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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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The Pope's Exorcist

The Pope’s Exorcist

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When you really need a doctor, who do you choose?  The young, baby-faced one who’s only been a resident for a couple of years, or the older doctor who has fought countless battles with sickness and death and won most of them?  Experience matters, so I take the older doctor whenever I can.  Same would go for an exorcist.  I don’t want the young whippersnapper, I want the grizzled veteran who cracks jokes while in the presence of a demon just because it pisses it off.  That is exactly the kind of priest Father Amorth (Russell Crowe) is.  He’s been involved in more possessions than he can count.  He’s so savvy he can tell within a matter of minutes whether a man is actually possessed or faking it.  And if the afflicted is faking it, then Amorth is happy to oblige with a little of his own.

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Air

Air

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Once upon a time, in the land known as America in the Go-Go Eighties, there lived a man named Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon).  He worked for Nike as a talent scout, searching far and wide for talent to sign up to promote basketball shoes.  Though he toiled day and night, his efforts proved fruitless.  Then, in 1984, the answer to his prayers emerged.  A young collegiate basketball player named Michael Jordan had risen to national prominence by helping North Carolina win the NCAA championship with an amazing shot in the closing seconds.  He was subsequently drafted by the Chicago Bulls and tasked with not only leading them out of obscurity, but to NBA championship glory.  Even though he was only eighteen years old, this didn’t phase him in the least.  Everyone agreed it was only a matter of when he achieved greatness, not if.  No, the biggest question surrounding Jordan was which company he would choose for a highly-lucrative shoe marketing contract.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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The life of Edgin (Chris Pine) is a tale of misfortune and woe, sung in a pleasing tenor.  In the fantasy realm where Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes place, he formerly was a member of a peacekeeping group known as the Harpers.  The Harpers worked with the Red Wizards to keep things orderly.  One day, he became disenchanted with his role and turned to thievery.  For reasons I don’t want to divulge here, his wife was killed by Red Wizards.  Edgin turned into a drunk and all-around lousy father, but fortunately for him, a warrior named Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) took pity on him.  She decides to help him raise his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) for reasons never really made clear.  The two are not romantically linked, even though that probably would be the case in any other movie they appeared in.  (I also suspect this was done to remain true to the spirit of the D&D game, a favorite of nerds who probably avoid mushy romantic stuff at all costs.)

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A Good Person

A Good Person

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Like many movies about drug addiction that have come before, A Good Person asks for our sympathy.  To my surprise, it got it without a struggle.  It tells the story of Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who became addicted to prescription painkillers after a fatal traffic accident.  Physically, she seems fine.  Allison moves about normally when she chooses to and has no visible scars.  Mentally, she’s in an entirely different place.  She spends her days in her house with the curtains drawn, lounging around, conspiring ways to obtain a refill of her expired prescription.  Her mother Diane (Molly Shannon) pops over unannounced, throws open the curtains and shrilly demands that her daughter get her act together.  Nobody ever told Diane that the last thing a drug addict wants is a high-energy pep talk.

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The Fabelmans

The Fabelmans

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Once upon a time, in a quiet suburb in New Jersey, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) take their son Sammy to see his first movie.  He’s apprehensive about the experience, so they do their best to explain it to him.  For an engineer like Burt, movies are nothing more than a magic trick the   projector plays on your brain.  Mitzi, a classically trained pianist, says that movies are dreams that you remember.  Their views on movies, while worlds apart, are both correct.  Sammy didn’t realize it then, but he will spend the rest of his life reconciling the perspectives of his parents on his journey to becoming a Hollywood film director.

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65 Adam Driver

65

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65 billion years ago, a spaceship piloted by Mills (Adam Driver) crash-lands on Earth after crossing paths with an unexpected group of asteroids.  His cargo, twelve people in cryosleep, are all killed except one, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).  Mills needs to get both of them to the remaining escape pod before the asteroids hit.  Their journey is complicated by two problems.  First, the two speak different languages.  Mills’ home planet has managed to develop interplanetary space travel but not a universal translator.  Second, the environment is filled with Cretaceous period dinosaurs who want to eat them.  Over the next twenty-four hours, Mills and the only other remaining survivor Koa do their best to navigate all manner of dangerous beasties, big and small, in their desperate journey to their only means of escape before an extinction-level event happens.

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

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Life is good for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd).  After helping the Avengers undo The Blip and defeat Thanos, everyone loves Ant-Man.  The movie’s funniest bit is when it shows Lang walking carefree around San Francisco to the chorus of “Welcome Back” graciously accepting free coffee and meals because people confuse him with Spider-Man.  (I would have chosen “Believe It or Not”, the theme song from “Greatest American Hero”.)  Aside from his heroic exploits, Scott  is just an all around good guy.  Problem is, he doesn’t know what to do with himself in this post-Endgame world.  As his daughter Cassie helpfully points out, he’s been content to rest on his laurels instead of choosing to engage with the world’s numerous problems.  Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Scott, he lives in the MCU.  Defeating one existential threat only means that an even bigger and badder one is on the way.

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Tár

Tár

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Describing classical music composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) as an overachiever is an understatement.  Having already achieved EGOT, she is also the lead conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic, a guest lecturer at Juilliard and the head of a foundation that provides opportunities for female conductors.  She’s also working on an autobiography and has begun practice for a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth symphony.  When the latter is complete, Lydia will have recorded all nine of Mahler’s symphonies with the same orchestra, equaling an achievement by her mentor Leonard Bernstein.

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