SUPER MARIO BROTHERS: Regurgitation, Riff-Trax-ing, and The Problem With Lampshading Motive (Patreon)

1. Butterscotch

Patton Oswalt once told this funny story about modern screenwriting that’s been burned into my brain for years now. Within the bit, he describes the act of “doing punch up,” which is something that happens in a lot in studio filmmaking. Basically, they hire funny writers to come in for a day to suggest jokes / tighten things up / and move story stuff around all to make it work better. It’s a good gig that tends to at least be a fun day of work for the folks involved. But as soon as it hit the age of computer animated movies, he noted the key and crucial difference was that now they were often brought in at a time where the films are 80% completed. Not only that, but there wasn’t time or money to animate anything new, really. So why are they even there? I’ll go straight to Patton’s description:

“… So they tell us ‘We need you to think up funny jokes that people off screen can yell over the unfunny, uninteresting action, to make it a comedy.” I didn’t know you could make comedies that way! I didn’t know you could take sad boring footage and then just have people yell jokes over it… have a guy off screen yell “I just fell on my bottom into some butterscotch!” And you go, ‘wow someone who I can’t see, nor will I ever see, just fell into some butterscotch, and is talking out loud about it, the way that nobody does.’”

The phrasing he’s using is admittedly strident, but hey, it’s a comedy bit. And more importantly, if you’ve seen a computer animated kids movie in the last fifteen years, you’ll be like “oh god, they do this all the time, don’t they?” Yes, they very much do. But my bringing it up is less worrying about that hyper-specific device and more the way this device speaks to an ongoing style of storytelling. It’s not just the obvious problems of putting the cart before the horse script-wise (especially as animation is its own development labyrinth anyway). I’m talking about something more ethereal. Because this device reflects this way that modern movies are constantly making jokes AT themselves, as they’re happening. Which is part of the reason so many of these off screen yellings use your garden variety insults like “you suck!” or “no one likes you!” It’s like the films themselves always have this weird air of “get a load of these guys, am I right?” And it’s seemingly everywhere. To the point I just wrote a column about the way the MCU likes to constantly make jokes at itself (and why the character-driven humor of the D&D movie felt like a breath of fresh air by comparison). And this all leads to a very simple realization.

Movies are essentially riff-trax-ing themselves.

Yes, in my brain it will always be “Mystery-Science-Theater 3000-ing,” but some of their key players later went onto do Riff-Trax and that’s the easier verb to use, so we’ll go with that. But if you look at what Patton says, “I didn’t know you could take sad boring footage and then just have people yell jokes over it,” you realize that’s EXACTLY what those shows do. So it all just reinforces this idea you can effectively just be yelling *at* your own movie / your subjects with this hand waving attitude of “yeah, yeah we get it” as a weird attempt to ingrain yourself to the audience. And whether purposeful or not, it creates this feeling of knowing cynicism in the viewer…. And it hurts a lot more when it gets put right into the core storytelling itself.

2. Bubblegum

I’ve just realized I have never written about any ILLUMINATION films, but there’s probably a good reason for this, in that I have a fairly banal take. Now, this would be the animation studio responsible for the Despicable Me, Minions, Secret Life of Pets, and the Sing movies. Which are all extremely-profitable, big ass family comedies. And when it comes to the current hellscape of modern cinema, I am happy they exist. Mostly because their success has basically been bouy-ing Universal and their smaller production wings, which has been keeping them afloat in the age of Disney Dominance (and thus been allowing them to make other kinds of movies in turn). I even hope the success of the new Nintendo Cinematic Universe continues the trend in their favor. Yes, my “happiness” is mostly about not letting Disney further turn into a mega-monopoly and the fact that this is something I feel like I have to care about is absolutely horrendous. But hey, we’re in late state capitalism and things are beyond grim.

Anyway! When it comes to films themselves, I’ll admit that I’ve seen about half of them? And the rest I’ve been in and out of a lot of it when they’re on TV? I feel like this is a common enough sentiment from other people I know. Meaning there isn’t any real animosity toward them, either. Especially because there’s an innocent enough streak in Illumination’s work that no one can really get riled up (over-saturation from a kids repeatedly watching does not apply). To compare, Katzenberg famously had Dreamworks make its bones on a certain brand of snarky, pop-culture-referencing stories that dove headlong into winking and eye-rolling. And yes, they also made two great films later in Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon, but we’re talking generalizations, here. And there was this kind of snarky undercurrent that really rubbed me the wrong way. Because it’s the way of looking down at your own sense of artistry, characters, and subjects. By comparison, Illumination’s form of cynicism doesn’t really feel that jaded. Instead, it’s more that they’re happily in the bubble gum business.

Now, I get worried the second I start talking in a way that sounds reductive about ANY studio like this, especially in animation. Because these are productions that require the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds if not thousands of incredibly creative people, who are working in an industry that regularly abuses their efforts. And they are very much trying to put humanity and humor into their creations. But in such a big, complex environment, it’s like trying to steer a skyscraper. Which is why the overall intent and modus operandi of the top down creative and finacial heads matter more than anything. In short, it’s what gives purpose to the greatest of efforts from the collective artists working below them… And it can easily be what makes certain things sometimes feel like they come up short.

So when I say “Illumination is in the bubble gum business” it’s because they have often employ a brand of humor that is quick, kid-friendly, and lowest common-denominator - which is to say a lot of “butterscotch” type jokes. Yet they are also undeniably cute! And at the same time, they often appliy their own brand of the absurd. It’s not quite the Genndy Tartakovsky brand of animation that plays with stylization, nor the reality-breaking clever plays with the form that Duck Amuck and the Looney Toons were famous for. It's more that there’s a constant disinterest in establishing baseline comic reality because it’s always going for the broader joke, regardless it tracks with given behaviors (the minions sort of epitomize this). Effectively, it feels less manic and twisty and more slapdash. And it creates this viewing experience where I’m constantly like “we’re really stretching for that, huh?” and yet every ten minutes there’s also something about those random characterizations that evokes a genuine chuckle from me (in Super Mario Brothers, the angry dog is weirdly the beat that played hardest in the theater). But perhaps the larger problem is that they milk whatever works into the ground. This is how you get a whole ass Minions, but we also see it here the ongoing Lumalee flame bit in this film. So why do they keep milking it? Because people like it and they’ll go as long as it takes to peter out. Which means there’s a kind of economical brutality to all of it. And yes, in one way it’s innocuous, but in another way, the lack of any grounded meaning behind these actions makes it all feel empty.

And the place where it feels most empty is the core of the story.

3. Lampshades

Once again, I will go to a resource to say it better. In this case, TV tropes:

“Lampshade Hanging (or, more informally, "Lampshading") is the writers' trick of dealing with any element of the story that threatens the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief, whether a very implausible plot development, or a particularly blatant use of a trope, by calling attention to it and simply moving on.This assures the audience that the author is aware of the implausible plot development that just happened, and that they aren't trying to slip something past the audience. It also assures the audience that the world of the story is like Real Life: what's implausible for you is just as implausible for these characters, and just as likely to provoke an incredulous response. The creators are using the tactic of self-deprecatingly pointing out their own flaws themselves, thus depriving critics and opponents of their ammunition.”

I feel like Willing Suspension of Disbelief used to be much more of a concern among moviegoers, or at least a concern of the studio heads that funded movies. To think, they spent years not being interested in comic book movies because they were too weird! There’s no way an audience member could accept a Thor standing next to a Captain America,! But I think these fears were ALWAYS a bit of a misconception. Kids in the 50s and 60s could happily accept B-movie and serial logic, which was barely stringing things together. And now, we live in the age of MCU where you have science and magic and multiverses and audiences are fine with it. And there are two things that help us in that acceptance. The first is the way the MCU treats the lampshading with this easy, laid back charm, perhaps best exemplified in Infinity War when Robert Downey Jr says, with perfect line delivery, “Uh, he’s from space? He came here to steal a necklace from a wizard.” It’s as if he can barely believe the words he’s saying, let alone keep track of them, but either way, that’s what’s happening. And that brings us to the second part of our acceptance: the important thing is that it is happening. All the mumbo jumbo doesn’t matter because they’re doing it in the name of “we get to see the thing we like.”

And that understanding has been one of the biggest changes in Hollywood. Where studio executives used to take the IP of something popular and be like “this is nuts, let’s ground it in something real!” And as luck would have it, they would usually end up making something just as insane and weird (a perfect example of this would be, say, 1993’s Super Mario Brothers movie). But in our age of modern IP storytelling, faithfulness reigns. People want to see the thing they like, in the form they already like (cue ugly sonic convo). Fidelity is the act of regurgitation. And if the movie in question happens to have some grace and story aplomb? Cool! But if not, we can still get what we came for. But to the audience’s credit, the thing that seems to be most important in IP adaptation is a certain brand of faithfulness to characterization. Which thankfully speaks to something deeper.

Because, in the end, a story’s success rarely depends on hand waving or lampshading logic of how we get from point A to point B. The thing is, however simple, the character still has to have an emotional drive at the center of them that feels somewhat realistic. That thing is motive. It is the human shape of what we want and how that drives a story all around them. Because without it? It doesn’t matter if a movie has the densest or flimsiest plot imaginable, the thrust of it all just collapses. And in the case of all our modern IP stories, such collapse means that all that’s really left is the regurgitation of the thing you like. And whatever good you can personally absorb from it in turn. And with that understanding we can finally turn our attention to the…

4. Plumbers

It’s weird to think that I’ve been playing Mario games for almost forty years? Even since the wide North American release in 1987 it’s just been a fixture. And for many people my age they define what we THINK OF as video games at their core. Right down to the logic of rules, lives, and objectives, which were all combined into a beautiful miracle of artistry. And the man behind Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, basically became the godfather of video games on the whole. But when he was burned by the aforementioned 1993 movie, Miyamoto became intensely protective of their brand. And as a result, Nintendo got to stay Nintendo for years with complete control of their properties. Sure, the games and systems have gone through these ups and downs and constant state of reinvention, up through the recent mega success of Mario Odyssey and the Switch. But whatever it is about the here and now, Nintendo finally felt comfortable coming back into the fold of narrative media. And perhaps after getting burned, they went with the seemingly safest choice with ILLUMINATION.

As for the end result, I’ll get right to the point: the movie is a barely strung together series of allusions to the game and yet, is innocuous in the same way many of their other ILLUMINATION movies are. Meaning there’s no malice here, nor even something that sticks out as a glaringly bad choice. It’s just all paper thin. To wit, Rotten Tomatoes is hardly an indicator of quality, but instead the barometer of accessibility. And thus sometimes it’s a good analysis tool when trying to understand how a movie is working. Which is the reason a film like this can get a critic score of 57% and an audience score of 96%. Neither group is wrong. We’re just talking about two very different standards when it comes to a small measure of substance. But since it is innocuous, inoffensive, and gives people the thing they want to see, it “works.”

Now, if I were doing my standard “wins and losses” column for the weekly blockbuster, I suppose I could get more into it and discuss the things that probably worked better than I imagined. For instance, the way they handle the Mario accent thing is weirdly functional? Like turning those voices into what they do for the commercial and in real life they just have Brooklyn accents? It’s honestly more deft than I was expecting. And having Charles Martinet’s “Giuseppe” character be the one who gives the okay on the voice is a clever enough way to lampshade it, BUT then letting Martinet also give a slightly more grounded performance as Mario’s Dad works even better. There’s lots of little things like this. Like Luigi being the one who is kidnapped instead of Peach. Or a random character who gets to pop here and there. And mostly I’m interested in every single thing Jack Black is doing as Bowser.

As far as “losses” go, sure, I could point at a few things. There are a few goofy logic questions, like wait, how old are these brothers?! They look fifty, but are seemingly 20? And by sending the bomb into the pipe near the end, did Mario just effectively 9/11 his Brooklyn neighborhood!?!?! But much like the movie, we can handwave that stuff. Much the same way sequences are barely strung together and constantly lampshaded with rushing announcements. And in terms of character treatments, hoo boy am I sad that Princess Peach gets the roughest go in this one. Sure, we can call it progress for a character who was the first to define “the damsel” for video games at large, but everything about the choices here ended up reminding me of the meta text of Jamie Loftus’s “Boss Whom Is Girl” performance piece (it’s a deep cut, but you can guess the intent of it). And as enjoyable as the dark little suicidal Lumaleee flame character is, it does the aforementioned ILLUMINATION thing where gets beat into the ground by the end credits (you could hear the audiences laughter drop by 50% with every appearance). But all of these things are not the actual problem.

Because Super Mario Brothers (2023) has a far more existential one. For if I were to ask you, “what’s the story?” It would be easy to look at the specifics of objectives and be like oh, Mario has to go to the mushroom kingdom and defeat Bowser, yada, yada, yada This we know. But almost every movie has a deeper story within these kinds of events. A story where a character learns something and has changing relationships or offers just a little nugget of SOMETHING meaningful to hold onto. So what is the crux of this film?

The truth is there really isn’t one.

Because you can’t lampshade motive itself. Nor an arc. Sure, the movie is good at aping the kinds of beats that make it seem like it has one. At the big climactic moment Mario is getting beat up by Bowser and the commercial plays again with the slowed, sad music cue so we know this is IMPORTANT BEAT. So he watches the commercial and thus gets the courage to… do the thing he’s always been doing the entire movie? Like, Peach literally defines him by this exact quality earlier in the film so there’s nothing different about literally any of this compared to his other sequence. It’s a perfect example of what I call an “illusion of growth moment,” where it feels like some climactic summation, but there’s no actual change of behavior.

Now, perhaps you’ve noted the one who DOES have a change of behavior is Luigi. Because the movie plays into his whole defining thing where he’s scared all the time, which at first made me excited for some sort of Luigi’s Mansion-esque sequence. But instead he immediately gets brought to Bowser and sits around in a cage for most of the movie. Even the Baby sandbox memory comes at a weird point? Because it doesn’t change anything in his head or behavior. And it isn’t quite a set-up either because his final “I’m gonna help!” beat isn’t dramatized in a way that clearly connects to the memory. We just sort of cut to him helping as a surprise without any kind of emotional trigger for it right before, which is how those big emotional beats actually work. Even when you use a prior set-up, you always have to communicate to the audience in a way where they can instinctively answer “what is it about RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW that motivates the change like never before?” And nothing evokes the Baby memory about the scenario. Heck, this is a rare case where doing the Baby Mario flashback DURING the climax would weirdly work better as a cheap emotional ploy. Because in the end, the whole point is to be effective as possible and that slight change would better draw the comparison.

But the other thing about this beat of our brothers coming together is it makes you realize how much they’re missing the other side of the equation. Because if you play into this Luigi helping moment, suddenly you can make this part of Mario’s arc, too. Namely, you can better emphasize that Mario’s the one who always felt like he HAD to do everything himself / rush into danger / and most of all, is bad at letting other people help him. This not only turns into the kind of braggadocio that Pratt is good at, but it also allows the mildly co-dependent conflict between the brothers to play stronger throughout the film (especially if we could see Luigi TRYING and failing at the scary things instead of just sitting around). And best of all, it gives Mario something to learn by the end, which would make the Luigi helping - and Mario LETTING him help - all the more cathartic. Mario would learn he can’t do it alone. Because in the end, they’re the Mario Brothers. And it would give more meaning to their final mutual butt-kicking.

What’s amazing is how what I’m describing is not really that big a change from anything that’s already in the movie. It mostly just needs these little nips and tucks of emphasis. But a little would go a long way. Because suddenly it would turn things from “a character dynamic” into “a story.” Which in turn takes the fun IP and gives them the semblance of an actual movie with a little beating heart at the center. Along with a simple bit of wisdom that people can actually relate to, especially the scores of kids theoretically seeing the movie with their own siblings. But instead, it’s just the semblance of a movie with one, along with the regurgitation of all that’s left.

And alas, I am no longer a baby bird.

5. Hungry

This actually brings us to one of the meta things I liked best about Super Mario Brothers (2023), which is that it’s a big IP driven blockbuster that’s actually PG and aimed at kids. Even in my early evening screening, it was absolutely packed with kids. And I don’t really see that much these days because we live in the age of the weird PG-13-Ization of all modern four quadrant blockbusters (Granted, I’m not the one going to daytime screenings of Trolls 3 or whatever it is). But I feel like it’s something important. Perhaps selfishly, I want kids to love going to the movies. And I like that the movie wants that, too. And thus, we all got to sit there and go through this 90 minute movie that didn’t wear out its welcome. All of it felt okay, safe, and decent. Which is to be commended.

And yet, I also felt empty. Yes, I know I’m signing up to eat bubble gum, but there’s always some weird part of me that wants to turn every kids movie into a surprise Michelin star feast of enjoyment. To feature the cathartic highs of kids films like The Lego Movie, E.T., My Neighbor Totoro, or Toy Story 2. Not because I think reaching heights like that is possible for every film. But because in trying we can make everything just be a little bit better. A little bit more focused on what it’s saying and how it’s trying to move us. Because in the end, we all want to laugh and enjoy our 90 minutes as much as possible, but that enjoyment includes the little nugget of substance. The very motive that powers it all deep down. So even though I know how much people WANT to see the regurgitation, there’s still this nagging feeling within. It feels so close to featuring a slightly stronger connection. And yet, when it’s not there, it results in the kind of movie where I am left to ask myself “is this all it takes?” Again, I’m not saying this in a way that is meant to undermine the thousands of hours of work done by incredible professionals. I’m saying this because I want something that makes good on those thousands of hours of grueling work.

And makes us feel like we actually ate something.

<3 HULK