BEFORE: Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to watching this, it's just not my scene. Sure, I put it on the list, but I wasn't really that serious about it - and now it's going to serve as a crucial link here at the end of September to connect me to October. Normally I'd be very happy about that, because that means the plan is working, to watch films only when they become important, or are necessary to keep the chain alive. Yeah, mission accomplished, great, but now I still have to suffer through this damn stupid movie (I'm assuming).
Jack Black carries over from "Kung Fu Panda 4" - I'd mention the other actor who carries over, but I'm not quite sure if they used archive sound for his character in yesterday's film, it was just a couple of screams at the end.
THE PLOT: A plumber named Mario travels through an underground labyrinth with his brother Luigi, trying to save a captured princess.
AFTER: I've been reading about the proper order of adjectives, which is something that applies to English grammar that we all kind of just KNOW, even if we don't talk about it a lot or realize it, but we all put adjectives in a particular order, and if we don't follow the order, a sentence can sound wrong. Like you might talk about your beautiful new brown leather boots, and you maybe placed the adjectives in the proper order automatically. If you said "my leather brown beautiful new boots" that just wouldn't sound right, it would feel OFF.
So if I called "Super Mario Bros." a children's American brightly-colored new bloated crappy movie, that would clearly sound wrong, because I've purposedly changed the order of adjectives from the way that we're used to hearing them in regular conversation. Rightfully, this needs to be called a crappy bloated new brightly-colored American children's movie for it to sound proper and correct. Are we clear on this? Just remember "OSASCOMP", after you say how many there are of something, then you will describe, in order, your Opinion of the items, the Size, the Age, the Shape, then the Color, Origin, Material, and its Purpose, if any, so "Beautiful old Italian marble dining table" would be correct, but any other order of those words won't really work, try it. "Dining old Italian marble beautiful table"?
I'm deflecting here, because this movie just wasn't my thing. I haven't played a Mario-based video game in 30 years, probably. "Grand Theft Auto" and "Lego Star Wars" became my games, and I migrated from Nintendos to PlayStations. So I'm way out of the loop here, I don't know Bowsers from Koopas and I didn't even know Donkey Kong had a father named Cranky Kong, but I did know there was a Donkey Kong Jr. and also a Diddy Kong, but I think that last one just got arrested, so you can probably forget about seeing him ever again.
I know that there was some flap about the casting of two non-Italian Americans to play Mario and Luigi here, but then, if they hired two Italian actors and they maintained that "Mamma Mia!" overblown accent for the whole movie, that probably wouldn't have gone over well. So the story needs to kind of bend over sideways and backwards here to solve the problem - should the movie reinforce the games' stereotype with strong Italian accents? Or just change the characters over to American accents and pretend nothing is wrong? Well, both and neither. Mario and Luigi here speak with regular Californian American accents, but they do make a COMMERCIAL for their plumbing business where they over-emphasize their Italian accents. OK, great, now everybody is upset, including all video-game purists AND Italian people. What a terrible solution to a non-problem.
Next question, should they be video-game characters or humans? In this movie they're humans who get sucked into the video-game like world through a portal they find in the NYC sewers. But they looked like cartoons from the start, how could they be humans if they didn't look real? It's another non-problem that got turned into a narrative problem, but the solution doesn't really solve anything, it just makes things even more confusing than they were.
More confusing things - the residents of the mushroom kingdom are called Toads, but they're not toads as in frogs, they're kind of like mushroom-shaped people who are CALLED Toads. And then the one Mario befriends is also named Toad, yes, he's a Toad who is named Toad, however he's also not a toad. Ouch. Princess Peach isn't a real princess, as in she's not royalty, she just showed up one day in the mushroom kingdom and doesn't remember where she came from. OK, so I guess if you just move into a castle you can just start calling yourself a princess? It shouldn't work that way. She and Mario go on this quest to recruit the Kongs to help fight Bowser, and they make a big deal about her changing the color of her dress, then two minutes later she's wearing a cart-racing outfit, so why did we bother to show her changing her dress?
And Bowser is somehow in love with Princess Peach? That's kind of disturbing, I think I liked him better when he was just an evil character who kidnaps her and keeps her away from Mario. If he's also got feelings for her, that's just kind of icky and wrong, like "I love you so much I'm going to kidnap you and move you from one castle to another to show how much I care". No, no, NO that's very wrong, even if it sounds like what a psychopath would do, it's going to tell kids the wrong message about loving someone who doesn't feel the same way as you, like just kidnap her and force her to marry you, then things will be fine? Yuck.
Motivations are weird across this whole movie - Cranky Kong's random actions may even be worse than Bowser's, because he won't commit his army to the fight that will save the mushroom kingdom unless Mario can defeat his son, Donkey Kong, in a gladiator fight? Then he stacks the deck against his OWN SON by putting power-ups around the arena, supposedly because he wants the fight to last more than five seconds, but there's also some deep-seated father-son negative energy if he set up Donkey Kong to fail.
I'm probably reading WAY too much into all of this, because really, at heart, it's just a big stupid pile of nonsense, a story that goes nowhere and means nothing, like just go play some video games if you want, just leave these characters out of movies because they were never meant to be there in the first place? It's not very often that I feel like I completely wasted my time by watching a movie, but I sure feel in this case that I wasted 90 minutes that I will never get back. Sure, my linking can continue now, and I'll make it to October 1 on time, but the movie is a pile of hot garbage.
That's a pointless, big, old, shapeless, American cinematic pile of garbage.
Also starring the voices of Chris Pratt (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Charlie Day (last seen in "How It Ends"), Keegan-Michael Key (last heard in "Migration"), Seth Rogen (also carrying over from "Kung Fu Panda 4" - maybe), Fred Armisen (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Sebastian Maniscalco (last heard in "IF"), Kevin Michael Richardson (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Charles Martinet, Jessica DiCicco (last heard in "Over the Hedge"), Rino Romano (last heard in "Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild"), John DiMaggio (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Khary Payton (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Eric Bauza (last heard in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Juliet Jelenic, Scott Menville, Kazumi Totaka
RATING: 3 out of 10 ghosts in "Luigi's Mansion" (one of the few references that I did get)
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