About That "Super Mario" Movie

I understand why it took such a long time to put another "Super Mario Bros." movie on the big screen after the disaster that was the live action 1993 version.  However, after seeing the final product, this feels like such a no-brainer.  Everyone who grew up in the '80s and '90s knows the original game, and everyone who's grown up since knows some version of the characters and their universe.  For context, I played the first three games, watched at least one television show based on the game, and even read some of the comics, despite not really counting myself a fan of the franchise.  "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" had plenty for me to get fuzzy nostalgic feelings towards, and didn't feel like a waste of my time, despite being a very mediocre kids' movie.

Boy, is "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" mediocre.  Put together by Illumination Studios, and a bunch of primary creatives from "Teen Titans Go!," all the characters speak and act like they were written by eight year olds, all the character designs are taken directly from the old comics and the video game box art, and the voice actors are a collection of familiar actors who were only cast for name recognition.  Because it's Illumination, there are obvious needle drops everywhere, and a long, drawn-out sequence involving our heroes getting on the wrong side of an ornery dog in the opening act.  It takes far too long for Brooklyn plumber Mario (Chris Pratt) and his brother Luigi (Charlie Day) to go down the wrong pipe and end up in the magical Mushroom Kingdom, which is under threat by the evil Bowser (Jack Black).  Luigi winds up captured by Bowser's minions, so Mario teams up with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to defeat evil and save the day.

If you're here for the nostalgia, there's plenty.  Many of the action scenes are built with the original games' mechanics in mind, including a whole training sequence designed to look like a level of one of the early "Super Mario Bros" NES games, and a big race that is straight out of "Super Mario Kart."  There are Easter Eggs everywhere you look, with many of the games' creatures and design elements included in some way.  The most effective references are the aural ones, which bring back a ton of familiar musical themes and sound effects.  Kudos to composer Brian Tyler for being subtler than I expected, and doing some interesting things with Koji Kondo's familiar Mario themes.   

There's a little updating to the characters  for 2023, but not much.  A more competent Princess Peach never needs rescuing, and is the one who guides Mario along on his journey to becoming a hero.  There's a cute explanation for why Mario and Luigi no longer have broad accents, but they do gain a stereotypical big Italian family.  The only actor who brings much to their character is Jack Black, whose Bowser is now a lovelorn reptile pining after Peach, writing and performing love ballads when he's not plotting evil deeds.  Keegan-Michael Key and Seth Rogen are also clearly trying their best, though they're not important enough to the story to leave much of an impression.  One of the only new characters, and the only really good joke in the film, is the cute little Luma (Juliet Jelenic), a chubby little sprite who is one of Luigi's fellow prisoners, and reveals a disturbingly dark outlook on life.      

I'm probably being too tough on "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."  It was obviously designed for younger kids, maximizing the noise and action, while keeping everything as cuddly and bright as possible.  They got the important things right as far as the characters and the worldbuilding, and the filmmakers are clearly fans of the franchise.  As children's entertainment, this is perfectly acceptable and unobjectionable fare.  However, I can't help wondering what this movie could have been if it were in the hands of a creative team that was able to take some risks and not just rehash the familiar elements from the games.  I don't look forward to the inevitable sequels and spinoffs to come.  

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No Beef With "Beef"

It took me several episodes to get into the new Netflix series "Beef," starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as two Southern California residents, who get into an escalating feud after a road rage incident.  The show is very good - well acted, well written, great production, very entertaining, and plenty of substance - but it has the kind of anxiety-inducing story that I have trouble with.  I can sit through a movie like "Uncut Gems" for two hours without much trouble.  "Beef, " however, is ten hours of watching these two people teetering on the brink of self-destruction, and that's not my idea of a good time.  Because of Wong's involvement, I assumed this would be more of a comedy than it turned out to be.  There are some laughs, but mostly of the cringe and groan variety.   

Part of the issue is that Danny (Cho) and Amy (Ali Wong) are pretty awful people from the outset, before we learn how terrible they actually are.  Danny is a down-on-his-luck contractor, who owes too much money to a grifter cousin named Isaac (David Choe), and supports a shiftless younger brother named Paul (Young Mazino).  Amy is a businesswoman with a young daughter, June (Remy Holt), and a stay-at-home artist husband, George (Joseph Lee).  She's hoping to sell her business to the uber-rich Jordan (Maria Bello), so she can finally work less and spend more time at home.  Despite being on opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, Danny and Amy are both unhappy and full of rage.  The feud gives them an outlet for these feelings, but at a significant cost.       

The first three episodes of "Beef" nearly made me quit, because they were all about setting up why Danny and Amy were so angry, with only minimal time devoted to any actual feuding.  I'm an Asian-American who grew up in So-Cal, and recognized a little too much of my own upbringing here.  Amy sucking up to the suffocatingly crunchy art crowd and Danny's endless hustle for menial jobs immediately brought up uncomfortable memories that I wasn't keen on revisiting.  "Beef," created by Lee Sung Jin, clearly contains biographical elements from his own experiences as an Asian-American immigrant, and I noticed a few details from Steven Yeun and Ali Wong's actual lives too.  So, "Beef" feels like a very personal project for everyone involved.  I'm glad I stuck with the show, because all the setup does pay off, the pace does pick up, and there are some good twists and turns to keep things interesting.  

I wound up appreciating "Beef" more as a character study of two very troubled people than as a feud story.  This is the first mostly dramatic role I've seen Ali Wong play, and she's excellent.  We've seen plenty of stories about dissatisfied women blowing up their seemingly perfect lives, but the specificity here really won me over.  Likewise, Steven Yeun has a lot of experience playing scumbags, but Danny is sympathetic in spite of his many faults.  The quality of the performances goes a long way in helping to keep the story palatable as tensions escalate and the two leads take turns reaching new lows.  "Beef" goes exactly where you think it will, with a crazy finale full of violence and mayhem, but all the buildup makes it feel earned.  And I suspect the best episode is actually the one that takes place in the middle of the season, where everything is going fine for Amy and Danny.  And it drives them both crazy.  

I also want to spread some kudos to the supporting cast, many of them playing characters who aren't quite what they seem to be at first glance - Paul, George, George's mother Fumi (Patti Yasutake), and the nosy neighbor Naomi (Ashley Park).  "Beef" does a good job of efficiently subverting expectations and peeling back everyone's layers to show us different sides of people we think we know.  This is also true of Amy and Danny, who are innately more alike than they are different.  One of the best messages in "Beef" is that Asian-Americans from different backgrounds share more common culture than they think.  Amy is Chinese, Danny and Paul are Korean, and George and Fumi are Japanese, but in the end I doubt any viewer could distinguish which was which.     

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My Favorite Subreddit

Being a media junkie is fairly useless except in very, very specific circumstances.  Fortunately, with the help of an obscure subreddit, I've finally figured out a way to make obsessing over media a tiny bit helpful.  I'm talking about /r/tipofmytongue, the subreddit for people who need help identifying a piece of media they heard or watched.

If you're around any media-related forum for long enough, you'll inevitably run into this kind of request.  What was this song that I heard yesterday that reminds me of another song?  Does anyone have any idea what this movie or TV show I saw two scenes from when I was six might have been?  Who is this actor I'm thinking of, who was always in action movies in the '90s?  I have a couple of these lingering media mysteries myself, and it's always satisfying to finally solve them.  Most recently, I figured out a song I couldn't seem to google the lyrics to was a cover of "Prisencolinensinainciusol," a famous Italian song that sounded like it was in English, but all the words were actually nonsense.  

/r/tipofmytogue is dedicated to solving these little mysteries.  Users submit as many details as they can about what they remember about a book or song or movie or music video or discontinued soda, and the subreddit's resident sleuths try their best to identify it from there.  I stop by every few weeks or so to see if there are any lingering unsolved submissions I can help puzzle out.  I'm especially good with obscure cartoons from the 1990s and early 2000s, though there's not much demand for that these days.  Sometimes I recognize what's being described immediately.  Sometimes a little Googling turns up the right answer.  Sometimes, figuring things out takes more effort.  I once found an old cartoon movie by first identifying a trailer that was included on the same video, finding the American distributor, and then pulling up a list of every cartoon they'd released on home media, in order to point the submitter toward the right one. 

Since the subreddit started keeping track of how many queries were solved by particular participants, I also started keeping track of which titles I'd solved.  My official total is 64 solved queries, including movies, TV shows, miniseries, shorts, books, and an old website that helped you make your own digital snowflakes.  Though most of my solved queries are about cartoons and animation, I've found the titles of all sorts of random media.  The oldest was a children's book from 1929, The Funny Thing.  The most recent was an indie thriller from 2020 that has three different titles.  I've also gotten a couple of my own mysteries solved, including one about an anime series, "Akko's Secret," that I watched dubbed into Chinese in the 80s.  

If I can offer any advice about solving these media mysteries, it's that memory is incredibly unreliable.  It's fascinating how many times I figured out the right answer by completely ignoring details that the poster included.  A scene they're sure was from an anime?  Turned out to be an episode of the live-action series "Red Dwarf."  A recent courtroom drama?  Actually a twenty year-old John Travolta movie.  Memories of multiple movies or shows mashed together is common, and nobody ever seems to remember television channels right.  I'm seriously impressed whenever an offered description turns out to be completely accurate.     

I'm also struck by how much media there is that we don't tend to think about as media - commercials, news reports, industrial and educational videos, television station idents, tie-in computer games, website content, PSAs - all of them capable of getting lodged in our brains for years on end.  It doesn't matter how good or bad a movie or show is to be memorable, and no matter how obscure something is, chances are somebody out there saw it and was affected by it.  More and more requests are being posted for online content, which is even more ephemeral, and the only way to confirm that something exists can be other people's memories of it.

Most of the posted requests never get solved, but many of them do.  Sometimes I like reading posts that other users have worked out, marveling over how some of the vaguest, weirdest hints can lead to the right titles.  I like seeing the connections, however tenuous, between anonymous people trying to solve these strange little mysteries together.  But as much fun as some of the more convoluted mysteries are, I've found the most satisfying ones for me to solve are always the ones where there was really no other way to have found the right answer besides having remembered the media in question. 

It's nice to know that sometimes being a media junkie has its uses.       

   

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Giving the "The Diplomat" Its Due

I'm absolutely delighted with "The Diplomat," a new political dramedy from Debra Cahn, which charts the fallout from a recent attack on a British aircraft carrier by unknown forces.  Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is the new US ambassador to the United Kingdom, a role that she doesn't want and isn't suited for, but US President Rayburn (Michael McKean) won't take no for an answer.  Now she has to juggle relationships with the hawkish UK Prime Minister, Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), his foreign secretary Dennison (David Gyasi), and her new deputy chief, Hayford (Ato Essandoh).  And then there's Kate's husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), a former ambassador and loose cannon, who Kate is frequently at odds with.

On the continuum between "The West Wing" and "VEEP," "The Diplomat" leans closer to "The West Wing."  All of the various players are smart, dedicated, and hyper-competent.  Though the vulgarities are abundant, they're not ridiculous, and there's still a sense of idealism about how governmental agencies are supposed to function.  However, the characters are more neurotic and prone to petty power plays.  Delicate negotiations are constantly threatening to turn into outright farce, and Kate is consistently terrible at the parts of her job that require her to be a public figure.  "The Diplomat" is also willing to dip its toes into genre territory occasionally, with bits of espionage here and there.  The relationships are unapologetically soapy.  In addition to the Wylers' endless ups and downs, Hayford is romantically involved with the UK's CIA station chief, Park (Ali Ahn), forming the show's second tumultuous power couple.  

The main event is really Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, who have exceptionally good chemistry, and are instantly more interesting whenever they're onscreen together.  You root for them to work out the difficulties in their marriage, and figure out how to both get what they want.  At the same time, the friction is so good, and the fights are so entertaining, you kind of want them to stay in conflict.  After her long stint on "The Americans," it's so nice to see Keri Russell get to cut loose and play a woman who is often a hot mess, and who gets to deliver these great rants with impunity.  Rufus Sewell, who has spent an awful lot of time playing boring British villains in the past, gets to sink his teeth into something way more fun here.  Hal is an insufferably charming rascal who just can't seem to behave, and even when he's trying very hard not to get involved, he's always involved.  And they both get to be funny.  The scene where Kate finally loses her temper with Hal is both hysterical and gratifying to see play out.  

I should caution that "The Diplomat" is very dialogue dense, and is not the sort of show that you can only partially pay attention to.  It's also a good idea to have some familiarity with how geopolitics operate - the Wylers are constantly trying to confirm information, track down decisionmakers, and broker deals that will keep multiple governments happy.  To do this, they have to balance the interests of many different individuals, agencies, and administrations.  A big part of this season involves trying to get the UK prime minister to stop threatening to bomb Iran, when the Wylers know that the attack didn't come from Iran, but they got the information from backchannels that they can't disclose.  The elaborate, obtuse manner in which the Wylers have to communicate with Iran and Russia to get to anything resembling the truth is clearly played up for the audience's entertainment, but also feels like a genuine attempt to shed light on the endless complications of diplomatic bureaucracy.  Domestic politics are also a regular concern.  One of Kate's early appearances is cut short because she's in danger of being seen with the wrong politician at the wrong time.  

It's all very familiar if you watch many political thrillers, but more zippy and exciting than these are usually allowed to be.  My only complaint about "The Diplomat" is that it ends on a cliffhanger without resolving anything.  These first eight episodes feel like half of a season, and even with the promise that more are on the way, it's not enough.                 

        

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"Dead Ringers" Goes Easy on Dread

I love David Cornenberg's film "Dead Ringers," which was my earliest introduction to his particular brand of mind-bending body horror.  It seemed like an odd choice for a remake, since so much of its effectiveness is due to Jeremy Irons' amazing double performance as the Mantle twins.  However, the new miniseries version, created by Alice Birch, features an equally formidable lead performer: Rachel Weisz.  She plays the brilliant twin OBGYNs, Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who are on the cutting edge of research in fertility and reproduction, but also deeply codependent and prone to mental instability.  

In order to expand the story to fill a six episode miniseries, there are several new subplots and characters.  A big part of the season is spent with the twins trying to win over a rich investor, Rebecca Parker (Jennifer Ehle), who they hope will fund a new birthing center and laboratory.  We also meet their odd live-in maid Greta (Poppy Liu), their parents (Kevin McNally and Suzanne Bertish), a magazine writer working on a piece about them (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), and several of their patients.  As in the film, Beverly falls in love with one of these patients, an actress named Genevieve (Britne Oldford), and Elliot can't resist getting involved to play matchmaker in the most twisted way possible.  

Here, I will insert warnings for graphic nudity and gore, including very explicit birthing scenes, a miscarriage, and surgical procedures.  It's not Cronenberg, but it's similarly intense body horror, exploring the female anatomy and pregnancy in often uncomfortable detail.  Because the Mantles themselves are women in this version, and Beverly is dealing with infertility, these scenes feel less alien and exploitative, and more connected to the psychological states of the twins.  This also reduces the amount of tension and horror in the miniseries, making it feel like less of a genre piece and more of a character study.  The new "Dead Ringers" is still pretty twisted, but more due to the nature of the Mantles' relationship and less due to the uncanniness of their biology.

Rachel Weiss plays the twins with wholehearted weirdness, and such deftness that I instantly forgot it was the same actress playing both characters the moment I saw them.  The more confident and extroverted twin, Elliott,  is especially memorable - an impulsive hedonist and rule-breaker, who habitually greets Beverly as "Baby Sister."  She instigates a lot of the show's drama, such as in a meeting with Parker where she antagonizes another woman by refusing to stop swearing.  However, she's so utterly devoted to Beverly that it's difficult to tell which sister is really in control, and who really wants what.  There's so much going on under the surface that it can be deeply unnerving just to watch them have simple conversations.  The power dynamics shift drastically back and forth over the course of the miniseries, as the twins' relationship is tested and threatened. 

 

Among the supporting players, Jennifer Ehle is the clear standout as Parker - who coldly and bluntly interrogates the Mantles at every opportunity, and invites them into  her unsettling world of privilege.  I wish I could have seen more of her, as she feels a little underused as a Mephsitophelean figure.  Nearly all of the major characters in this series are women, which puts the familiar expressions of sexuality and power in a very different context.  Rachel Weiss so dominates the proceedings, however, that it often feels like there isn't room for anyone else.  Genevieve, surely named after actress Genevieve Bujold, who played the equivalent love interest in the "Dead Ringers" movie, is much less of a presence than her namesake, and we get almost nothing of her POV.  I liked the reveal of Greta's backstory and ultimate purpose in the story, but it would have been more effective if we'd spent more time with her and built up to it more gradually.     

Sean Durkin directed three of the six episodes, keeping a few famous images from the Cronenberg film, but with very different aesthetics.  Everything here is more grounded, to the point where even the occasional brushes with science fiction feel very plausible.  I missed some of the visual flair, but it wouldn't have suited the new story, which is likewise about very strange but ultimately very human characters.  The show flirts with more extreme material, but in the end I like that the creators treat the Mantles fairly sympathetically, as women who may be monsters, but are fundamentally still women.

     

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And What Didn't Make My Top Ten Films of 2022

As a companion piece to my Top Ten list, every year I write a post to discuss some of the other major films that got a lot of positive attention, in order to give some context to my own choices. I find this exercise helpful when working out how I feel about my list and the year in film as a whole. It's also a lot of fun. Please note that I will not be writing about films listed among my honorable mentions, including "Tár," "The Woman King," and "Women Talking," which I've already written individual posts for anyway. 

So, let's get the big ones out of the way first.  Where's "Aftersun"?  Reactions to this movie seem to be split between viewers who loved it and viewers who didn't get it, and I'm firmly with the viewers who didn't get it.  Maybe I've been on too many uncomfortable vacations being bored in the same way.  I even rewatched the final sequence multiple times, and it just didn't connect emotionally.  The other big title that I couldn't get on board with was Park Chan-Wook's "Decision to Leave."  It was so good to see Tang Wei again, but I think I've been watching too much noir recently, because I just didn't have any interest in this.  I could admire Park's playful filmmaking choices, but the characters just had no appeal.    

The biggest films at the box office this year also got plenty of awards attention, which has been getting rarer and rarer.  While I enjoyed "Top Gun: Maverick," and "Avatar: The Way of Water" as well-engineered spectacle, I couldn't see much worth recommending beyond that.  I think part of the issue was that these movies are both very simple, traditional, rah-rah male power fantasies and rather devoid of depth and humor.  This wasn't a problem with "RRR," the breakout Indian hit that had plenty of substance if you were looking for it.  It's such a bright, charming film that offered a breath of fresh air when it showed that it could do Hollywood style, maximalist filmmaking as well as anything that actually came out of Hollywood.  Three hours of it was just too much for me.   

Other award season contenders include "Elvis" and "Babylon," which did some things very well and some things terribly.  Poor Tom Hanks has hit a new low.  I have mixed feelings on "Triangle of Sadness," though I find it interesting that there's no consensus on which half of the movie is the better one.  I mostly like "All Quiet on the Western Front," just not enough to rank it very highly.  "The Whale" had great performances but was otherwise a mess.  "Living" and "She Said" were perfectly fine, but felt so slight that I'm not surprised that they didn't get much attention outside of the critical community.  

Animated films had a good year with some unusual features like "Marcel the Shell With Shoes On" and Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio."  They're both very specific films that I admire a lot but don't think I'm really the audience for.  I found the great reception for "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" mystifying though.  I think part of the issue is that I watched it as a parent, who was more worried about how my kids were handling the rougher "Shrek" style humor, than Puss in Boots' existential crisis.  I'm happy that Dreamworks Animation scored a win though.  

Finally, I really wish I could find a way to connect with Kogonada's "After Yang," which is the kind of thoughtful science-fiction that I usually love.  I suspect that the trouble is that the main character is the one played by Colin Farrell, and not Yang himself.  

Films that just missed the honorable mentions include "Hustle," "Do Revenge," "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Vengeance," "The Menu," "Comedy Punks,"  and "Ennio."  And I was sorely tempted to add "Clerks III" for being so much better than I expected.  

And that's my 2022 in film.  

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My Top Ten Films of 2022

What a strange and interesting year in film.  It feels like we've turned a new leaf in some ways, coming out of the pandemic and finding the distribution landscape slowly adjusting to a new normal.  I found an awful lot of my favorites on streaming services this year, often without much press or awards attention at all.  Then again, there were more movies than ever, and it was difficult to stay caught up.

My criteria for eligibility require that a film must have been released in its own home country during 2022, so film festivals and other special screenings don't count. Picks are unranked and listed in no particular order, and previously posted reviews are linked where available. The "Plus One" spot is reserved for the best film of the previous year that I didn't manage to see in time for the last list.

Banshees Of Inisherin - I find Martin McDonagh's work very hit-or-miss, and it's his most Irish projects that tend to come off the best.  So I'm not surprised that a film set in a remote Irish island community, with characters that I could barely understand, turned out to be my favorite of his films to date.  It's nice to see that he's mellowed on the violence, though it's still there, punctuating some particularly dark humor.  Also, I've buried the hatchet with Colin Farrell at last, who is utterly perfect here.   

 

Good Luck to You Leo Grande - I understand the concerns about the portrayal of sex work in this film, with Leo never really being allowed to be a real person.  However, I love Emma Thompson's performance, and the film's exploration of how difficult it can be to navigate your own sexuality, even when you're straight, privileged, and well educated.  It feels more daring than it actually is, and incredibly intimate.  Frills are few, but sometimes all you need is two great actors and a hotel room.

Everything Everywhere All at Once - While I wouldn't have picked this for Best Picture, it's so heartening to see the stodgy Academy embrace a film this wild and silly and experimental.  I admit that I've been influenced by the awards season narratives around the film, cheering on Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh finally getting the leading roles they've always deserved.  However, my enthusiasm is tempered a bit by the overlong second half, and that somehow I still feel that the Daniels are capable of better.  

Athena - This is a very flawed film with a poor ending, muddled story, and not much by way of characters.  The filmmaking, however, is awe-inspiring.  That incredible opening shot of the riot at the police station turning into a chase sequence, and the big reveal of the Athena housing project puts every big budget action film of the past few years to shame.  What the film lacks in polish, it makes up for in passion, intensity, and scope.  Director Romain Gavras will be one to watch going forward.  

Dinner in America - I love a film that can get me to change my attitude toward subject matter I'd previously written off.  "Dinner in America" looks like so many other indie films about disaffected youth in suburbia dreaming about joining bands.  However, what Adam Carter Rehmeier does is to remind us of what the punks were rebelling against, and make a strong case for music being a transformative force.  Watching Emily Skeggs' Beth come out of her shell was one of the most thrilling things I saw all year.

The Fabelmans - I resisted for as long as I could, but there are simply too many scenes in this film that I can't stop thinking about - the confrontation with the bully, the announcement of the divorce, and that ending - the closest Spielberg has ever come to breaking the fourth wall.  Best of all, I like that ultimately, this may be a trip down memory lane, but Spielberg's attitude is that being a filmmaker comes with serious  responsibilities, and while the movies have their magic, they have their dark side too.  

Armageddon Time - I don't know why this is the James Gray film that I finally connected with.  Maybe it's because it feels like a dark echo of "The Fabelmans," and is so mean to its young protagonist - a stand-in for Gray himself.  Maybe it's because this is simultaneously a story about white guilt and being part of an immigrant group trying to assimilate in America.  Maybe it's because it's about growing up in the '80s and having no nostalgia for the time period.  Maybe I just loved the cast, especially Jeremy Strong.

Close - Another story about boys, the betrayal of friendship, and the loss of innocence.  This one comes from Belgium and filmmaker Lukas Dhont, who shows us the idyllic world and interior lives of a pair of thirteen year-olds.  Despite the heavy subject matter, this is a very gentle film that doesn't place blame or try to give us answers.  Instead, its concern is with the emotions felt in the moment - the way that a tragedy plays out and takes its toll.  It's a beautiful take on some devastating material.

The Quiet Girl - A rare Irish language film, about a neglected foster child who comes into the lives of an older couple.  I keep wanting to compare this to "Close," because filmmaker Colm Bairead is so good at getting into the head of his young heroine and showing us the world from her intensely private point of view.  But instead of depicting a relationship falling apart, this story is about relationships and family ties being formed.  It's such a small film, but one that's able to stir big emotions.   

Catherine Called Birdy - Finally, Bella Ramsay may have gotten much more attention for "The Last of Us," but her best performance so far may be as the title character in this delightful medieval coming-of-age-comedy.  Written and directed by Lena Dunham, the film follows Birdy through the absurdities of becoming a woman in the 13th century.  I suspect this is a film that could not have been made with such frankness before 2022, and it's incredibly timely and vital for its young audience.

Honorable Mentions  

Argentina 1985
Bones and All
Glass Onion
Matilda the Musical
No Bears
Nope
Tár
Utama
The Woman King
Women Talking

Plus One

Ascension

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"The Power" Builds Up Some Charge

Teenage girls around the globe start being able to generate electrical shocks, called explosive outburst disorder or EOD, a power that upends the power dynamic between the sexes.  We're told via narration that this will ultimately lead to a revolution, but "The Power" starts at the beginning, showing us how several different girls and women get EOD, and how it changes their lives.  Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz) is the daughter of a British gangster, Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan), and wants a place in his crime family.  Tatiana (Zrinka Cvitesic) is the miserable wife of an Eastern European tyrant.  Jos (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of Seattle's ambitious mayor, Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Colette) and a doctor, Rob Lopez (John Leguizamo). Eve (Halle Bush) is an abused foster child who talks to a voice she thinks is God, and eventually becomes a religious figure.   Finally there's Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), a male Nigerian reporter who gets the opportunity to travel around the globe and report on how EOD is causing social change.    

"The Power" wants to talk about female empowerment and gender-related issues through an allegorical lens.  When the show is at its best, it does a great job of highlighting areas where women have traditionally lacked power by showing what happens when they gain it.  In some cases the effect is very dramatic, such as the episode focusing on an uprising in Saudi Arabia.  Jos, Roxy, and Eve learn more about their powers very gradually, but the moments of discovery are often violent and dangerous.  I appreciate that everyone in the show has the potential to be a monster, no matter how justified they are in using force, or how good their intentions.  We spend the most time with the Cleary-Lopez family, which is dysfunctional to begin with, and Jos getting EOD just makes it worse.  By the end of the season, Margot finds herself up against a rival politician, Daniel Dandon (Josh Charles), who wants to suppress any use of EOD, while her teenage son Matt (Gerrison Machado) falls under the influence of hate-spewing men's rights activists.  And I'm not sure I should be rooting for Margot.  

The first half of "The Power" is much stronger than the second, when the show is setting up the rules of the world and how EOD works.  There's a scientific mystery angle that's a lot of fun before it shifts to the messy business of charting a path toward revolution.  The writing is occasionally too heavy-handed, especially when it comes to Margot trying to justify her political aspirations, and Jos and Matt opening a new front in the American culture wars.  However, the Cleary-Lopez clan are well positioned to show us how the government responds to EOD - first denying its existence, then using strong-arm tactics, then surreptitiously looking for ways to eradicate it.  I prefer the smaller, more character based storylines though.  Roxy and Eve's stories are much more personal, and equally as compelling as the larger scale conflicts.  This is one of the few shows I've found with such disparate storylines, where I could watch a full series based on each one individually.  This makes it all the more exciting when some of the girls finally start to cross paths in the final episodes.

The acting talent is strong across the board, but I want to single out Ria Zmitrowicz and Halle Bush, who are relative newcomers and have no trouble carrying their parts of the show.  Bush is especially good at making all the material involving spiritualism come off as stirring instead of silly.  John Leguizamo and Toheeb Jimoh also deserve their kudos for shouldering the male POVs, and keeping the show from being too one-sided.  Jimoh's Tunde is especially vital as someone with great hopes for what EOD could do to make the world better, and ends up severely disillusioned.   

In the end, I wish that this season of "The Power" had come to a more definite conclusion, since we leave many of the characters on cliffhangers, and I don't think the show is doing well enough to be renewed.  The creators spent all season setting up characters and conflicts, and in some cases they're still a long way from paying off.  "The Power" definitely has its problems, but as it stands, I'd definitely tune in for more.    

      

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"Swarm" and "The Swarm"

Don't you love it when two completely different shows are released almost at the same time, with close to the same title?

Amazon's "Swarm" is the brainchild of Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, and occasionally feels like a spinoff of "Atlanta."  It has the same mix of psychological thriller, dark satire, and existential dread found in some of their more adventurous episodes.  Our protagonist is a troubled young woman named Dre (Dominique Fishback) whose one passion is being a fan of a pop artist named Ni'jah (Nirine S. Brown).  After the death of her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), who the online rumor mill suspect may have killed herself over the new Ni'jah album, Dre chooses violence and embraces her terrifying dark side.

Each episode starts with a spin on the famous "Fargo" disclaimer, cautioning viewers that "Swarm" is based on real events, and any similarities to the real people involved are intentional.  Ni'Jah is clearly modeled on an iconic singer with a notoriously fervent fanbase, and many of the events we see in "Swarm" are taken from real life - or at least the rumors of what might have happened in real life.  The show probably works better if you're familiar with the drama in question, though it was fun for me to go back after watching "Swarm," and dig into the real world influences and connections.  

"Swarm" follows Dre through several years and several stages of her life, and feels like an anthology at times.  Even if you assume that Dre is an unreliable narrator, the way things unfold is too outlandish to be taken at face value, so I don't think it really works as a thriller.  However, the commentary is sharp and there are some good laughs to be had.  Also, Dominique Fishback's performance is excellent throughout.  If "Swarm" gets anything right, it's the portrayal of Dre's sad existence as an obsessed superfan, constantly attached to her phone, and using her love of Ni'Jah to compensate for other parts of her life.  The show is tragic, horrific, and sometimes a deeply uncomfortable watch.  And yet, it's so well made that I marathoned the whole thing in two sittings.     

Now, for something completely different.  "The Swarm" is an ambitious German science-fiction series that is mostly English language, featuring an international cast playing scientists from around the world.  The show is about a series of crises involving marine life, including suddenly aggressive whales, plague-spreading crabs, and boat-destroying bivalves.  A pattern emerges, pointing to a possible intelligence in the deep sea that is orchestrating these disasters as attacks on coastal populations.  Like many other science fiction series this year, the changes are hypothesized to have been triggered by climate change.  

What I like about "The Swarm," which will no doubt bore or frustrate other viewers, is that in spite of the wild premise, the show spends the majority of its time foregrounding scientists and their daily struggles.  The bizarre attacks take place in the first ten minutes or last ten minutes of each episode, and the rest of the time is devoted to checking in on various doctors and professors and researchers who are the only ones with any inkling of what might really be going on.  They discuss science, struggle to cut through bureaucratic red tape, and end up in more battles over funding and organizational politics than with any supernatural activity.  This lends a nice sense of realism to the events of the first few episodes, until everything goes off the rails into supernatural chaos for the finale. It's nice to see this kind of procedural mystery, where all the characters are fairly ordinary people, cast with lots of actors I didn't recognize, with the exception of Cecile de France and Sharon Duncan-Brewster.

  

The disaster sequences are very well executed and look very expensive, which should draw in some genre fans.  However, I suspect that the show will move too slowly for most viewers.  We learn plenty about the personal lives of characters like biologist Dr. Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim), who is struggling with whether or not to consult for a mining company, and a First Nations cetologist named Leon Anawak (Joshua Odick) with a rough past, but none of their stories really impact the larger plot and aren't very compelling in and of themselves.  I appreciate the more cerebral approach to the material, but it often feels like it's working at odds with the wild premise, and the talented ensemble seems to ever have enough screen time to really make a lasting impression.  "The Swarm" is an interesting series, but ultimately a dysfunctional one, and I doubt we'll see it continue past its first season.    

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"The Last of Us" Makes the Leap

I'm not the likely audience for the post-apocalyptic HBO series, "The Last of Us."  I'm extremely wary these days of post-apocalyptic horror media, and only made it through the first season of "The Walking Dead" before calling it quits.  "The Last of Us" is based on a highly regarded 2013 video game, with a fervent fanbase.  Famously, much of the game was motion-captured and voice-acted by professional actors, many of them now returning to cameo or play different roles in the new series.  Video and computer games have been notoriously difficult to translate to screen, with titles like "Assassin's Creed" and "Uncharted" among the latest failed attempts.  "The Last of Us" series, however, succeeds by being a very faithful adaptation of very strong material.     

"The Last of Us" is zombie media, though the culprit is technically a cordyceps fungus that evolves to be able to infect humans, take over their brains, and turn them into mindless, undead extensions of itself.  The first episode follows our main character Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the chaos of the initial outbreak, and then twenty years later, where he's eking out a sad existence as a smuggler with Tess (Anna Torv), his partner in crime.  The government has turned fascist and is constantly fighting a rebel organization, the Fireflies.  Joel and Tess work out of a quarantined zone in Boston, where they encounter a Firefly leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), who needs them to help transport a 14 year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsay) out of danger.  Ellie is immune to the cordyceps and may be the key to a cure.

As with all stories of this type, "The Last of Us" is less about the monsters and more about how humans behave in these conditions.  The show was created by Neil Druckmann, the original writer of "The Last of Us" game, and Craig Mazin who created "Chernobyl," and they do a good job of expanding on the game's story.   With nine episodes to fill, the show has time for extended flashbacks and side stories to show us how others are surviving in this dystopia.  The episode that has attracted the most attention features a couple (Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman) who ironically find a better life together after civilization falls apart than they had when everything was still intact.  There are also the typical run-ins with cult leaders, scavengers, and different types of communities that have formed in the twenty years since the cordyceps took over.  

Despite a fourteen year-old being one of the main characters, strong content warnings are in effect.  There's plenty of violence, including the non-graphic execution of a child in the premiere, and Ellie curses like a sailor.  This is a very dark universe, where the surviving humans are regularly committing worse atrocities than the zombies, including some of our heroes.  Major deaths are not only possible, but pretty much a given, with nearly every episode ending in someone's demise.  One of the major themes is how the heartwarming father-daughter bond that develops between Joel and Ellie inspires Joel to do some truly heinous things out of love. The visceral frights here have nothing on the existential horror of watching people's humanity erode throughout the show.    

   

Because it's HBO, the production quality is excellent.  Fans of the game will enjoy seeing some favorite sequences recreated, and the cordyceps monsters brought to horrifically tactile, fungalicious life.  However, the real upgrade is the caliber of the acting talent.  Pedro Pascal has felt a little overexposed lately, but he's making an excellent case for being our go-to everyman as Joel.  And Bella Ramsay is the exact right combination of annoying kid and burgeoning badass.  The supporting cast is also wildly overqualified, with great work from Torv, Offerman, Murray, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Shepherd, and many more.       

I put off watching the show for a while, for a myriad of reasons, but once the good notices started rolling in, I knew I'd see it eventually.  "The Last of Us" is familiar territory, and the kind of series that could have been done very poorly.  However, I knew that with the right talent and the right approach, it was also a show that had the potential to be the first great game adaptation.  And I think the jury's still out on that, but it's certainly one of the best ones to date.  Here's hoping season two can live up to what we've seen so far.  

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A "Shazam!" Sequel Autopsy

Minor spoilers ahead.

What happened to this movie?  The first "Shazam!" was one of the more memorable DCEU superhero outings, because it was one of the few that was aimed squarely at kids, and offered a lot of humor, heart, and poignancy to go with its CGI-heavy punch-em-ups.  Billy Batson, played by Asher Angel, had some genuinely interesting emotional territory to explore as a Philadelphia foster kid struggling to accept the love of a new family.  Now it's four years later, though apparently only two have passed in universe, and the "Shazam!" crew is ready for a new outing.  And it's a mess.

Clearly there was a lot going on behind the scenes of "Shazam! Fury of the Gods."  The movie actually has a lot of good things in it - a lot of the humor works, some of the ideas are fun, and foster parents Rosa and Victor (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews) are the secret MVPs of these films.  It's good to see more of the adult versions of the kid superheroes, with Adam Brody and Meagan Good making an especially good impression.  However, the whole movie is built around two characters, and really just two actors - the adult Billy played by Zachary Levi, and Billy's best friend Freddy, played by Dylan Jack Grazer.  These two get the lion's share of the screen time in this movie, with very mixed results.  

Levi, once again, is not on the same wavelength as Asher Angel at all.  Billy is supposed to be seventeen, and Levi is playing him like a much younger, brattier kid in the body of an adult.  And having so much more screen time makes him come across as a far more obnoxious, blustering dope.  Asher has maybe five brief scenes and barely gets to do anything.  Instead, the cute teenage romance subplot goes to Freddy, who falls for the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler).  Grazer and Brody are more in sync, and pull off the body switching more seamlessly than Angel and Levi, so it makes sense why they get featured more this time out.  Grazer is clearly the best actor among the kids, and the movie ends up heaping a lot on his shoulders.  However, this makes the story feel so unbalanced, that I suspected they were setting up Freddy to take over the franchise.  Wishful thinking, maybe.

Remember the after-credits sequence of the first "Shazam" setting up a new bug villain?  Well, he's in the after-credits sequence of this movie too, setting up an appearance in another sequel that probably will never happen.  The main villains here are a couple of Greek goddesses, the daughters of Atlas, who want the Shazam powers.  Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) steal the magic staff and menace the wizard (Djimon Honsou) into giving them information about Shazam.  How they got Helen Mirren to agree to be in this movie is a mystery, as she's utterly wasted.  Ditto Lucy Liu, but that's sadly nothing new.

 

A lot of these creative decisions, including several cameos, were reportedly due to Dwayne Johnson throwing his weight around behind the scenes.  His character, Black Adam, was supposed to be a "Shazam!" villain, but he wanted nothing to do with the "Shazam!" movies for reasons that are a mystery.  Of course, this doesn't explain why there wasn't enough time with the kids as kids, Billy's character arc was very minimal, or why there's a shameless deus ex machina ending (literally!) that made me groan.  I still think that Shazam is fun as a concept and character, but being part of the DCEU has been detrimental, and this is an installment that really didn't need to exist.

   

Still, there are some good action scenes and some good laughs to be found amidst the wreckage of an over-compromised script.  This often feels more kid-friendly than the previous Shazam movie, though there are still a few weirdly dark moments.  "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" should be fine for your basic superhero needs, but it's not remotely as good as the first, and it's a shame to see so much talent and so much potential go to waste.  This is one of the last proper DCEU movies before James Gunn takes over, and it's the fitting equivalent of a crash landing.  

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My Favorite Penny Marshall Movie

Penny Marshall is perhaps still best known as a sitcom actress, but her contributions to cinema have had far more impact over the years.  She directed mostly gentle feel-good comedies and heartfelt dramas, but through them launched several major stars to fame, including Tom Hanks with "Big" and Whoopi Goldberg with "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  She made the kind of midbudget, star vehicle comedies that haven't gotten much traction at the box office lately, and I've been feeling nostalgic for them.  However, her best film was a medical drama, "Awakenings," which represented a rare confluence of several talented players.

I saw "Awakenings" for the first time when I was very young and didn't recognize most of the actors.  It didn't strike me as odd that Robin Williams was in a serious role or that Robert DeNiro was playing a very sweet man who wouldn't hurt a fly.  All I knew was that both performances were wonderful, and the script, the second screen credit of Steven Zaillian, was very moving and maybe even profound.  The film is a lovely mix of comedy and drama, and presents a very humanist, life-affirming story about the wonder of human existence.  "Awakenings" has superficial similarities to much darker narratives like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Flowers for Algernon," but keeps its attitude positive without ever coming across as too maudlin or melodramatic.          

     

It helps that the film's visuals are so strong.  Marshall never got much attention as a visual stylist, keeping her filmmaking very simple to let the talent of her actors shine.  However, she had a knack for orchestrating some iconic visuals, like the FAO Schwartz piano scene in "Big" and Whoopi Goldberg stuck in that telephone booth in "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  Her cinematographer on "Awakenings," and for many of her subsequent films, was the celebrated Miroslav Ondricek, who shot many of Milos Forman's best films.  Early on, there's a sequence where Williams as Dr. Sayers demonstrates how a seemingly catatonic patient still has reflex responses by having them catch a baseball.  His theories are dismissed by the other doctors, but Sayers will not give up.  Soon baseballs and tennis balls are being lobbed everywhere, becoming the film's visual metaphor for Sayers' determination.  Patients are wheeled down the halls with them clutched in their frozen hands.  After seeing "Awakenings," I couldn't remember the title, the actors, or the name of the disease they were trying to cure, but I always remembered the tennis balls.    

"Awakenings" received plenty of acclaim when it was released, and the lion's share went to Robert DeNiro for his work as Leonard Lowe, a man who contracted encephalitis lethargica as a boy, and had been in a catatonic state for thirty years.  His awakening to a new reality as an adult, and his transformation from a voiceless vegetable to vibrant personality, are the impetus for a voyage of discovery.  Leonard is one of DeNiro's most charming and lovable characters, initially a boy who has suddenly found himself in a man's body, but who grows up quickly, falls in love, and eventually becomes a tragic figure.  Robin Williams' Dr. Sayers takes a backseat as the film goes on, but he's plenty compelling in his clashes with the medical establishment, and finding his own personal victories.  I like him far more here than in most of his other dramatic roles.    

It doesn't surprise me at all that Marshall eventually stopped making movies, and spent the last years of her career directing television shows like "United States of Tara."  The slower, character-based films she was best known for have largely gone out of fashion.  I think you could still make a film like "Awakenings" today, but it's a far less likely project than it would have been in 1990.  This is an adult drama that takes a more thoughtful and uplifting approach to its medical mystery subject matter than most, and is difficult to categorize.  It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not tragic enough to be a tearjerker, and far too complicated to be a feel-good film.  However, it is a film that I still think about after thirty years, and continue to hold in very high regard.  

What I've Seen - Penny Marshall

Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986)

Big (1988)

Awakenings (1990)

A League of Their Own (1992)

Renaissance Man (1994)

The Preacher's Wife (1996)

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"Creed" and "Magic Mike," Round Three

I never watched all of the "Rocky" movies, so I'm not sure where they started to go off the rails.  "Creed," however, is still going strong with its third entry, which was directed by Michael B. Jordan, and introduces a formidable new opponent in Damian "Diamond Dame" Anderson, played by Jonathan Majors.  Donnie and Dame share some history and got in trouble together in the past.  This landed Dame in prison for many years, and has left him with a serious grudge against his former friend.  Donnie retires from boxing at the beginning of the film, and is now helping to train and promote upcoming boxers like Felix Chavez (Jose Benavidez Jr.), and spending more time with his family, including young daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent).  However, when his attempts to help Dame go awry, Donnie may have to step back into the ring.  

It's been eight years since the first "Creed," and it's been thoroughly satisfying watching Donnie move through different stages of his life and relationships.  Sylvester Stallone sits out this installment, allowing Phylicia Rashad, as Donnie's mother, to be his major mentor figure here.  Despite his personal crisis in this film, there's been a lot of growth since we saw him in 2018's "Creed II."  It makes sense that he's moved into a different role, running a training academy and gym with Wood Harris's Little Duke.  And of course he's fluent in ASL with his daughter and Bianca.  And what the film gets so right is that it sets up a great troubled antagonist in Diamond Dame.  "Creed III" is a star vehicle for Jonathan Majors more than it is for Michael B. Jordan.  Majors' physical presence is so charismatic, and his performance is so well calibrated, it's impossible to keep your eyes off him.  The film works because its combatants are well matched and they play off of each other perfectly onscreen.

"Creed III," frankly, has a bare bones story that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, but its emotional arcs are rock solid.  It's good to be in this universe with these characters and all their decades of history again.  The filmmaking is very strong, with the boxing and training sequences among the best in the entire franchise.  I like the occasional stylization, like the use of speed ramping and abstracted visuals.  Jordan is a professed anime fan, and I was expecting something far more exaggerated, but the big flourishes are rare, and the action is mostly kept pretty grounded.  I wasn't expecting much at the outset, but this is a thoroughly satisfying film on every level, and I hope Michael B. Jordan gets to direct again soon.  

Now on to "Magic Mike's Last Dance." Despite her prominence in the ad campaign, it didn't really sink in for me that Salma Hayek Pinault was the female lead of this film.  I thought her role would be closer to Jada Pinkett Smith's emcee in "Magic Mike XXL."  Instead,  Hayek Pinault is firmly the second lead of "Last Dance."  She plays Maxandra Mendoza, a wealthy socialite going through a divorce, who happens across Mike Lane, working as a bartender at a fundraiser.  One thing leads to another, and she pays him for an intimate lap dance that leads to more.  The next thing Mike knows, she's flying him to London for a secret job, which turns out to be helping her transform a stuffy play at the theater she owns into an erotic male burlesque extravaganza.   

The love story is pretty flimsy, but it stays mostly adjacent to the old "putting on a show" formula and some snazzy dance sequences.  None of the new dancers are really characters, but they display enough impressive moves to be a nice distraction.  None of Mike's fellow performers from the previous "Magic Mike" movies appear either, except in a Zoom call group cameo, which is a shame.  Instead, we have Max's precocious teen daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) and chauffeur Victor (Ayub Khan Din) keeping an eye on the progress of the show's development and Max and Mike's romance, and occasionally putting in their two cents.  Zadie's incongruously posh VO narration of the events is downright awful - one of the more perplexing choices in the film.

"Magic Mike's Last Dance" was originally supposed to be an HBO Max Original, but was one of several recent streaming projects that was given a theatrical run.  I don't think they should have bothered with this one, because everything about the film feels small and overly familiar.  It has some fine spectacle, and Tatum is able to summon up more charm than you might think, but there's nothing remotely on the level of Joe Manganiello's epic gas station number from "Magic Mike XXL."  And as much as I love Salma, I think she's been in too many inane comedies lately, because she's pitched way, way too broad for this kind of movie.  I have to respect Steven Soderbergh for sticking with this series for so long, but please let the title be accurate, and let this really be "Magic Mike's Last Dance."  

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"Tetris" and "Pinball"

There was a previous attempt to turn the beloved video game "Tetris" into a movie, roughly a decade ago.  It was supposed to be a science fiction adventure that didn't sound like it had anything to do with the actual game.  The second attempt to turn "Tetris" into a movie takes an entirely different approach, presenting a highly exaggerated version of the fight among several companies and individuals to license Tetris from its Soviet creators in the late 1980s.  Our main character, and the eventual winner, is businessman Henk Rogers (Taron Edgerton), who runs a small Japanese game company with his lovely wife Akemi (Ayane Nagabuchi).  His competitors are the billionaire Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), and shady licensor Robert Stein (Toby Jones).  Eventually all of them end up in the USSR together, trying to win the lucrative deal for rights.

Significant liberties are taken with actual history, as Rogers has to contend with a comically corrupt official named Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov), and eventually everything builds to a thrilling escape sequence and car chase.  However, the messiness of the business dealings and the culture clash between the Western businessmen and the Communist system feels fairly plausible and is a lot of fun to see play out.  Rogers befriends the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), and Pajitnov's plight gives the story more crucial stakes beyond the financial ones.  The portrayal of the U.S.S.R. in its decline is fairly cartoonish, but the whole story takes place during the '80s, and the Soviets were our go-to movie villains in that era, so it also feels oddly appropriate.  And it goes with the 8 bit pixel art for the film's chapter breaks, and a soundtrack full of '80s standards.  Reorchestrated versions of the Tetris theme also feature constantly, to get your nostalgia going.

I appreciate the filmmakers including some of the nerdier aspects of the story and video game history.  The unveiling of the prototype of Nintendo's Gameboy is hilariously reverent.  However, "Tetris" should still be plenty accessible for non-fans, as it's far more of a farcical biopic and stranger-than-fiction slice of history than the usual video game themed film.  I thought it was a fun watch, and Toby Jones stole the show the way he always does, but all in all pretty middling.  There was a lot more they could have done to make the story interesting beyond awkwardly adding some 8-bit graphics to the unnecessary car chase.   

     

And that brings us to "Pinball: the Man Who Saved the Game," which is a biopic of a man named Roger Sharpe, played by Mike Faist as a young man and Dennis Boutsikaris in the present day.  Sharpe came to New York in the '70s to make it as a writer, got a job at GQ Magazine, and fell in love with a single mother named Ellen (Crystal Reed).  Sharpe was also the star witness at a 1976 hearing that convinced the City of New York to lift their decades long ban on pinball, which used to be considered a game of chance, and therefore a gambling device.  Sharpe, a pinball obsessive, was able to show that it was a game of skill.

The movie's not really about the legalization fight, however, but about Roger Sharpe and his relationship to a game that he loves.  And what's absolutely irresistible about the film is that it employs a framing device where an unseen director (Jeff Yass) is interviewing the older Sharpe in the present day, and both are commenting on the dramatized past events starring the younger Sharpe.  They're constantly talking about filmmaking particulars in the process - spending too long on the love story, having to replace swear words because the movie is going to be PG-13, and no, we can't use John Lennon's "Imagine," because the song is too slow and it costs too much.  The older Sharpe does the fun trick from "American Splendor" and "American Animals" where he'll occasionally wander into the margins of a dramatized scene to offer additional commentary.  At the end, he even offers some fact-checking and an update on what happened to all the characters in real life.  This is tremendously fun to watch, and executed wonderfully.   

What really won me over in the end was Faist's performance as Sharpe, an ordinary but very specific man.  I bought his love and enthusiasm for pinball, while Edgerton's love for video games in "Tetris" seemed rather more convenient.  And I bought into his romance with Ellen, such that I really wouldn't have minded if we'd spent the whole movie on their relationship and never made it to the legalization hearing at all.  I think it helps that I wasn't expecting much from the movie, giving it the chance to overdeliver.  "Pinball" wound up being one of the best surprises of my movie year so far.    

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