I was asked how I felt about the mario bros movie. and I answered. "I don't know".
What a marvellous thing to feel! "I don't know"! it's almost refreshing- after decades of every animated film being a "perfect" on-formula retelling of A New Hope, it's actually refreshing to watch a film that's an incoherent fucking mess
Mario, on some level, has to impress his father (played by charles martinet) but also that's not important. bowser wants to marry princess peach. the film leads up to the wedding and it's over almost as soon as it begins. donkey kong and mario are on a road trip for a portion of the movie. that is also then abandonned. it's a meaningless, surreal mess and that is actually something that accuratley reflects the material it's based on
I think the "New Hope" graph is the reason I have despised so many recent movies, especially those from disney- I would leave every disney movie like "that was just the same movie again!" because they had the formula DOWN. the arc of the story, the emotional stakes, the denoument, it was always identical. it was always the same movie. The Mario Bros Movie is not that movie. It feels at times like it was TRYING to be that movie, but it missed the mark, and in doing so made something that was more interesting
some bits of this film suck!! the scenes all zoom by so fast and the stakes are never so high that they're not immediately resolved at the end of the scene. bits of this film border on tasteless (there's a luma who is suicidal. why? this character makes me uncomfortable, why is it here) bits of the film are longer and/or shorter than they need to be constantly. it's NOT tight, it's full of filler, chris pratt plays mario, plot threads are abandonned, plot holes are everywhere..... God, it's so refreshing to watch an artless, stupid mess of a movie it's so much less boring than the dead end disney is currently down
I change my opinion on this movie on a whim, because I don't know what to think of it. that's the super mario bros movie. I will fucking hate it tomorrow and then I'll fucking love it the day after that. thankyou
Image from "Extra Credits"
MEET MY ENEMY. The legendary "PERFECT MOVIE PACING GRAPH", the pacing of Star Wars: A New Hope- cited often by scholars as the ideal perfect formula for a perfect movie. the stakes start high, then lower as you get the next part of the movie set up, then they accelerate, onwards and upwards, with these tiny dips, until the climax, where everything happens!! wow! showstopper!
This graph is my enemy because I hate the idea of living in a world where we think we have boiled art down to "formula". people keep remaking old shit to make it fit the formula more. No. No more of this. I hate the formula. I want shit to have weird pacing. I want it to be the story the artist wants to tell, not the "formula" for leeping cinemagoers in their seats.
I also think it's just plain incorrect. I've seen this movie so many times now and it's not getting better. I don't even think it was my favourite movie to begin with. With the rise of ChatGPT it feels like we are inching ever closer to every single mainstream film being this- an attempt to get closer and closer to the "everyfilm"- the last film you ever need to make, and the last film you ever need to see. Fuck that film
I heartily encourage people to fuck with this pacing graph as much as possible and even when the results aren't that cool, well, I think it's cool that you did it
