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magnesium23
Reviews
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Creative Potential Unmet: A Disjointed Journey Through Mario's World
The movie is based on a couple of IPs who earned their place at the pinnacle of our culture due to their creativity and inventiveness.
We were all hoping that such inventiveness would come through in this movie, they certainly have the budget for it. Disappointingly, the whole movie is just a series of looking for excuses to make references to stuff, which on its own is fine, except there's practically no narrative (and I'm not just referring to the entirety of the plot being "Bowser wants a shotgun wedding with Peach" for the dozenth time) and some loose, watery character development seemingly stapled on at the last minute.
Not to mention, the logic of these worlds is inconsistent and totally bizarre, in an upsetting, lazy-story-writing sort of way. If you're going to create a universe, or in this case, build context around an existing universe, the least you could do is establish some rules and then stick to them. Otherwise there's just no point in following the narrative because anything can happen, and for some of us that just makes us anxious.
Plus, and this is a personal thing for me, I think Illumination just uses too much pop music in all of their movies.
That said, I like the luma character. But I like the dog character the most, Francis. I think it's name was. That's the character with the most interesting arc in this movie. Maybe this is due to Illuminations experience with its far superior movies, The Secret Life Of Pets and Sing what with their completely animal cast.
Hoping the inevitable five or six sequels do better,
1.5/4
Oh and the graphics and music were great.
The Rise of Jordan Peterson (2019)
Well, it gave me the answers I was seeking.
I watched this recently. It was a good documentary in its unbiasedness. That said, I was kind of disappointed at how unremarkable Jordan b Peterson is, it turns out.
There are some things that Jordan b Peterson says that I agree with and admire. Like, for example, his pleading with people be their own person as opposed to mindlessly adhering to the extreme rhetoric of whatever political party you find yourself under the spell of.
But it turns out he was only briefly famous because of some assertion regarding free speech he made one day which just so happened to toss trans people under the bus in the example he was using, so he became very divisive and all of the anti-trans people, under their usual guise of promoting free speech, hurried to his side.
And then it seemed like he didn't quite know how to handle that Fame. But it did I guess bring some attention to some of the good points he has, unfortunately his Fame also gave a lot of voice and power to White supremacists and transphobic individuals, which is something he can also be seen struggling to wrap his mind around.
And, by the way, my thoughts on the inciting incident that kicked off his brief Fame is this: his worries about how misgendering a trans person being made to be classified as a hate crime, that if that happened would ultimately result in fascism thriving in Canada, is a garden variety slippery slope fallacy.
And the fact that he capped off his argument by really just complaining intensely that he will never never use a person's desired pronouns for any reason, I think was detrimental to his assertion that his objections were solely regarding free speech.
Deadcon (2019)
😒
I like to think I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to judging movies.
For example, I'm still not at the point where I can fully understand what people mean when they say, presumptuously, "this person did not act in a very believable way". I mean, some people/characters are fundamentally neurologically different. And so on...
Another example, if something I don't understand happens in a movie or it even ends in a way that I don't understand, I'm more tempted to reach for the conclusion that I just did not understand what they were trying to go for, as opposed to that the movie had a bad scene or a bad ending.
But there was a part in this movie that happened, after which I had to stop what I was doing and laugh out loud to my empty living room for a while.
This movie had proper internet Brand placement in it such that when people search things online they use Google and when people were watching videos they were using YouTube.
So, when it came to the point where one of the characters in the movie went to Google and searched the term (Bobby 1984) it returned with Google's "we found zero results" screen, I performed the above-mentioned series of reactions.
Now, I don't think you have to be aware of how Google's pagerank-based website indexing system works to know that that sequence of events is hilariously fictional.
Also, I feel comfortable in stating that I think this movie ended abruptly and unsatisfactorially.
If I were reviewing it, in other words, I would say: "please watch. I want my friends to tell me whether I'm wrong."