When my wife told me that they wouldn't be back until later because they were at the movies, at first I couldn't place what movie they could possibly be seeing. They had just gone to see Hoppers the weekend before (I'll be happy enough to catch that on Disney+ in a couple months), and usually a bunch of children's movies don't come out in close succession. (Though it is school holidays, and they do usually try to stack up a few for that.)
Then it occurred to me:
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, of course.
I secretly did a little dance of rejoice. I mean, not an actual dance, but a metaphorical one.
I had, of course, noticed that this was coming out, seeing it on the sides of bus stops and buses themselves. That's aside from being the cinephile that I am, and knowing more about upcoming releases than most people do.
But my son had not put to me the idea of seeing it. When talking about movies we might see when my wife is in Tasmania for most of the next week, he mentioned only the continuation of our march through the MCU movies, which has now arrived at the big kahuna: Avengers: Infinity War.
Now that my sister-in-law has taken him, I've obviously dodged that bullet.
I think he assumed that I would go but that I would not really want to go. When we went to see the first one a couple years ago -- can't recall whether my older son joined for that or not -- I don't think I said to him/them that I hadn't liked it. But I imagine I was very lacking in any sort of commentary about it at all, which is what I do when I've just seen a movie that I think he likes but that I myself did not like. It was the same way I dummied up while walking out of Anaconda on his birthday.
But he's a smart cookie. He can tell the difference between a movie I liked and a movie I fucking hated.
And that is not too strong of a description of my feelings toward The Super Mario Bros Movie. I felt assaulted by 90+ minutes of essentially that poster you see above, with its nauseating blasts of colour and its stupid Italian plumber jokes. I gave it 1.5 stars and ranked it 160th out of 168 movies I ranked in 2023. And in ranting about this new movie a couple minutes ago in a group chat, I said "I could live the rest of my life and not see (or more to the point, hear) Chris Pratt voice another animated character." Pratt = sucks.
And I might not have to. At least, not in this movie.
When my son returned home and I asked him what he'd thought of it, he said it was "good" and that he liked it "about the same as the first one."
Because he's my son and has inherited some of my proclivities, his brain immediately shifted to wondering if he should have saved the movie to watch with me -- if I had been hurt by being passed over for this. But he also knew he was probably okay to have excluded me. "I wasn't sure if you wanted to see it," was what he said, or something similar, which was basically like "I didn't think you wanted to see but I wanted you to know I did think about you first."
So it worked out perfectly for everybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment