Movie Weekend!
I saw two movies this weekend.
The first was SUPER MARIO BROTHERS. I mentioned I tried to see it last weekend in the local theater, but it was sold out, so this weekend I drove to the larger theater the next town over. Once again, it was sold out, but this time I arrived early enough to get one of the last seats.
Amusingly, I think I might have been the oldest person there, but I’ve been playing Mario games since before a lot of the audience had been born, so that was all right. But that explains why SUPER MARIO BROTHERS is probably going to pass the billion dollar mark, doesn’t it? There are people with multi-generational good memories of playing the original game or Mario Kart or Mario Party or whatever, and the movie taps into that.
Of course, a billion dollars wouldn’t happen if the movie was bad, which it wasn’t. It managed to land in the sweet spot of referencing all the games without getting bogged down in the details, the animation looked just like the more modern Mario games but with more detail, and it had a coherent plot that followed the rules of story structure and didn’t cheat. Granted, ultimately Mario is about a mustachioed Italian plumber who uses magic power-ups to fight a warlord dragon turtle who is obsessed with a princess who rules over a kingdom of anthropomorphic talking mushroom people, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when you lay it out like that.
Anyway, definitely recommend SUPER MARIO BROTHERS if you’ve played a Mario game in the last 35 years.
The second movie was GHOSTED.
How to describe it? Think of the plot of a stock Hallmark movie. Stressed career woman can’t find love, travels to a small town, meets a down-to-earth yet handsome man (usually wearing a sweater), they click, something unexpected happens in the second act to drive them apart, but they reconnect to help save the small town’s baking festival or charming artisanal hotel or horse ranch or something.
Now, imagine the same formula, but the stressed career woman is the CIA’s top assassin, and the small town’s baking festival is actually a deadly bioweapon that various sinister organizations are trying to obtain.
The end result is movie that is a mixture of a romantic comedy, HIS GIRL FRIDAY from the 1940s, and a Jason Bourne movie. I won’t say it’s brilliant cinema, but the weird fusion of separate genre elements manages to hold together for the most part (again, by following the rules of proper story structure). Definitely a solid B movie you can turn off your brain and enjoy with some popcorn.
-JM