I don’t play video games anymore mainly because they interface badly with my addictive and obsessive tendencies, with irl return on the time spent slightly worse than, say, drinking alone… wherein I might in stupefied form at least, idk, realize something. Even so, I’m infected by certain games I’ve played in a way similar to favorite movies, novels, dreams, or trips, “as texts.” Where they differ from e.g. 210 page novels (“the 92-minute feature film of novels”) is in their embedding a subtle physical experience of play as part of their texts, in their taking at least ten times longer to tattoo onto my mind (at least 100 times longer in at least one case), and in the demonic demand for “rereading” I feel they present at least to me.
That said, I feel that Mario (i.e. “the entirety of Mario stuff”) is extremely important. It contains a generationally-significant new pantheon and at least three(!!!!!!) new media urtexts (SMB, SMW, M64). Its world-building is at least as large & lush as its nearest peers in popular fiction (LotR, SW, HP), but somehow without narrative or story being important or figuring in much at all… Mario is largely in the realm of abstraction. The simple presence of the characters, the color & design, the feeling of fun bouncy responsiveness… that’s the whole thing. The shared reading is derived from the characters as projectable/selectable as “myth-forms” (like Looney Tunes) and the individual but commonly-shared interaction with the gameplay’s physical “hand/eye” “UX”. The study(?) of this latter piece has been elevated to (and can be experienced as) worship or ritual magic… like if the tactile experience of reading a book was utterly unique to a given text, and came to supersede the the content of the text itself in importance. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch the incredible “SM64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x A Presses” (2016),” “Super Mario World — Credits Warp in 5:59.6 (First Time Ever on Console)” (2015), “The Greatest Super Mario Bros Speedrun Ever Just Happened” (2022), or “FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)”, all on youtube (and all way more worthy viewing), and try to tell me this is different from Hildegaard von Bingen or Agnes Martin or whatever.
Unnnnnfortunately the Mario movie (2023) doesn’t really capture any of this good stuff. Instead it takes the characters, plops in some story and voices, deploys some “References,” and that’s p much it. I watched it totally alone in a theater in Edina with reclining La-Z-Boy style seats, stone sober, and I already don’t really remember it, except for Peach “wielding” a “halberd”, as if in a “Soulslike” “build,” which I saw as juttingly/interestingly not Mariolike. The voice acting situates these iconic characters in the moment in a way that awkwardly flattens their timelessness. The movie itself flattens the active experience of play to a passive one, but worse than watching some sibling or cousin or roommate at the controls, because even tho it may be fine that you’ll never get a turn, it feels terrible to know it’s impossible for anyone to improve, break, explore, perfect, or otherwise make any of it their own by unforeseen strategies, and then in that transformed/reborn way, yours in a new visionary one. Unfortunately instead, it just is what it is… normal-ass preexisting IP setting boring sail for movie franchise money waters, that I paid to see, but probably should have illegally downloaded three years from now.
High-quality entry in the rave movies category, this one a quasi-autobio of the director’s brother (& co-screenwriter) Sven Love’s “Cheers” night & DJ duo in Paris. Sven is stylized as “Paul,” whose rise the movie tracks from raving teen & budding garage DJ in 1992 thru to an inevitable descent into irrelevance & full-blown adult “regular life” confusion in late 2013. The same actor plays Paul for this 21 year period without visibly aging, and while the cursed Dorian Gray vibes this gives off are apropos, this’s probably more of a lucky function of the production budget than an intentional reference… the actual direct literary refs (Bolaño, Creely) are called out explicitly in scenes near the end.
Definitely has that paint by the numbers Netflix curation feel: their data told them they needed an EDM movie of their own and so by god, they bought one. Six or so not particularly connected characters make their way to and then through a festival, shooting for something of an EDM Dazed and Confused. This proves to be way too ambitious for the skill set of this director (Dazed and Confused‘s form is end-boss level in terms of difficulty), and the movie never finds any real relevance in the characters or much to say about the experience besides “vague friendship is good,” or “music is good” style platitudes. It’s kind of an open question as to whether EDM is going to prove useful in the future to understanding our current times – the movie is pretty up front about its opinion that it’s something you get into before you head off to business school, or while you’re taking a vacation from your high-paying Silicon Valley job. Since EDM is shown as the shadow of what the characters are taking a break from, I hate to say it, but I think those areas are where understanding of our current world will live when looking back. The movie even seems to back this idea up through the one character who’s a rave culture lifer. He’s a bitter crank at war with himself, and utterly miserable in comparison to the college-age kids shown to be consciously dipping in temporarily. Don’t do subculture too seriously kids: it can have long-term detrimental effects. With all this said, I have something of a soft spot for this film, as it contains the line “I was thinking about putting an LFO after the drop” – a delightful bit of nonsense pulled from almost-there electronic music making terminology that’s proven to be a good mind-clearing mantra for me, when making music on my own. 
The year is 2057 and the sun is not doing so hot. An international crew has been dispatched with a mission to fix it and save humanity. Their plan… shoot it with a bomb. The specifics of how exactly this is going to help are pretty loose, though the script by Alex Garland (Dredd, Annihilation, Ex Machina) has enough movie science in it that the idea as-rendered is innocuous enough if you’re willing to go along with it. Even if you aren’t, I’d recommend giving it a go anyway, as this scenario sets the stage for a group of people flying directly at the sun while stakes get higher and margins of error get slimmer the closer they get; a delicious recipe. Having the sun pull them in while the danger rises puts a nice tactile spin on the whole “that which giveth taketh away” vibe.