It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The unexpected massive box office hit of 2023, The Super Mario Brothers Movie, answers the question, "How long does it take Hollywood to see what's right in front of it?" In this case, it was thirty years after the notoriously bad production that interpreted Mario and his universe as something completely different from what it was. There're plenty of flaws in the new movie, but it understands the most important thing, which is that Mario is not Edward G. Robinson, he's Charlie Chaplin.
Or Weary Willie or Mickey Mouse, take your pick. In fact, some seditious whispers have begun that Mario has overtaken Mickey Mouse in popularity--a phony question, of course, since Mickey's cartoons were never as good as Donald Duck's or Goofy's. And, of course, Mario has been moving a lot more merchandise than Mickey for decades.
Though, fittingly, Mario's not the most interesting character in his own film. That honour goes to Bowser, played by the perfectly cast Jack Black whose song, "Peaches", is the underused creative high point of the film.
90% of the time, Jack Black doesn't work for me. He appears in movies full of energy, tackling some average zany material and, for all his zeal, comes off kind of lifeless. "Peaches" reminded me how great his band, Tenacious D, could be and the song, part of the film's ironic treatment of the villain in love with the damsel in distress, buoys the humour with Black's irrepressible sincerity.
The film was directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, creators of the execrable faux-Japanese Teen Titas Go!. They said in interviews that their goal with the Mario movie was to make something less ironic than the Titans series but, like a lot of creatives of their generation, I think they've been breathing irony so long their lungs can't tolerate oxygen because this movie is full of tedious ironic jokes. The attempts at sincerity are sabotaged by the too-common problem of issues introduced and forgotten. Mario and Luigi go to prove themselves as plumbers by fixing a broken water main, but the movie forgets about this. Princess Peach reveals she may have come from Earth, but the movie forgets about it. When she and Mario have to rush off to forge an alliance with Donkey Kong, she stops to make Mario go through an obstacle course.
Of course, the movie's compelled to make the Princess a hyper-competent young woman who doesn't actually seem to need Mario but that's part of the price of admission to any major American film these days. While the film tries to hew close to the relationships from the games, it never quite fills that void left by the absence of the central, simple conflict of Mario rescuing the Princess from Bowser. When Mario asks Peach if she's just humouring him when she tells him she had a hard time with the obstacle course at first, too, she admits she was lying but Mario concedes that her lies did make him feel better. The message apparently being that it doesn't matter if something's true, it only matters if it makes you feel good.
Video games like this, that have spanned generations, present a peculiarly new way of preserving lived experiences and creating bonds between old and young. I think the movie would have been even more successful if it had even more rigorously bound the characters to the same rules of gameplay we all had to go through. One can hope the inevitable sequels will improve on these obvious shortcomings, but I'm not gonna hold my breath for another thirty years.
Twitter Sonnet #1717
Infected dirty turtles vomit flowers
And mimic paste and paint the corner red
And yellow hues for dreams of noxious hours
For lying near the withered sack of dead.
Deflation forced a fortune vast to fold
Behind the deck of sunny cards returned
To dock and mischief makes a demon bold
And quickly young for truth is slowly burned.
Determined mines negate the chances down.
Along the dotted tie and twisted rust
Condemns the road to wreck the noisy crown
And build a banished block of human dust.
A crimson cap commenced to stomp the rage
Of demon love defined as empty cage.
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