“hey, remember this?” for a whole movie is just like… look, i’ve grown up with mario my whole life. some of my earliest memories are sitting wide-eyed, watching my dad play super mario world, too shy and anxious to actually play it myself until later on. i could pick out the provenance of literally every koji kondo musical tease in the score. i am a locked-on target for their cruise-missile of cheap nostalgia
i don’t think a breathless cascade of references and easter eggs could ever make a decent watching experience. absolutely nothing that happens matters at all, just a blank canvas on which to overwhelm with references, like oversalting spaghetti or something.
the “blue shell” is a colloquialism, the actual term for that shell is “spiny shell”. i’m disappointed in that line.
also, mario wears the tanuki suit and there is a comment about both “raccoon” and “bear” even though tanukis are obviously superior.
the entire theater was deadly quiet the entire film except for one moment - the luma in a cage thing. dreadfully unfunny movie
seth rogen’s performance is awful. every time he said something i tuned out. chris pratt also sucks
your use of “cheap nostalgia” put “expensive nostalgia” in my head through sympathetic vibrations and damned if that doesn’t describe the tack sonic’s taking lately
Contrasting it to the Sonic movie is pretty funny to me because they are basically the same movie. And why shouldn’t they be.
It definitely felt to me like a series of best practices untouched by any spark of love. If a very smart guy got told to make a Mario movie, he would do a bunch of due diligence research and then make this movie.
My kid with adhd was just barely able to sit through the whole thing, and that’s praise of a kind.
idk folks, maybe it was because i ate like 300mg of edibles when i saw the Sonic movie, but my impression of the Sonic movie was that it had been written about something else and then they decided to put Sonic in it, whereas the Mario movie, while you could call it rote or predictable, is at least very much tied to its Mario-ness
maybe Sonic 2 does more of the nostalgia thing, but that first movie was so dire, again, all i can say is
also, though, i don’t have a kid nor do i watch a lot of films for children, so presumably it’s possible to be burned out on whatever Mario is doing, for sure
watched The Bad Guys, it was very enjoyable. The animation is really, really good. It’s pretty funny. It’s obviously for kids, of course, but it was a nice end to a hard day.
I kept thinking “Ah finally a replacement in my mind for The Incredibles, without the libertarianism” but then i started thinking about the politics of it and like Zootopia it has a very strange message if you try to apply it to reality. Something something model minority something something i have no real interest in dissecting it but yeah definitely a weird one. I guess it’s the neolib version of the incredibles?
anyway if I was making this movie I would change it just a little bit to be like “Who cares about doing the ‘good’ thing if it means leaving your friends behind” which isn’t that much of a shift, but maybe not what people wanna teach their kids lol
Zootopia definitely only works if you treat it like science fiction and not an allegory. It’s more about “how does morality obtain in a universe with an entirely different biological basis” than it is like “ok so the rabbits are Jews??” or whatever. It’s a District 9 situation
fwiw it totally does, adapting the plots of 2 and 3, making set pieces reference game mechanics and specific designs, etc. i think this came after sega set up a team to make sure sonic media was real head approved like the comics and frontiers. ymmv because i can’t imagine caring about mario the character more than vector the crocodile
it still has a bunch of human characters doing gags about sonic in “the real world” but it has, like, angel island lore and a dramatic arc about conquering sonic’s fear of drowning
and then the stinger threatens to adapt sonic adventure 2 for the screen
i’m not really joking when i ask about toad like cute tails can carry a movie for me
honestly the visuals are pretty great, it’s a bombastically colorful movie and there are lots of gee-whiz spectacular moments. the rainbow road scene is very nice to look at. i also remember a scene where someone is going over sand and the sand has that specular look where certain grains are reflecting, making the ground kind of sparkle. thought that was cool
the music is also alright when it is orchestrating and using motifs from koji kondo or dave wise tracks, but i thought all the “original” music was distinctly bad and highly generic. every time it transitioned from a tease to a “regular animated movie score beat” moment, the rising giddiness in me was snuffed out.
i guess my feelings on the movie can be summed up as such: jack black does a good job, and his bowser crooner scene is one of the better ideas in the film, but i can’t help but recognize this is probably the absolute least interesting/funny jack black song i can think of, and yet it is still a relative high point in the film
like two days ago I watched Body Double, which I was kinda going back and forth on at the time and has grown on me a ton since then, in no small part due to the movie-within-a-movie (kino-within-a-film? fuehehehe) of the porn shoot scene / relax music video:
de palma’s hitchcock riffing is like, fine, occasionally grating, but the mirrored door swinging shut to show the camera crew is such an incredible chef’s kiss moment. like of course! it has to be rear window because all thrillers are experienced as rear window, and the voyeur’s fantasy isn’t watching but being caught.
then I tried watching Dressed to Kill and turned it off like an hour in
Theme of perversion from body double. The fucking garbage can at the mall
The best part of dressed to kill is when the scienceman shows up at the end he says some insane nonsense about transsexuals that de Palma is like ok whatever at so he can cut to a scene of the de Palma stand-in character and Nancy Allen at dinner talking about SRS, she is completely normal and de Palma is excited about it as an “experiment” until he finds out you have to get your dick chopped in half. It’s bizarre. I like couldn’t even get too mad I just started laughing. Brian just can’t help it. The way he talks about it in the de palma doc makes his sexual fascination with trans people clear
Also the weird surveillance stuff he does in that movie is based off of 12 year old de palma watching his dad fuck some lady while he gathered infos for his mom. When he tells this story he leaves out the part where he ran into the house with a knife and started looking for his dad by trying to kick in doors while menacing his girlfriend*. The doctors office is based off his father’s house iirc. Very interesting guy
*this version of events is recounted in The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood which is a stellar book to read if you want to: a) hate Brian De Palma b) see how bad misogyny in Hollywood actually is
A friend took me to see Renfield today for my birthday. It was terrible. I didn’t know anything about the movie except that it existed and it had Nicolas Cage. It’s too bad they spend so much time on the obnoxious, loud, THWACKY BOOM action and the crime lord bullshit instead of focusing on the psychology stuff. Like, why is there any of this crime lord bullshit in a movie about Dracula and Renfield’s relationship? I’d just watch Dracula Dead and Loving It instead – that guy from Ally McBeal is still my favorite Renfield.
My mentor worked on it and said it was a long and difficult shoot with multiple units. Next time I see her, I will try to get more information. Including the missing dance sequence that is only seen in the background of the credits.
Late to seeing it (I was one of five people at the showing, and it had been scuttled to the tinier screen), but I’ll echo that Dungeons & Dragons was a lot of fun.
And yeah, that cast pre-roll video felt like a hostage video. Squirming in my seat as Michelle Rodriguez went on her tangent about popcorn…tasting better, because it’s at the movies? I don’t know! You don’t have to do these anymore!! Please!
It was a lot like the Mario movie imo. Some guy who aced Screenwriting 401 was given a hot property and ordered to make a zillion dollar movie. No love, just impeccable research chops and severe technical competence.
