Films and Feelings

    The fanboy renaissance manages to reach even higher heights with the new "Super Mario Galaxy Movie." The easter eggs and cameos are back with a vengeance, and in much richer resolution than we'd have thought possible even five years ago.     It's for this kind of thing that the movie will be called "wish fulfillment" for video game nerds, but I personally felt fed as an animation enthusiast. To see such caricatured designs playing on such a vivid, textured playground is a rarity. It's only when you see the bricks of a giant, fairy-tale castle splintering and disintegrating that you feel like this world has weight, consequences, and there is something about that which feels strangely validating. And as with the last movie, as with the Mario universe as a whole, the animated world's command over its own landscape lets you swim between all sorts of exotic and eclectic locales and genres at leisure.          Every single cast member...

    There isn't a story on the books that can't somehow trace its genealogy to the works of William Shakespeare. Such is the nature of inspiration and archetype.       But the latest film from anime auteur, Mamoru Hosoda, is almost an adaptation of, rather than a homage to, Shakespeare's Hamlet , carrying over character names and even a few iconic lines.  Yet it's not what Scarlet borrows from Shakespeare that gives the story its weight, but what it adds--and I'm not just talking about the giant thunder dragon in the sky.      The Prince of Denmark in this story is reimagined as Princess Scarlet. This film sees her failing in her quest to avenge her father and being doomed to wander in some sort of desolate afterlife. Her only consolation is the idea that she might find her treacherous uncle somewhere in this wasteland and see her vengeance fulfilled in this world. But her quest sees her crossing paths with someone else, a medic from a ...

So here’s a question: how much do you really know about your favorite actor?  Follow-up question, do you sometimes wish you knew less? It is a truism that the people making the magic onscreen are not necessarily mirror reflections of the heroes they are bringing to life. The players in your favorite romantic drama have cheated on their spouses. Your favorite action hero has enabled abuse. Or, he’s just a loser. And all of us lost at least one favorite to #MeToo.  But just the same, we cannot deny our fascination with those people on the big screen. Film historian, Ty Burr, described in his book, Gods Like Us ,  Gone with the Wind (1939) “The fascination with stars is in large part a desire to unlock the nagging puzzle of identity—who are these people who we know so well and not at all? ... The violence done to Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by the mobs in the public square was on some level a rapacious desire to unclothe them, flay them, burrow to their essence....