I am professionally reviewing the Super Mario movie

TheFragranceOfDarkCoffee

◉◉maru I never put 2 and 2 together but wow, that sure is John huh

◉◉maru

Really wanted to post this in the Republican Mario thread but…

Box Office: ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Heading for Huge $195M-Plus Five-Day Opening

tomjonjon

2501 I’m hard pressed to find the “major problem” with this. Critics have always had different opinions than the larger audiences, and with sites like RT and Metacritic its easy to see what the audience does think. Critics are not the main arbiters of what is “good” or “bad”. Also Ego Muck chiming in like he knows anything is amusingly sad.

2501

tomjonjon I’m pretty sure this whole “critics v. audiences” discourse went down most loudly over a decade ago, back in the heyday of the Transformers films (which some critics are already trying to reclaim as vulgar auteurism lol). I think the reason Mario, which is pretty much a bare-minimum “okay” movie clearly intended for children rather than adults, has become an obvious whipping boy is because of the trends it represents: corporate tie-ins over storytelling, snarky self-awareness over sincerity, the cynical deployment of fanservice for an EZ built-in audience the film doesn’t need to earn. In other words, it’s emblematic of cinema’s Marvelization, which critics have reached a point of (justifiably) resenting partly because of the cheap tricks films in this mold tend to pull to gain mass appeal. That’s my guess anyway, as someone who doesn’t think the movie is exceptionally bad to the degree I’ve seen people in the Cinema Community proclaim it to be. It’s the movie equivalent of Doritos.

yeso

yes and except now there’s a doritos fandom and it’s elitist to say you don’t think doritos are great cuisine

yeso

I think the really gross thing with that posture isn’t ofc that someone likes junk from time to time and isnt interested much in art, it’s the insistence that actually it’s art that is bad. truly creepy shit imo

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

Exactly! it’s the need for validation that makes it creepy. I’m trying to think if something like it exists in the other direction, but I don’t think it does? I didn’t notice the Fabelmans Fandom bemoaning how the masses had it out for Paul Dano. I think the crowd that tries to engage with art on even the most basic level can recognize that art can’t be summarized in a percentage.

The whole slobs vs. snobs stuff is feels like it’s just a proxy for other anxieties anyway.

2501

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts Yeah - building on this, and more controversially, I think Everything Everywhere offends my sensibilities more than Mario because it represents the intrusion of a Marvelesque sensibility into a realm of “prestige” Film Product that asks to be taken seriously by adults, as opposed to a transparent marketing vehicle for children that’s never pretended to be anything else. The hyper-protective fandom for that movie is so rabid it made the NYT’s chief movie critic decide he’s through with movies!!

goonbag

Saw the movie a few hours ago with my wife and kid. I sure wouldn’t have been going to a theatre to see it (if at all) if not for the whole family outing aspect.

My hot take? It was a good time.

I’m pretty familiar with the Illumination formula by now, having seen quite a few of their works in my role as doting parent, and I find them generally more palatable than the orthodox Disney/Pixar ouvre (although I have a soft spot for Moana and Turning Red). So I went into this expecting an Illumination film somewhat tempered by Nintendo’s brand sensibility, and that’s what I got.

Now, is it ‘good’ as a film? I don’t know, but I tend to think that’s kind of irrelevant considering it’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

You know what definitely ISN’T a good film though? Tetris. That shit trash. Direct-to-landfill trash.

2501

goonbag Yeah I was mildly curious about The Tetris Movie until I learned it was NOT about Alexei Pajitnov but about the American marketing guy who licensed his creation for big buxxx. What the fuck, man.

yeso

the thing for me is that it’s so incredibly easy to watch more interesting films and learn about the art form lol. These dopes are so fucking lazy it’s wild

tomjonjon

yeso its what happens when an identity is built around a product. Having been born in the early ’80s I am not susceptible to such notions, even though Genesis does what Nintendon’t.

Coffinwarehouses

yeso one of the truly big bummers is how much this infects even people who are supposedly interested in movies. when i was in film school there was a trio of required classes on film history that had a lecture and lab component (for the lab we would watch a movie to discuss for next week’s lectures) and the professor generally had the TA run the lab, take attendance at the beginning of class, then start the movie.

almost every single film huge chunks of the class would leave before the movie was over. for something even mildly difficult like L’avventura there’d be maybe 7 or 8 people out of 40+ students that stayed for the whole thing.

yeso

and they’re grown adult men lmao

2501

Coffinwarehouses These stories are wild to me because my college film classes were the polar opposite, screening selections so obtuse and pretentious with so little effort made to present a case for these films to people who weren’t fully inculcated in Artforum jargon that I swore for years arthouse cinema was a scam by wealthy elites to feel intellectually superior to the normies. It wasn’t until I took a class with an actually good professor who knew and cared enough to explain the appeal of Brakhage or Godard in plain English and apply the same analytical rigor to their films and Hollywood classics that I began to open my mind a bit and appreciate films operating in fundamentally different styles than just conventional action-driven narrative. (Actually, I still can’t stand Godard.)

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts

Coffinwarehouses almost every single film huge chunks of the class would leave before the movie was over. for something even mildly difficult like L’avventura there’d be maybe 7 or 8 people out of 40+ students that stayed for the whole thing.

Man, this makes me so sad. I always wanted to go to film school and always imagined it was filled with passionate students. My public university didn’t even have a film program. How could these kids leave in the middle of an Antonioni film? It blows my mind.

At least as someone who never took any film classes or was involved with pretentious Artforum knobs that @2501 mentions (at least not until long after my personal tastes developed), I know I came about my opinions honestly. I love Godard. Gimme those obtuse didactic films like Tout Va Bien and Week End that has so much detail I can keep thinking about it for a month or years later.

Coffinwarehouses

2501 out of curiosity was the film program at your school purely academic? curious about a potential correlation b/c my school was mostly film studies but with a good amount of production classes too. production classes weren’t required if, like me, you only wanted to do academic work, but you couldn’t graduate without a fairly large number of film studies credits even if your emphasis was on production. but most of the people in the program seemed to resent the idea of having to watch and think about movies instead of getting to spend all of their time making them.

seems like i would have liked the program at your school a lot better! i was definitely craving the chance to be a big pretentious nerd all the time.

2501

There’s also I guess obviously the classic dissonance where critics, who are deeply invested in an artistic medium they proactively expose themselves to on a regular basis, which they break down, analyze and codify to try and understand its essence, tend to want novelty and insight from an artwork where “normal” people with no such investment are content to be painlessly distracted for a couple hours.

2501

Tradeghouls 'n ghosts Yeah I mean with age and maturity I’ve come to appreciate that someone like Godard is just operating in a different style from conventional narrative cinema, not an inherently better or worse one, which some people earnestly like and it’s not just about being in a secret club of indoctrinated art school elites. But it can definitely look that way to someone being exposed to more experimental art for the first time, which is why I think it’s important to be able to explain the appeal of even the most abstract work in simple, accessible (but not reductive) terms.

2501

Coffinwarehouses Yeah it was a small liberal arts college and the program was very much academically oriented which was the opposite of what I wanted at the time lol. Also though I really think the professors I had just sucked, because when I took a different class at a different local school covering the same academic material I found it much more inviting - even with stuff I didn’t like, the prof got me to look at it seriously and understand how it operated before passing judgment on it. I wholeheartedly believe though that pretentious undergrads eager to prove what smart little cookies they are should be forced to explain why Citizen Kane or Jaws or whatever is good before they’re allowed to move onto super abstract arthouse stuff where it’s much easier to bullshit your way around the academy/art world with impressive-sounding Theory talk.

Also ftr I’ve come to accept that Godard is 100% a Vibes filmmaker masquerading as an academic filmmaker, and some people love the vibes while they do nothing for me (which leaves only formalist experimentation for its own sake and pseudo-philosophical wankery). I still think Welles’s last couple films were just giving the ultimate middle finger to Godard by proving he could do the same formally disruptive postmodernist thing but make it better and actually fun to watch.

yeso

I’ve mentioned it on the forum before, but when I was studying lit and everyone in class was frustrated with some difficult high modernist text, the million year old professor suggested approaching everything first as an aesthetic object, the way you would something encountered in the natural world (I think this idea belongs to Keats). And that really did the trick as an initial approach to challenging art/media imo. Someone with twitter tell @boredelonmusk about this concept

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