There are probably other films that I’ll remember later that are at least comparable as movies I’ve felt like I had to review at some point, but this one has always been basically the most “must-review” movie since the beginning.
I understand that this is a dramatization of a real story of a factory owner using his privilege to get Jews out of the Holocaust. It is also definitely going to be a Hollywood “The Holocaust was Bad” movie. Every movie condemning the Holocaust is to its own degree earnest and moving, but the lesson has been taught over and over and at this point it’s become a “Best Picture Oscar please” button while the West is becoming more enamored with racism and fascism anyway.
This month I’m going to cover a very particular set of movies I’ve already seen before. These are some of the movies I saw for the first time shortly before beginning the blog, and had opinions about. They’re movies that are in many ways responsible for the concept of Yesterday’s Movies as a project.
Super Mario Bros.was maybe the first movie I rented on Netflix for myself. It was infamous on the internet and I decided to see what the fuss was about. And it’s definitely an extremely weird movie.
Millions of years ago, the meteor that struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs created a pocket universe the size of New York where the dinosaurs lived and evolved into people who look exactly like humans with extreme hair gel effects and a taste for spiky clothes. Twenty years ago, Koopa led a coup to replace the benevolent ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom as dictator “President”, but the queen managed to escape to the outside world and hide her daughter along with a piece of the meteorite that opens the gateway between worlds. Now, Mario Mario and his kid brother Luigi Mario run Mario Bros. Plumbing in Brooklyn, but are losing business to Scapelli Construction, which is currently being stymied in a big development project by the local university trying to study and protect an extraordinary fossil collection unearthed by the project blasting. After giving Daisy, the leader of the study, a ride, Mario suggests that Luigi take her on a double date with him and his girlfriend Daniella, and when Daisy takes Luigi to the site after dinner, they find Scapelli goons trying to flood the place, leading Luigi to call Mario to help. While fixing the sabotaged pipes, Koopa minions Spike and Iggy grab Daisy and drag her through a portal between the worlds, with Mario and Luigi, who managed to grab the stone necklace that has been Daisy’s only tie to her mother her whole life, following to the rescue. And then things really get weird.
Whenever I think about the lore of this movie, I try very hard to keep in mind that this movie came out a year before Charles Martinet’s very first time playing Mario, so basically the only way anyone had interpreted Mario beyond a collection of pixels that went beep when you press jump was The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. That at least makes the casting and costuming of the heroes make a little more sense. I still can’t get past how somebody seems to have given the designers the instruction to completely ignore anything from the existing games and cartoon show and just go nuts with spikes and leather and hair gel and wrought iron. This movie looks like it wants to be Blade Runner or Demolition Man (I could swear they’re using the same stage for the city streets) and is trying very hard not to be a cartoon. Mario and Luigi don’t even wear their iconic colors until almost exactly the one-hour mark. In fact, Luigi spends most of the movie in red and Mario spends a lot of the movie in green. I feel like it helps a lot that now, thirty years later, there is a movie based on the franchise we now know. But when I’m watching this, I still can’t help but question every single choice made, and how it actually relates to the world of Mario circa 1993.
I was always confused why they used Daisy and not Peach for the Princess, but maybe it’s because they decided the Princess character worked best as a Luigi love interest and Peach is more associated with Mario. It’s still totally out of nowhere that Mario has a totally normal Brooklynite girlfriend named Daniella. I suppose if they made this movie now, they would have drawn from the game lore and used Pauline, the damsel from the original Donkey Kong who was brought back in stylish fashion as the mayor of New Donk City in a recent game, but nobody was doing that deep a read on the franchise in 1993. Maybe the most bizarre departure from expectations is that the Mushroom Kingdom name and prevalence of mushrooms in the game is interpreted as a slime mold infesting the whole city that turns out to be, in its own way, acting against Koopa too. Maybe there was a mistranslation involved.
I have to admit that Bob Hoskins plays a great Bronx plumber. It doesn’t seem appropriate that he spends most of the movie following behind Luigi, cleaning up after his mistakes, and dismissing his ideas that turn out to be correct like the helpful fungus (again, Luigi is the one in red for the first two acts), but there comes a moment when Mario goes from reacting to taking action, and then he feels like a hero. Whatever Dennis Hopper is doing, it’s nothing like Bowser/Koopa, but he’s a very entertaining villain who leaves no scenery unchewed. John Leguizamo is as charming as can be and I might in some ways like his take on Luigi more than some of the more flat interpretations of the character as voiced by Martinet. And Daisy is that special kind of late 80s/early 90s girl character who’s tough and capable and feels well-rounded and still spends most of the movie captured and waiting for the heroes to rescue her.
I can’t deny this is a really fun movie, sometimes even beyond its own expense. Once you let go of what you expect Mario Bros. to be post-Mario 64 and try to accept it for what it’s trying to do, it’s a bit nostalgic in its own way. I may not have seen it until after 2009, but there’s a kind of tone here that reminds me of other movies made in its day that I did see at the time. This is best watched with friends to mock it with you, a beer or similar if you partake, and plenty of popcorn that you might at some points throw at the screen, but a good time will be had, if you’re ready to take the movie as unseriously as it takes the source material.
I have vague memories of watching Batman: The Animated Series as a kid. It was a thing that was on, sometimes I would watch it when it was available, but I don’t remember really making a habit of it. Even so, it defined Batman for me as a kid. I was aware of the live-action movies of course. I definitely remember at least one McDonald’s Happy Meal tie in that I got a Hot Wheels-size version of the best Batmobile out of, but I’m not sure the timelines actually sync up, since it would have been the 1991 promotion and I may have been a little young to be as aware of it as I remember.
Regardless, as for many my age, this is the definitive version of Batman to me. I’ve probably watched more episodes as an adult seeking them out, but the series brought as much plot and emotional complexity to half-hour episodes as was possible. It introduced characters and interpretations so compelling they were imported to the comics and other versions, it was the keystone to a shared-continuity animated franchise, and had two direct continuation series.
I’ve gotten around to Batman and Mister Freeze: Sub-Zero before, but I never made it to the first movie spinoff, the one that actually got released in theaters before. And it has taken me entirely too long to get here.
After watching the movie:
Batman busts a meeting of Gotham’s biggest crime lords, and in the ensuing chaos, Chuckie Sol gets accosted by a hooded, masked figure claiming to be his agent of death, who tricks him into crashing his car through a parking garage wall, leaving him dead. When bystanders look up at the commotion, they see Batman at the hole in the wall trying to understand what just happened, and news spreads fast that Batman might have graduated to murdering mob bosses. Councilman Arthur Reeves, in the mafia’s pocket, vows to finally have Batman arrested. Ten years earlier, in Bruce Wayne’s earliest days of crime fighting, before he figured out how to intimidate the criminals, he met Andrea Beaumont in the cemetery talking to her mother’s grave close to where Bruce was talking to his own parents, and they quickly bonded. Bruce became torn between the vow he made to his parents to avenge them against all crime in Gotham when he realized that plan never included having someone waiting for him at home, and their relationship ultimately ended in heartbreak. Now, Andrea is returning to Gotham, and Batman realizes that the gangsters getting killed all share a link with Andrea’s businessman father, but his investigation is hampered by Gotham law enforcement hunting him down for the same murders, while the next don on the Phantasm’s list has gone to a former mook and friend from the old days for help, now in business for himself as the Clown Prince of Crime.
When a movie gets made from a tv show, especially one still on the air, one of the important questions to answer is what can this do that an episode can’t. Aside from the corny early 90s CGI fly-through of Gotham skyscrapers right at the beginning that doesn’t contribute much except to show “look what we can do with a movie budget!” the answer is that I think this story plays with lore too integral to the Batman mythos to trust to a 30-minute story. It doesn’t just rehash Batman’s origin story, it goes inside the often-elided time when Bruce was still trying to figure out how to be a vigilante and tells us the love of his life we never knew about was there. It dangles the Joker’s life before he was the Joker in front of us. It shows us that Gotham once hosted a World’s Fair. And it does it all with incredible care, so that it feels like they’re sharing secrets instead of polluting an established story.
They also take a lot of time to explore the tragedy of being Bruce Wayne. For the first time here, he really has to wrestle with the conflict between what he feels he owes to his parents and a chance to let himself just be happy, and the weight of that dilemma is keenly felt. Of course, in a more realistic world, Bruce would be better served by getting therapy and realizing that maybe he took a flying leap from his parents getting accidentally shot in a mugging gone wrong to a duty to them to clean up all the crime in the city with only wits, fists, and gadgets, but this is not the world he lives in, and regardless of what he wants, becoming Batman is the destiny he cannot escape. And in this story, he rages against that.
Involving the Joker feels almost obligatory. The Phantasm may have unacceptable methods, but the motives are too sympathetic to be satisfyingly defeated alone, so one of the regular villains has to come in the last act to raise the stakes and be properly thwarted in the end. There’s really only one good reason it had to be the Joker, and one could argue that some of the other rogues could be made to make sense too (isn’t the Penguin a crime boss?), but he’s mostly just the one brought into the game late because he’s Batman’s most iconic antagonist, and this is this version of Batman’s first movie. It can feel about as lazy as making Moriarty the surprise mastermind behind every Sherlock Holmes mystery. A version of this story could probably be wrapped up with a dire fight against a well-prepared mob boss and his goons instead of against one of the Usual Suspects while on the run from the law. But Mark Hamill’s Joker is too charismatically sinister to be too upset about.
While this was shown in theaters, that was a relatively late decision, and it could’ve stood to have more production time to make it ready for cinemas instead of just a surprisingly good direct to video feature. I felt I was watching really good storytelling, but I didn’t quite feel like I was watching a real movie. Whatever it is or isn’t, even by the standards of Batman: TAS, this is masterful.
This was one of the big cultural moments in my early childhood that I was aware of even as it passed me by. Everyone was talking about Free Willy for some reason. I dimly recall it being on in the same room at one point, but I think it was in the way that one dips in and out of a movie someone else is watching while at a family gathering.
There’s a good movie finding its audience, and then there’s a cultural phenomenon. The latter I can understand for a lavish tentpole movie like Titanic, but this doesn’t seem to be that kind of visual-oriented extravaganza. It kind of looks like it has a similar domestic plot to the original, before the franchise fatigue Air Bud, actually, like if you took all the basketball out of that movie and swapped the dog for an orca, you’d come close to this movie. While cetaceans were popular in the 90s, I would’ve thought that more came out of the popularity of this movie than contributed to it. Well, I guess I’m about to find out.
This looked like a bland musical in a setting I wasn’t very interested in until I recently heard it discussed as a unionization success story, which is pretty topical. I also have more understanding of the newspaper landscape of the late 1800s and the media dueling media empires of the day.
It also still looks like a kind of bland musical, but I haven’t looked too closely.
There’s really only one thing I can say about what I know about this movie. It’s pretty clearly meant to be a “Die Hard on an X” type adventure. There’s a single guy accidentally in the wrong place at the right time thwarting bad guys. Like Under Siege. Like Air Force One. Probably like other movies I’ve blogged and can’t remember.
However, it’s also Sylvester Stallone fighting the bad guys single-handedly, so it’s probably also meant to be like Stallone movies likeFirst Blood, or rather, like the Rambo sequels that dropped the main thematic point of the original.
All of that is to say that I don’t know what this movie is, but I’m pretty sure I know exactly what other movies they wanted me to think of by making it.
This was not well-released, not well-received, and perhaps not well made. But it looks fun enough, unless they managed to choke the fun out of it in the poor execution.
Steve Buscemi seems to be intended to be the most normal character in the story, which is a strange concept to me. He’s long been leaning into the eccentric roles his features attract, but I think he might be the straight man here.
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. Amblin Entertainment 1993.
Before watching the movie:
Despite definitely remembering a trailer, I couldn’t say anything more about what this movie is that isn’t on the poster. Cartoon dinosaurs in the modern day. There are a lot of names I recognize in the credits, but I don’t know what to expect other than John Goodman is definitely the lead dinosaur and Jay Leno’s character is probably a minor chomic relief player.
While it was never really a favorite, more of something not disagreeable between other shows I did like, I recall there was a period in my youth when I watched a lot of The Beverly Hillbillies. Boy, those yokels who don’t know how they’re supposed to use egregious amounts of wealth, right? Actually I recall it using both extremes to mock the other. The Clampetts may have been walking stereotypes, but they were also people of simple tastes who highlighted just how absurd the excesses of wealthy Southern California can be. They bought a mansion in a nice neighborhood, but they still lived simply. I recently spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with a massive windfall, and I think it’s smart not to change much about one’s habits simply because smoking cigars wrapped in hundred-dollars bills on a yacht becomes an option.
I don’t know what to expect from a reboot movie made 20 or 30 years later. The show was made in a media landscape that believed in a simpler world than what the 90s accepted. The plots that stick strongly in my mind are the time Jed decided that the “billiard room” was the place to have Thanksgiving dinner because it had the nicest table in the house, and if possible he should serve a “billyard” (a rhino, like the head mounted on the wall in that room) on it, or when their banker turned out to be the last descendent of a family feud inspired by the Hatfields and McCoys, until Granny found out and revealed she was from the other family. When I try to imagine the 90s equivalent, I see a lot of manic slapstick. “From the director of Wayne’s World” being a selling point does not sound promising.
Have I seen this before? There’s something special in my memory about Coneheads, but I can’t quite place it. I’m fairly sure that I had a friend in Kindergarten or first grade who talked about it fondly, but the only concrete recollection I have is that there were a few clips of it in a Paramount promotional montage on a couple of tapes I liked to watch a lot. And more recently, I’ve seen some of the original sketches. Since my memories are so hazy, and there are a few alternative options, I’m going to conclude for now that I haven’t seen it before, and if I did, it was so long ago that nothing really stuck and my view will still be fresh. However, in the interest of transparency, I’m making this decision public.
While not as widely talked about as other Saturday Night Live spinoffs, this seems to have a pretty positive reputation. The concept certainly offers room for a full-fledged plot and lends itself to a higher budget. In fact, it may be so much more of a movie concept than a sketch concept that it becomes hard to remember it got its start on SNL, like Blues Brothers.
Yesterday's Movies 