The Wizard (1989) - by J. Molotov

The first thing I want everyone to know about this movie is that it is essentially a commercial for Super Mario 3.

Do you remember the frenzy that the release of Super Mario 2 caused? All the kids in my school were freaking out and lying and bragging about whose cousin had already gotten it when the stores were sold out and it wasn’t even really a Mario game. Once the first Mario Brothers did so well, the makers realized they’d better hurry up and get a sequel out there into the clutches of the clamoring mob. So instead of taking the time to program a whole new game, they took another Japanese game with different characters and put in Mario and Luigi, the Toadstool and that bitch Princess and voilà: Mario 2. That’s why the entire game is totally different, with different bad guys, different animation, different goals. We didn’t notice this as children because we were craaaaazy with excitement for another game that featured Italian blue-collar workers as the protagonists. We were susceptible to the ol’ bait and switch back then.

But after the repeated wild success for the Mario franchise with Mario 2, the programmers decided it was time to do right by us. They went back to the original framework and crafted possibly the finest video game to date: Mario 3. And in order to drive up the frenzy to absolutely astronomical proportions, they decided that the way to unveil their marvelous creation was that it was to be the centerpiece of a videogame competition at the climax of a movie starring Fred Savage, the Paul Newman of 1980s children’s film.

What I will never understand about this movie is how they came up with the plot. The movie’s raison d’etre was to promote a video game. The story they decided to give us is about a young child, Jimmy, who has witnessed the drowning of his twin sister. The consequences of witnessing her death are that a) he exhibits autistic-like behavior to the point that the authorities want to take him away from his family because they think that the family is unqualified to care for him and b) he becomes a videogame prodigy. Jimmy and his brother (Fred Savage) hitchhike across the country, escaping from their broken family and a runaway-child hunter and eventually finding their purpose when they learn of a videogame tournament that they believe winning will prove that Jimmy doesn’t need to be in an institution. I mean, that’s some heavy shit. 

Jimmy is a sad, withdrawn child, carrying around his little lunchbox full of drowned-twin-sister mementos, only capable of interaction within the pixelated world of videogames.  He and his brother meet a red-headed drifter girl along the highways who joins their journey. Fred Savage and the red-head use his deceptive appearance and uncanny videogame skills to hustle people along the way, at one point even forcing him to compete with a prototypical hot-shot asshole kid who has no understanding of the horrible life he’s led. The mother and stepfather are egging on the obviously bad man they’ve hired to chase down the children, and the hapless father and Christian Slater are lagging behind, just trying to understand why this nondescript grey box has turned their lives updside down. Certainly this was a lot to cope with for the hordes of maniac children who must have descended on the theaters to see this movie because Nintendo ruled their lives (and I will bet you $10,000 that they showed the part with the Power Glove in the trailer).

Of course, what happened to me was that I promptly forgot all the finer plot points and only remembered the awesomeness. I can only assume that sort of bad-memory repression happened to the rest of my cohort. The awesomeness, by the way, is sufficiently awesome as to not be overshadowed by the bummer plotline even upon recent repeat viewings. It includes children exercising their autonomy in ways that children always wish they could, like making a cross-country hitchhiking journey and hustling adults, in addition to generalized awesomeness like long discussions of videogame strategies, the aforementioned Power Glove, the biggest little city (Reno, NV), and giant dinosaur statues in California. And of course, there is the moment we’d all been waiting for: the Unveiling of Super Mario 3. Which turned out to be so freaking awesome that last Saturday night I returned home at 2:30 a.m. from the bar and found my boyfriend and friend playing it, 20 years later, with as much focus and enthusiasm as we all greeted this life-changing game at the climax of this classic film. 

Quantum of Solace (2008) - by Leon

Quantum of Solace, like most James Bond films, crafts a philosophy for its hero that resonates throughout the narrative. In this case, the philosophy is simple: God is dead... we have killed him, you and I, and in doing so, ourselves.

 

Nothing in the movie is taken at face value, we as the audience are taught to distrust authority, to distrust the agents of morality, to distrust all governments as they scramble for dwindling resources, distrust all forms of love as being motivated by revenge, by duty or by money, and not even James Bond is allowed to kick some ass without Joseph Campbell leering behind the curtain. Seriously, in Quantum of Solace it is impossible to escape worries about loss of identity or metaphorical images that reference pouffy foreign films that mince about the use of violence as a solution. The film is afraid, afraid to spell out the raw aggressive power of a man for whom right and wrong, black and white, evil and good are concrete defensible realities. It's as if he's hampered by our post-colonial understanding of the world. In a Zizekian sense, the film no longer allows James to view Bolivia as a country that can get its ass kicked, because we as a nation, and deeper, the Western ideology has had its ass kicked. It is no longer the Other, for we have become the other ourselves.

 

This approach to Bond is understandable to some extent. Ever since Paul Newman's eviscerating portrayal of an anti-hero in The Hustler, we have found shades of gray in our heroic characters. The increasing information density of Western society has muddied our belief in not only our own safety and national superiority, but also the very fabric of our belief in heroes. Post-jihad, we are now relegated to an inner discussion of appropriation; does that person's action seem like something I would do... and that creates the right and thus black and white has become the other and me. A priori Value, in Kantian style, cannot exist on a plane of jello. James Bond, always the child-star of a morality play, now acts a very different role. In this latest installment the writer Paul Haggis, known for his other muddled, washed our epics Syriana and Crash, has decided to downsize in his latest installment of the franchise. The hero, in Quantum of Solace, has been given the pink slip. In the face of an unscrupulous government willing to lay down with a cabal of bad haircuts and capitalists who seek to sell a poor country what ought to be free, Bond is forced to deal with a villain, Spectre, so evocative of the shade of fear we live in under terrorist attacks, that it has a name that by its very meaning cannot be defined, and one who is driven by an ideology we cannot understand.

 

In a very telling moment during the film, the Prime Minister's aide tells 'M', "How could we not know anything about this organization," mystified by the shadowy nature of Spectre. The world, with its suitcase bombs and powdered envelopes has changed utterly, and James Bond must too. Gone, the insouciant smile, the witty rejoinder. Instead, much like our new president elect, there's no time for rest, he must hit the ground running, and by the way, eyes open, missionary position, until we have a handle on the current situation. That is why the villain is undefined, and Bond so bleakly efficient. This is a time for pragmatism, not poetry, real solutions and not drawn out cocktail parties. In the entire film, Bond relaxed only twice, and it caused the death of his only friend Mathis. and his only lover during the film Ms. Fields. Like Obama, James is the personification of an individual and lacks a true singleness. When asked his motives for revenge, they are always for other people, for Vesper, for 'M', never for himself. There is an odd symmetry to Quantum of Solace that reflects the West's loss of separatism from the developing world... in his battle against Sceptre, James Bond is on a suicide mission, and resembles the very terrorists that he seeks revenge against.

 

Clarity has vanished from our national reflection in an age of instant media reporting. The West can no longer separate itself from developing nations. And so our belief in the other is threatened. The tools for manufacturing consent have spread to all countries, continents away, and we all now play deeper and deeper games of gray. Mr. Beam of the CIA and the head of MI6 both ask, "If we don't deal with the bad guys, who's left." James Bond is left as the collective expression of the search for a voice. God is dead, we are dead. James Bond is not in the ground.