Month: May 2023

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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This is the end of the road for the Guardians of the Galaxy.  After pitching in to defeat Thanos and working as intergalactic mercenaries, the team has decided to hang up their guns and put down roots on Knowhere.  You remember Knowhere, right?  You know, the place that’s actually the severed head of a dead god.  The place where Thor gave the Soul Stone to the Collector (Benecio Del Toro) at the end of Thor: The Dark World for safekeeping.  The place Thanos destroyed after taking the Soul Stone from the Collector in Avengers: Infinity War.  The place with Howard the Duck.  Yes, MCU lore is dense.  Thirty-two movies into the MCU saga (thirty-three if you include this one), you either jump-ship or swim.  I’m still swimming, although the boat has been taking on water the last couple of years.

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We're All Going To The Worlds Fair

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

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The internet is a place where things that are strange, stupid or both thrive like weeds.  In one corner you have TikTok, where members challenge themselves to do incredibly dangerous things like swallow a spoonful of cinnamon without drinking any water, punch unsuspecting people in the back of the head or construct a flamethrower from a lighter and an aerosol can.  In another corner there is the website Creepy Pasta, where the stories and videos of a fictional  being named the Slenderman influenced two teenage girls into murdering one of their friends.  (Luckily, she survived.)  We’re All Going to the World’s Fair considers what an intersection of those two worlds would look like, who would be interested in it, and what the ramifications would be.

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

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In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) are two working-class jamokes from Brooklyn who leave their steady jobs to start their own plumbing business.  When they reveal that they’ve put all of their savings into a corny-yet-catchy television commercial to promote themselves (with stereotypical “a-this and a-that” phrasings) I thought, these guys are living the American dream.  They should be commended for doing something so risky, given how most small businesses fail within the first year.  So when their own family openly derides the brothers at the dinner table for being idiots, I was a bit stunned.  Is this the message we really want the future business owners in the audience to hear?

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