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Lovingly crafted animation fatally undermined by substance-free storytelling

Beginning with Donkey Kong in 1981 and their own standalone video arcade game, Mario Bros., just two years later, Mario and Luigi, erstwhile plumbers and brothers from the same Italian mother, found their way to video arcades across the world. Video arcades and console games were never the same. Success, however, in other media, specifically film, proved to be a challenge, made all the worse by the first — and forty years later, only — attempt to bring the Mario Bros. to live-action screens and audiences. Against all reason and logic, the 1993 film, Super Mario Bros., co-starring the late Bob Hopkins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi respectively, has ascended to cult status among a certain subset of nostalgia-oriented video game fans.

While taste, as always, remains a subjective proposition, the demands of the marketplace, not to mention the needs of corporations to churn revenue and profit from preexisting IP, has led inexorably to The Super Mario Bros. Movie (aka Fan Service: The Movie), a collaboration between Nintendo and Illumination, the French-based animation studio behind the Despicable Me/Minions franchise. The effort to bring the Mario Bros. and their world to reel life are everywhere onscreen, but a frantic, frenetically paced storyline, flat, one-dimensional characters, and shallow, broad-based humor will leave all but diehard fans of the videogame series dissatisfied, disappointed, or even despondent after waiting 30 years for the Mario Bros. to receive another go at multiplex screens.

Bookended by scenes set in an imaginary, fictionalized Brooklyn that bares little resemblance to the real world, The Super Mario Bros. Movie opens with Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and his younger brother, Luigi (Charlie Day), walking, talking stereotypes both, in the equivalent of start-up mode, leaving unfulfilling employment working for wrecking company to open their own plumbing business. For Mario and his go-along to get-along brother Luigi, becoming full-time plumbers translates into a dream come true, but when their first gig goes predictably awry, they somehow find themselves sucked into a magical pipe-portal connecting Brooklyn and the magical, mystical Mushroom Kingdom (among others).

Deposited at opposite ends of this not-so-brave new world, thus setting what passes for a plot into motion, Mario and Luigi find themselves in vastly different circumstances, Mario on the outskirts of the Mushroom Kingdom, Luigi in the sunless, strip-mined world ruled by Bowser (Jack Black), a tyrannical turtle-monster with a penchant for song. Along with the usual desire to conquer the known world, Bowser suffers from an unhealthy fixation, an unrequited romantic obsession with Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), the de facto ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom and its diminutive, mushroom-shaped people.

The painfully simplistic story turns on Mario inadvertently joining Princess Peach’s effort to stave off Bowser’s invasion of the Mushroom Kingdom, saving Luigi in the process. To bring various elements of the video game series into onscreen play, Princess Peach attempts to form an alliance with the Jungle Kingdom, its leader, Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen), and the leader’s maturity-deficient son, Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen). That, in turn, sets up a reasonable facsimile of the Donkey Kong game, pitting an out-of-his-league Mario against a much bigger, much stronger foe (barrels are flung from great heights, barrels are missed in the nick of time).

The Super Mario Bros. Movie crams a dizzying array of Easter Eggs and fan service into its rapid-fire, fast-paced 92-minute running time (including credits). It spends almost all of that thankfully brief running time on nostalgia-filled call-outs to four decades worth of Nintendo video games, including, but not limited to, the original Mario Bros. (in an early montage where Mario learns gameplay parameters for taking on Bowser and his gang), the aforementioned Mario vs. Donkey Kong challenge, and Super Mario Kart (among too many others to cite here).

That leaves non-video game fans on the outside looking in, though to Illumination’s credit, they deliver an incredibly detailed, textured animated world, energetic set pieces, and faithful character designs to make most diehard video game fans happy if not outright ecstatic at seeing their onetime childhood favorites receiving the big-screen treatment. For everyone else, though, The Super Mario Bros. Movie may worth a bargain matinee or a stream when it hits a major online platform, though even there, the rule of diminishing returns will hit sooner rather than later.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie opens theatrically on Wednesday, April 5th.

How tenacity, adaptation, and intelligent shoe design led to Nike’s greatest creation

In recent years the secondary market for new and used sneakers as collectibles has boomed into a massive industry, sending values for vintage classic shoe models skyrocketing. And in the world of athletic footwear there’s no name more hallowed than Jordan — Air Jordan, that is. Even two decades after Michael Jordan’s retirement from the NBA, the shoe that Nike built — or was it the shoe that built Nike? — is still in production with no sign of ever slowing down.

In this understanding of the Air Jordan phenomenon, the idea of FAMOUS SHOE: DA MOVIE might seem a crass move, a tacky product manufactured in recognition of a collectible market that has too much money, in order to relieve them of some of it. Or worse, an elaborate brand advertisement — a thought that is in no way assuaged by having Amazon as its distributor.

Happily, it’s neither of those. Air, which chronicles the behind-the-scenes story of inking of the Michael Jordan endorsement deal which led to the biggest sneaker of all time, is pretty simply a great story, well told, about the clash between navigating sterile corporate politics, against taking big, passionate risks.

Taking place in the early 80s while Nike was still just a fledgling and desperately struggling company, unable to break into the basketball market dominated by Converse and Adidas, Air centers on Sonny Vaccaro, a middle-aged Nike employee and basketball expert who pleads with his company (including teammates Jason Bateman and Chris Tucker, and Ben Affleck as CEO Phil Knight), to forego their cash-conservative (and unexciting) plans and instead put all their chips — the entire budget, and probably the company’s fate — on trying to land a deal with #3 draft pick Michael Jordan, a player who is hopelessly unattainable to them for several reasons that everyone is happy to point out.

This is a great cast putting in top performances — everyone’s wonderful here. Viola Davis shines as Michael Jordan’s mother Deloris, who’s sharp, looking out for her son, and wary of the wolves at the door. Matthew Maher is especially delightful as Nike’s shoe designer, who’s tasked with prototyping the revolutionary new model. And I was very pleased to see such a supporting role for Chris Tucker, who hasn’t acted in many films in recent years but kills it here.

While Michael Jordan (portrayed by Damian Young) is on the fringes of the narrative — and spiritually at its heart, the film makes a conscious choice to not show his face, which might seem odd but makes great sense for a number of reasons. Besides eliminating the possibility of being a distraction for the audience to see how closely the actor looks like Michael (literally one of the most famous and recognizable people alive), he’s simply not really an active character within the plot — that’s where his mom comes in instead. In fact, obscuring Jordan’s face isn’t all that different than concealing the contents of Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction: he’s kind of the MacGuffin around which the story revolves.

Director Ben Affleck continues to show a deft hand at crafting engaging stories. My screener has a brief video introduction in which Affleck encouraged the audience to, “Have fun!”.

Mission accomplished.

Mamma Mia, it’s-a big, beautiful… commercial.

Super Mario has always existed.

Obviously this is objectively not true. The character we now know as Mario was first Jump Man in the 1981 video game Donkey Kong, an arcade cabinet about a mustachioed man in overalls attempting to rescue a damsel from a mad gorilla. He went on to become the star of his own series of video games, and was the flagship title for when Nintendo launched their own home console in Super Mario Bros., a game that all but defined the genre of the “platformer,” games where the player has to use manual dexterity to assist their digital avatar to traverse treacherous terrain. Year on year, the Super Mario franchise of video games would evolve and perfect this formula, providing playful character design as a palette for which players would explore exciting stage designs.

And Mario has always been there in my life. Some of my earliest memories are sitting in front of a TV, Nintendo controller in hand, controlling my best friend through the mushroom kingdom, transfixed by the variety of worlds he would discover. As I grew up, Mario grew more complex, eventually entering into three-dimensions and including an ever-growing cast of colorful characters, each more inventive than the last.

For all of these reasons, The Super Mario Bros. Movie would seem like something pitched perfectly at me, a faithful adaptation of a beloved world that I have returned to again and again and again. After all, the pure nostalgia-based dopamine this film is centered around is geared directly at my experience, my brain. And make no mistake, the film which is a joint production with Illumination (the Minions/Despicable Me studio) and Nintendo is precisely that: a faithful recreation of the games in a new medium, down to pitch-perfect character design, movement, and references for keen-eyed Nintendo fanatics. And not just for the Mario franchise itself; homages to the long storied history of Nintendo across the board are easily apparent throughout the film, down to minute details in the set design.

The reason for this near obsessive faithfulness to the source material is not difficult to suss out. 30 years ago, the first attempt at adapting the franchise was anything but faithful, a live-action mishmash of elements that were drawn from the game intermixed with an early 90s dystopian satire that was both manic and disorienting. The end effect was a movie that made gestures towards the games, but was decidedly its own thing. The first live-action film based on a video game, the movie was a critical and financial flop, and was disowned by most everyone involved with it, most notably Mario actor Bob Hoskins who derided it as the nadir of his career.

For this reason, Nintendo has spent the last three decades very gun shy about collaborating with American studios, demanding if they were to make another film adaptation it would have under their guidance and as true as possible to the games themselves. Thus we have this object now, which is essentially a feature length adaptation of what the games suggest.

The major problem with all of this is that the Super Mario Bros. games, for all their brilliance in terms of character and level design, have never been a narrative-first franchise. Film, however, often is, meaning that translating from one form to another require some careful consideration of how you adapt between different media. An adaptation that the new Super Mario Bros. seems doggedly against. It’s beautifully animated, but the heart of the thing is brand preservation and extension. The movie plays like a very expensive commercial, pointing towards the thing it is honoring rather than having any identity unto itself.

As far as that plot goes, it is as straight forward as any of the games: a parallel world to our own is being threatened by Bowser, a turtle-dragon warlord. After capturing the powerful super star, Bowser plans to both destroy the peaceful Mushroom Kingdom while also simultaneously attempting to woo their monarch, the level-headed Princess Peach. The saviors of this mythical, technicolor world? Two plumbers from the Bronx, Mario and Luigi, who are sucked into the Mushroom Kingdom through a magical sewer pipe. Well, really mostly Mario, as Luigi is relegated to the potion of hapless coward and damsel in distress for must of the film’s run time.

And that’s basically it. The film isn’t interested in providing any particular take on these characters other than these ones are good, these ones are bad, and the good ones have to stop the bad ones. The titular Mario Bros. are themselves empty shells of characters. It is telling that the most interesting sequences of the film are when the camera takes a hard locked side-view, allowing action sequences to play out as if they were impossible Mario levels. A whole scene is dedicated to Mario basically getting good at Mario games. It is when the film has to slow down to explore the plot that the film drags. It is at its best when it is running on the fumes of pure kinetic energy, when its game roots are most evident. When it is trying to be a movie? Not so engaging.

It is hard to blame the voice actors for their lackluster performances. Much hand-wringing has been made over Chris Pratt’s take on Mario, but the end result is mostly fine if uninspired. Anya-Taylor Joy’s Peach and Charlie Day’s Luigi are even less engaging, mostly because their characters are somehow even flatter. The only actor given anything to sink their teeth into is Jack Black as Bowser, whose conflicted desire to both rule and love Peach is the one comedic angle the film has on any character that work whole cloth, mostly because it takes a truth about the games and gently undercuts it. Bowser is a silly character, and the film acknowledges that to its best benefit. You can only imagine a movie that digs an inch more under the surface of what it’s drawing from.

These are potentially unfair criticisms to lob at a film with such market-driven designs. The movie likely is what it sets out to be, and when it is in movement it mostly engages those centers of the brain. But compare this exercise to the LEGO Movie series, an equally market-driven film that finds a perspective on the thing it is riffing on and creates something magical that elevates both the film and the brand simultaneously. And they even have great Chris Pratt voice over performances!

By comparison, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a soulless parade of “Here’s the thing you know, doing the thing you expect it to do.” There is no thrill of newness, but rather a stale conformity to being just like it has always been. It contracts the world of Mario into a simple package rather than expanding it. For as misguided as some of the choices of the 1993 Mario movie may have been, they were at least choices. Its brother, three decades later, is somehow flatter and duller. Almost certainly watching the 1993 version would be at least more interesting, or better yet, just play a Mario game. Which ultimately is probably the desired effect of the movie in the first place. So mission accomplished I suppose, but as a movie, it’s easily discarded and never thought of again.

Mark Jenkin’s latest feature-length film takes a deep dive into psychological fragmentation

By definition, folk horror centers on the conflict between paganism, Christianity, and (super) natural forces. It also involves folklore that either existed before the advent of Christianity or stubbornly developed alongside the monotheistic faith, functioning both as counterpoint and contrast, though Christianity, like most world religions, has been syncretic by tradition, absorbing and re-purposing local beliefs, rituals, and holy sites. Those key elements of folk horror plays an essential role in Mark Jenkin’s (Bait) experimental horror film, Enys Men (literally “Stone Island”). Deliberately emphasizing abstract imagery and fragmented soundscapes over narrative coherence and interpretative clarity, Enys Men delivers a singularly provocative, challenging moviegoing experience.

Set in 1973 on a lone, isolated island off the coast of Cornwall (England), Enys Men focuses on an unnamed volunteer (Mary Woodvine) to spend days, weeks, even months away from the equivalent of civilization on the English mainland as she carefully charts the progress of a strange, possibly alien flower. Every day, wearing seemingly identical clothes, including a bright red overcoat, she ventures outside her home, traipsing across inhospitable, stony ground, eventually reaching a cliff where she takes the temperature of the ground and observes the unique flower for any visible change. Noting none, she fills a notebook with the same, simple message, “No change.” Until, of course, it does.

The volunteer curiously notices lichen growing on one of the plants, excitedly noting the development in her log. So far, so (apparently) normal, but when she discovers a similar-looking lichen growing on a keloid scar on her stomach, the obvious result of some unexplained injury or trauma, Enys Men, already slipping into an oneiric state where dreams, hallucinations, and memories meet, merge, and diverge, falls headlong into surreality. A discordant, disjointed stream of images follow, including a young woman who may or may not be real, who may or may not be a projection of the volunteer’s rapidly fragmenting mind.

Reflecting the volunteer’s tortured psyche, Enys Men doesn’t so much follow a traditional narrative structure as rebel against it. Even when a mainlander arrives in a boat to deliver much-needed supplies, it’s unclear whether he’s real, a convenient fiction created by a troubled mind, or possibly a mix of both. Even before he arrives, the volunteer begins to suffer from a series of disturbing, disquieting visions involving children apparently engaged in a ritual game of some kind, the apparent ghosts of miners who once worked the abandoned mines on the island, and women, dressed in the austere clothing of milk maids drawn from packaging in the volunteer’s temporary dwelling.

Collaborating with his partner, longtime TV veteran Mary Woodvine (she appears in practically every scene), Jenkin’s wrote, shot, and directed Enys Men to make it look, sound, and feel like a long-list ’70s film, a film that would easily feel of a piece with the so-called “Unholy Trinity” (The Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man) and, more recently, The Lighthouse. To that end, Jenkin’s used 16mm film, a boxy aspect ratio, and added splices, cuts, and other imperfections to the film print. Based on the available evidence onscreen, working from a limited budget on location with COVID restrictions in place did little to diminish Jenkin’s creative expression.

Likely to the frustration of some or even many members of the audience on the other side of the screen, Jenkin fully embraces the interpretative ambiguity inherent in the premise, offering few answers and a proliferating series of questions about the nature of identity, the effects of isolation, and unresolved trauma.

Enys Men opens theatrically on Friday, March 31st, via Neon.