Saw Super Mario Brothers with my wife last night. It was reasonably fun. I didn't love it. But I can see why it's popular, especially since there is so little new good family fare that doesn't subvert your children right in front of your eyes. But the guys who run around saying how great it is; c'mon. No, it isn't. The plot and characters are pretty cardboard, and the charm and humor is low-key, not really hot. I liked it. But I didn't love it.
I was worried that they were going to turn Mario into a chump and make Princess Peach a girlboss. They didn't, exactly. Mario had an arc; he was a pretty normal guy who's defining feature was that he didn't give up. Peach was mostly likeable, but was a bit too in charge and action-grrl for my taste, given that the whole reason she was invented was to be a damsel in distress. Until the very end when he stepped up, Luigi was the damsel in distress, and Peach was the leader of the team to rescue him. Now, yeah... I know that over the years she's been more of an active participant in a lot of games, especially stuff like the Mario Party and Mario Kart games. And maybe it was easier to write with her being the expert on the mushroom kingdom running around telling Mario (and by extension, the audience) all of the things that he needed to learn about Super Mario World once arriving from Brooklyn.
So, if you have kids, especially Nintendo fans, absolutely take them. If you're an adult, like my wife and I, looking for some entertainment, this probably won't cut it. Last year's Bad Guys was a better surprise in that regard.
What else? We're scheduled to see the new Dungeons & Dragons movie next week on Tuesday, with free tickets. That's the way to do it. If you kinda want to see a movie, but don't really want to contribute to a company that you're not sure deserves it, wait until after opening weekend; maybe even a couple weeks after, get matinee prices or cheaper, and see it then. The opening weekend in particular is the most important weekend for a movie from a buzz and industry metric standpoint, so never see a movie on opening weekend unless you are really quite certain that you will like it and the company isn't Disney, or someone else that you don't want to support. You actually can have your cake and eat it too. I've actually heard that D&D isn't very woke, although it has a kind of low-grade ambient wokeness to it, mostly represented by the diversity in casting, making most of the men kind of silly and useless compared to the girls, and a handful of off-hand remarks in the dialogue about humans being racist against tieflings, which is supposed to be topical or something (to be fair, tieflings are literally the descendants of demons (or devils) and it's frequently noted that they tend all too often to give in to their dark nature. Being racist against tieflings would, in a D&D milieu, be simply "pattern recognition.")
I'm not expecting much, but I've actually raised my expectations for this movie, and I hope to at least by entertained. I don't expect it to be memorable, but I expect it to be better than completely mediocre would-be tentpoles like Jungle Cruise or Black Widow. Hopefully it's as good as Black Adam or Shazam in that regard. Which, I know, I know... weren't particularly successful financially, or particularly great or memorable movies either. But I enjoyed them well enough to recommend them to my kids. They were both marginally better and more charming and less of a problem than Jungle Cruise or Black Widow who's wokeness was a bit more than merely ambient.
The new Raiders of the Lost Ark trailer dropped recently. It looks really terrible. The wokesters in Hollywood may think Phoebe Waller-Bridge is really hot stuff, but to normal people she's absolute poison. Involving her in anything is a terrible idea. Also, is it a coincidence that the super-Hispanic Blue Beetle trailer made a point of having George Lopez throw out that "Batman is a fascist" line, as if it would be funny and charming within weeks of Michael Douglas' character in Antman 3 giving an apologia for socialism and a new Indy trailer that equates theft with capitalism? I doubt it.
My regard for Indiana Jones has fallen precipitously in recent years. The first movie was one of my favorites for many, many years, and as Star Wars started to fade, I would literally tell people that it was my favorite movie of all time. I still like it, because it's a good movie, but knowing what I do about the creators has made it lose it's shine. To wit; here's the transcript from the script development brainstorming meeting—which was recorded and preserved for us to see it again more recently—from 1978 about the Indy/Marion backstory.
Lawrence Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it.
George Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.
Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.
Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.
Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...
Spielberg: She has pictures of him.
So, this is an early brainstorming activity, so bad ideas are fine, but creepy ideas make you wonder what the devil is wrong with these people. Spielberg was right to say that she better be older than 22, but he seemed to jump right on it after that. Lucas comes across as just a plain creep, even suggesting that Indy had an affair with an 11-year old girl, or that if he pushes it to older than 15, it's not interesting anymore. Interesting? That the hero of your movie is a pedophile? How exactly is that interesting? Neither Kasdan nor Spielberg really is all "WTF, George, no way," which doesn't speak well of them either.
I know that there's all kinds of chatter about Hollywood Jews molesting under-age American girls. Shirley Temple's biography mentions several incidents, as does Judy Garlands'. More recently, we have people like Bella Thorne admitting that they were basically passed around as sexual party favors as kids and teenagers when they worked in Hollywood, which she attributes (rightly) to her own emotional brokenness. What's her name from iCarly left the industry because of creeps looming over her the entire time she was on that show too. Of course, in all fairness, Lucas was himself the worst part of this conversation, and he's the only one who isn't Jewish. So much for over-generalizations!
Now, I can probably still enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark on its own merits. Frankly, if I dig too deep into anyone in the entertainment industry, especially acting, you find that they're creeps, narcissists, perverts, and self-loathing haters who project their own hatred on to people around them. Even old fashioned guys that I liked are rather notorious for being philanderers and adulterers. Bing Crosby allegedly have a well-known and long-lived affair with Grace Kelley, who was apparently a bit of a nympho herself. I've come to see the entire Hollywood enterprise as hopelessly corrupt and degenerate, and that it's always been so, even from the Silent Era. It just comes with the territory. Creatives should, if they can't control their behavior, at least control their need to talk about it and make it public
Is there anything else coming out at all that I'm interested in? I'm not sure. I'm a little over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, and I don't really like James Gunn, but that's just about the only thing I can think of in the next few months that looks even remotely entertaining until the next Mission Impossible movie comes out in the middle summer, maybe Oppenheimer because Nolan usually is OK, and Dune Part 2 in November. Cautiously optimistic about the follow-up to Ghostbusters at the end of the year. There's literally nothing else this entire year that I really care about at all.
Being a movie-fan these days is bleak. Especially because my wife is also a big movie fan, but lives in denial about how bad movies are, and still wants to push to go out and see stuff. Hope springs eternal in her, and criticism is not in her nature unless the flaws are incredibly obnoxious and obvious. I have no doubt that I'll see plenty of movies that I don't want to see between now and the end of the year. Sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment