Deliberately overthinking ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ to play out the fantasy that someone is paying me to do this

Posted on May 18, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

8/10 The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a manmade horror beyond my comprehension – not as an assessment of quality, but as a fact about its nature. As far as man-made horrors go, it’s pretty high-quality.

Brooklyn- Mario and Luigi (Chris Pratt and Charlie Day) struggle to start a plumbing business out of a cramped New York apartment with their extended family of first-generation Italian immigrants. The brothers rush to the scene of a water main break, hoping to seize a chance to save Brooklyn, but they descend deeper and deeper into the sewer in search of the break and are eventually sucked into a warp pipe. The pair are thrust into a brewing war as the evil Koopa king Bowser (Jack Black), who rules the Dark Lands, is launching an invasion of all local territories in order to win the heart of the Mushroom Kingdom’s ruler, Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy).

The movie begs a lot of questions about its own existence, but it begs them by demonstrating a lot of really solid answers. Maybe they aren’t the right answers, but there’s a consistent, observable thought process behind this movie. 

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Steel yourself for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’

Posted on May 6, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

7/10 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is more intense than it is good. It’s very well made and there’s a lot of value that you wouldn’t be expecting as a natural extension of the series, but plenty of people are going to be disappointed in this.

Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a superpowered artificial being created by an artificially designed race called the Sovereign, crashes into the Guardians of the Galaxy’s headquarters in Knowhere to kidnap Rocket (Bradley Cooper). The other guardians fight him off, but Rocket is critically injured, with an estimated 48 hours to live without medical assistance, which they can’t give him because of a kill switch embedded in his heart by the people who surgically altered him that will go off if anyone unauthorized opens him up for surgery. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and the rest of the guardians take off toward a desperate faceoff with the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), creator of Rocket, the Sovereign and countless other races hoping to find override codes so they can save Rocket.

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There’s ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ movies now?

Posted on May 4, 2023 by reelentropy
The movie spends a lot of its time in these fantastic spaces relaxing over a beer. It really helps bring the vibe of gameplay down into the story world. Images courtesy Paramount Pictures.

7/10 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is fast and fun, much better than it has any right to be. The quote is “a great movie is three great scenes and no bad ones,” and there isn’t anything in this movie that sticks out too far in a bad way, so I guess that’s high praise.

The Forgotten Realms- Bard Edgin Darvis and barbarian Holga Kilgore (Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez) have lazed for two years at the Revel’s End arctic prison after their last job went sour. They bust out and head for Neverwinter, where their old crew’s rogue Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) has set himself up as the lord, only to learn not only did he intentionally betray them and align himself with an apocalyptic cult of necromancers for power, but he has their daughter. The pair brings a new crew together to knock over the upcoming High Sun Games, a gladiatorial competition that Fitzwilliam has staked much of his lordship on.

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Willem Dafoe’s ‘Inside’ is the new definitive COVID movie

Posted on April 27, 2023 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 Inside is the new definitive icon of the COVID-19 crisis in film that explores the psychological damage of isolation and the way attitudes change toward the comforts of home when you’re trapped in it.

That’s Willem Dafoe in Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside, not the other one.

Times Square- Professional art thief Nemo (Dafoe) breaks into an art collector’s penthouse to steal three works from Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. He gets in fine, but his attempts to leave trigger the penthouse’s security features, and he becomes trapped in a “Robinson Crusoe” esque fight for survival, not against the elements on a deserted island, but against his own body in a penthouse that has been emptied of food and water.

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At the end of its life, DC keeps going back to poisoned well in ‘Shazam 2’

Posted on April 27, 2023 by reelentropy
You know what? This is a nice wood dragon. I can’t give Fury of the Gods credit for designing it, but they absolutely picked the correct 15-year-old “World of Warcraft” design to steal and reskin. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

7/10 In 2019, Shazam! was one of the first popular successes for the DCEU, which was already long-dead by this time. It’s fun and flighty, but from a franchise this desperate that holds this tight a grip on its movies, you kind of already sense that a bloated, overboard sequel was on the way.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods never quite earns my excitement, but it does earn my respect. It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot of meat to this movie.

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