was shot on a cell phone, exposure was off, either overlit, or flatly lit, or everyones skin tones were yellow, gross. Acting is way over the top, comical in how bad some of it was, cartoonish. Not something I would tell anyone to watch, total waste of time, I turned it off because it way overstayed it's welcome.

I sat down hoping to enjoy this film, and I simply did not. I always hope to see indie films that rise above the rest, and this one didn't. The story is basically a mix stolen from several other films. It seems to take the most from Bruce Almighty, a Jim Carey vehicle from the early 2000's.

The acting is pretty subpar from most of the cast, there are a few good moments here and there. The writing is really very bad. It's not funny, it stalls out and dies on delivery. I think a lot of the problems with this film fall onto the director, there was a lot that could have been done to make this work, and it just felt lazily shoved together.

I was able to see the film on pureflix, and they usually have some pretty good stuff, but this one I don't think the runners of pureflix even saw before they put it online. My kids grew bored with this after just the first few minutes, they ran off to play, and I stayed thinking it would pick up, it didn't.

I don't want to be mean, because I could see that some of the cast/crew was really trying, but it was also bad. Seeing the other reviews on here, they must know the director or producer, because they aren't being truthful.