April Movies Part 3: Suzume & The Super Mario Bros. Movie

If your month hasn't contained enough Japanese, or Japanese-adjacent, animation, then this blog post might help solve that problem. Whether you love anime or love playing Mario Kart, there's something to tickle your fancy at the movie theaters this month!

Suzume: Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, this is a rather gorgeous movie about Suzume, a young girl who meets a stranger and gets entangled in a mysterious quest across Japan. The stranger is named Souta, and it turns out that his family business is as a Closer. There is a worm in a realm underneath Japan, and there are doors scattered around abandoned ruins across the country. If those doors are open, the worm will have a chance to escape and create earthquakes, so Souta's job is to travel to those doors and close them, thereby ensuring Japan is protected. 

Meanwhile Suzume is an orphan who was raised by her aunt after her mother was killed in the 2011 tsunami. We get some flashbacks to the young Suzume, heartbroken after her loss and running around the countryside refusing to believe her mother is dead. Without giving anything away, the movie takes a turn towards the end that is very emotionally moving and brings everything full circle to the trauma this girl faced at a young age. 

Like with any anime, there are also some cute elements; here we have a cat named Daijin, who keeps leading Suzume on a merry chase across Japan to find the open doors. And lest I forget, the reason Suzume is having to close these doors is because Souta gets cursed early in the film, and is turned into...a chair. So yeah, there's a talking chair, and Suzume has a crush on him, because again, this is anime, and age-inappropriate romances are the norm. The romance element felt a bit icky, but the rest of this film is a marvelous adventure with an emotionally resonant payoff. And every frame is a work of art, accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack by the band Radwimps and composer Kazuma Jinnouchi that I kept humming after I had left the theater. I watched a dubbed version where Nichola Sakura voices the main character, and she did a fantastic job, so if you want to revel in the animation without the distraction of subtitles, I would certainly recommend this voice cast. So go forth and be transported by this tale.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie: This movie was surprisingly great. Directed by Aaron Horvath and and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, it's a tight 90 minutes that fully delivers all the nostalgia you want, with lots of jokes and fun animation. My only comment upon leaving the theater was that I have no idea if this movie would make any sense at all to a person who had never played any kind of Mario game. But I, the most casual of gamers, was still thoroughly delighted by all the sly homages to the Mario universe, both visual and acoustic (I still can't get over a scene where Bowser is playing the piano and plays a classic Mario tune). 

The premise is simple - Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are Italian-American plumbers who live in Brooklyn and are struggling to strike out on their own. They discover a mysterious Warp Pipe that sucks them into the Mushroom Kingdom but they get separated. Luigi is captured by Bowser's minions and is imprisoned in his castle, while Mario meets Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), who takes him to Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who has a plan to destroy Bowser and save the Kingdom. It's 2023, so the depiction of Peach is much more feminist, where she is a rousing leader of her people, active and agile and capable of fighting with the best of them. She takes Mario to the Jungle Kingdom to forge an alliance so they can fight Bowser with the Kongs, which is how Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) also becomes a part of this movie. It all fits together beautifully.

This is a fun, breezy film that is colorful, clever, and charming. The voice cast is great, with all of these actors having a fun time, none more so than Jack Black who voices Bowser and recently has been climbing the music charts with his heartsick rendition of Peaches, a song about how much he loves Princess Peach. This movie is like playing any Mario game - there's not a vast amount of substance, but it's certainly addictive and entertaining. There are plenty of jokes and Easter eggs to suit every level of fan. So grab your kart and take a ride down Rainbow Road - wahoo!

April Movies Part 2: Rye Lane & Tetris

Would you rather not leave your house? Well then, streaming services have your cinematic needs covered. Pull up your Hulu or AppleTV+ accounts and settle in for a treat.

Rye Lane: Have you been seeking a sweet, fun, British romcom? Even if you haven’t, you should now, because Rye Lane is a lovely entry into the genre. Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson star as Yas and Dom, two people who meet at an art show under decidedly odd circumstances and then proceed to have one long magical day, Before Sunrise-style, where they walk through London and talk about their lives, their past relationship trauma, and their hopes for the future. What starts out as platonic friendship of course starts to morph into something more but these two are still dealing with a lot of grievances with their exes and may not quite be ready to move on.

Written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, and directed by Raine Allen-Miller, this movie is charming and beautiful, making London glow with promise and making me immediately want to book a trip across the Pond. Oparah and Jonsson have splendid chemistry and they do splendid banter for 90 mins straight, which is truly what we should all demand from every single romcom. And if that wasn’t enough to entice you, there is a brilliant cameo halfway through this movie that gives it the perfect British romcom polish. So head off to Rye Lane for an absolutely delightful day of adventure and romance. 

Tetris: I had no idea what I was going to get with this movie but boy did it deliver. Set in 1988, this is the true story of how Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) ran into someone marketing Tetris at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and decided to buy the licensing rights in Japan for PC, console, and arcade. However, the game had originated in the Soviet Union, created by a man named Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), and the worldwide licensing rights (ex Japan) were sold to a British media mogul in a convoluted fashion that would set the stage for a battle over intellectual property, handheld gaming rights, and an ideological standoff between communism and capitalism as the KGB starts to intervene in the business dealings. That’s right, this movie takes a hell of a turn. 

Written by Noah Pink and directed by Jon S. Baird, this is a twisty, funny, thrill-a-minute movie that keeps you thoroughly entertained for two hours straight. The finale is a very Hollywoodized version of the truth, but Rogers and Pajitnov actually existed, ultimately did found The Tetris Company, and now are producers of this film, so it’s not complete hogwash. It’s a wonderful story of how interconnected we all are in this era of globalization. It's a great tale about rapidly evolving technology and gaming and greedy corporate overlords. And somehow it’s also a spy thriller that involves the Iron Curtain and the KGB and Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time you’re done, you will be bopping along to the amazing score by Lorne Balfe and desperately want to play some Tetris. Mission accomplished.

April Movies Part 1: Dungeons & Dragons, A Thousand and One, Air

There doesn't seem to be a slow season in Hollywood anymore - April has been jam packed with new films coming out at a constant clip and I've been churning through them. Whether you want a blockbuster or an indie, your local theater has plenty to offer this month.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: I am not a D&D person, so I cannot comment on the worthiness of this film from that standpoint. But as a filmgoer, I was plenty entertained. The cast alone is worth it, with Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head, and Hugh Grant all playing a band of thieves who get into trouble and end up turning on each other. Sophia Lillis and Rege-Jean Page eventually round out the cast and bring their own spin to the proceedings. There are jim jams and McGuffins galore, and lots of references to people, places, and things that were way over my head but I'm sure were a delight to D&D afficionados. But at the end of the day, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio) have put together a rollicking adventure movie that has the requisite amount of comedy and plenty of great action sequences.

One part of the film functions as a heist movie, and lord knows I love a heist movie. All the machinations were inventive and fun, and the CGI was mostly well done, though some parts of the film did get a bit too video-gamey. The actors all have great chemistry and camaraderie with each other and it was great to see them bond and fight against magic and treachery and all manner of mischief. This is a fun popcorn film that doesn't overstay its welcome. I do feel like one was enough, but we are bound to get sequels, so we'll see if my enthusiasm for the franchise wanes over the years. But for now, this is a fine start.

A Thousand and One: Nothing pleases me more than when a woman of color gets to write and direct her first feature film. Here we have the brilliant A.V. Rockwell who has created a movie that sticks with you even after you walk out of the theater. As I was watching it, I was perfectly engaged and on board, enjoying the story. I thought it was a fine and interesting film that featured one major twist I certainly didn't see coming. But the more I reflect on it, the more pleased I am that it exists in the world, and the more convinced I am that it deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

Teyana Taylor stars as Inez, a young woman in 1994 New York who has just gotten out of Riker's Prison after doing some time for helping her boyfriend in petty larceny. Her six-year-old son, Terry, is in the foster system, but she still checks up on him when she sees him on the streets and visits him in the hospital when he has an accident and needs to be patched up for a few days. That's when she makes the fateful decision to kidnap him and raise him on her own. And what follows is a tale about a woman who desperately wants to do right by this boy, but is facing all the challenges of poverty and a rapidly gentrifying New York City. 

This movie is a portrait of this family, but also an astonishing portrait of the changing city from 1994 to 2005. It manages to capture so much about this world, feeling both expansive and intimate at the same time. And the dialogue is always crisp and on point, with none of these characters mincing their words. Terry is played by three actors at different stages of his childhood, Aaron Kingsley, Aven Courtney, and Josiah Cross, who all perfectly convey how Terry is a quiet, reserved young man who is clearly still hurting from all the trauma of his early life but also trying to take advantage of new opportunities. This is also such a woman's picture, with so much emphasis placed on the emotional labor as well as very real labor Inez performs every day to take care of her son and her on-again, off-again partner, Lucky (Will Catlett). She is this constant, a force to be reckoned with, and Taylor's performance is riveting from the first scene to the last. This movie and its characters leave you with a bit of an ache. You must make every effort to watch it.

Air: This movie is directed by Ben Affleck but written by first time screenwriter Alex Convery. This distinction matters because when we left the theater, my fiance and his friend and I had to puzzle through our feelings about this film and why it had seemed good but weirdly choppy. What we landed on is that while this movie has an incredible cast who are all putting their best feet forward, they are let down by a script that seems more fascinated with trivia about Nike and basketball than putting together a cohesive storyline.

A true story set in 1984, Matt Damon stars as Sonny Vaccaro, a talent scout for Nike's basketball division who was convinced that Michael Jordan was about to be an explosive talent. He set about convincing everyone at Nike that they needed to spend all their money on signing Jordan to the company and promising him an exclusive sneaker deal. Naturally, the CEO, Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) didn't love this idea, and neither did marketing VPs Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) or Howard White (Chris Tucker). But possessed by his gut feeling, Vaccaro decided to bypass Jordan's agent, David Falk (played with crass excellence by Chris Messina) and directly approach Jordan's parents, namely his powerhouse of a mother, Deloris (Viola Davis). Davis gives a bravura performance and I would be willing to give her a Supporting Actress nomination right away for the fiery strength with which she advocates for her son and ends up changing the entire business model for athletic sponsorships.

A small thing that bothered me throughout the movie was how we would get a few seconds of some iconic 80s song, but it would abruptly stop before we could really get to the main chorus. It was emblematic of this script, where the scenes play like brief sketches that don't fully cohere into one narrative. It feels like the screenwriter learned a lot about these different people and got enamored with the idea of telling us these amazing facts about them, but then sacrificed the whole movie as a result. As we neared the finale, however, scenes were allowed to breathe and the full songs could play out, crescendoing to keep time with the action onscreen. This is still a fun film, and I do recommend you watch it. But the whole time I was watching it, and particularly when Viola Davis came into her own, I couldn't help thinking that it could have been better. 

Even More TV: Shrinking and Daisy Jones & the Six

Let's face it, you can never get enough prestige TV in your life. And now Apple and Amazon have given us two stunning shows that I couldn't get enough of. Let's get into it.

Shrinking: First off, this show has amazing pedigree. The fact that it was created by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein should already tip you off that this show is going to be both funny and bursting with heart. Then the cast boasts Jason Segel, Jessica Williams...and Harrison freakin' Ford. What follows is an incredibly funny show about grief, therapy, friendship, and family. I dutifully tuned in every single week after each cliffhanger, jonesing to find out what happens next, and I'm jealous that newcomers to the show now just get to binge it all in one fell swoop. But at the end, we're all going to be in the same boat, i.e. desperately clamoring for the second season.

The show follows Jimmy (Segel), a man who has been widowed for a year and is not doing a great job of processing his grief or parenting his teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), much to the chagrin of his next-door neighbor, Liz (Christa Miller), an intense but caring woman who is dealing with her own empty nest by caring for Alice while Jimmy is AWOL. To make things even more interesting, Jimmy is a therapist, so while his personal life is a mess, he must still offer support and counselling to his clients. Things start to take a turn when he decides to take an overly involved approach to therapy, getting very invested in his patients' lives and not just restricting his interactions with them to his office. One such patient is Sean (Luke Tennie), a young Afghanistan War veteran who now needs helps dealing with his PTSD and anger issues, and ends up living in Jimmy's house. Which no therapist would advise, but it certainly works for comedy purposes.

Harrison Ford plays Paul, Jimmy's boss and mentor, while Gaby (Jessica Williams) is his colleague who was also his wife's best friend. As such, this is a very close-knit group of colleagues who struggle with the fact that their personal and professional boundaries are all over the place. No therapist will be recommending this show as a how-to guide on running your practice, but this is a beautiful and loving sitcom on having a supportive social structure to lean on in your darkest moments. Watching these characters evolve over the course of these ten episodes and make mistakes (OK, a LOT of mistakes) is a joy. So much happens, most of which you won't even see coming, and that final episode ends in a way that will make you deliriously impatient for the second season. I don't know how they're going to write their way out of that cliffhanger, but I certainly can't wait to see them try. 

Daisy Jones & the Six: I loved the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid so I was certainly intrigued to discover Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber had turned it into a show. And oh what a show it turned out to be. The story starts as an oral history, where a woman is interviewing the members of a fictional 70's rock n' roll band that was massively popular but then died a sudden death. The members of the band haven't spoken publicly about their history, but they are now sharing it all for this documentary, so we will get to see their rise and fall interspersed with talking head footage of them as they reflect on what came to pass.

The stars of the show are Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, playing Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne, the two lead singers of the band who have an intense and chaotic relationship. They are incredible songwriters who can frenetically feed off each other's energy to come up with epic records, but they are both battling their own demons and a tendency towards self-destruction that makes them an explosive combination. Billy's wife, Camila (Camila Marrone), is a patient and nurturing woman, but she is also puzzled by this duo's dynamic, and in the meantime, we have the other members of the band (played deftly by Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse, and Sebastian Chacon) who all harbor their own dreams and ambitions and often find themselves unable to focus on the music because of the maelstrom of personal drama that is always swirling around the band.

Over the course of ten episodes, this show gives us a complete portrait of every band member and slowly ratchets up the tension until the fateful night of their final concert when everything comes to a head and the band simply dissolves into nothingness. The costume and production design is amazing and perfectly captures this moment in American music history. But the main thing I want to talk about is the music. At first, I wasn't wholly sold. Songs would get parceled out in bits and pieces and I found myself more compelled by a joyous rendition of Ooh La La that the band performs during a blackout, than any of the supposedly magical songs Daisy and Billy concoct. But oh man. Once they start to perform these songs on stage, and once we see how Claflin and Keough can change the performance every time depending on what phase of their relationship they're in, I couldn't get enough. These songs are absolute bangers, particularly Look at Us Now and Aurora, which I have not been able to stop humming. It's one thing to act, but to be able to sing like this is astonishing and Claflin and Keough deserve to get a whole heap of kudos as well as a spot on the Billboard charts. So give this show a try. It's truly an audiovisual feast; and when you're done, I highly recommend reading the novel to complete your immersion.