Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Director: Rocky Morton, Annabel Jankel

Cast: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis

Have I Seen It Before: I’m not 100% sure, but I think I may have seen it twice in the theater. I may be the only person living, or to have lived (including the cast and filmmakers, one would imagine) to have seen it in the theater twice. It was somehow on my—I was all of eight—radar to insist we go see the movie, despite the commercials screaming—even to an eight-year-old—that there was something not quite right about the film. Then, when a friend’s mom decided to try and stem the tide of summer exhaustion with a trip to the theater, I went again, because even then I’d rather be at the movies than almost anywhere else. That’s still true.

Then I remember becoming absolutely fixated on renting the movie and seeing it again when it was released on video later that year. I can’t remember why I might have done this, because I wasn’t all that thrilled with the movie even back then. It may have been a direct result of someone  in the school cafeteria insisting that Disney/Hollywood Pictures (or, the monolithic “they” as we would have called it then) was absolutely, without a doubt going to make a sequel, because the people that make movies don’t include the <Back to the Future (1985)> ending.

As it turns out, I’ve probably seen this film too many times.

Did I Like It: Making a good movie is a mysterious alchemy. It’s a massive undertaking, where the majority of the intricate pieces involved have to be either simultaneously or in precise coordination at the top of their game, and if the marketing isn’t right, no one may see the damned thing. The one thing that I think probably has to happen is that the people involved have to want to be there*. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo don’t want to be there, but to dip one’s toe in the trivia associated with the train wreck production knows that they were sufficiently lubricated to work through their displeasure. They emerge from the film as genial presences, and we can commiserate with their plight in being in the movie while we are forcing ourselves to watch it. And yet, one can’t help but marvel at the alternate universe—where’s a massive meteor when you need one?—where Tom Hanks nearly played Mario, but was passed on as he wasn’t at that time the kind of box office draw that they could get out of Hoskins.

Dennis Hopper, on the other hand, just spends the film looking angrily confused, screaming “plumbers,” “fungus,” and “meteor” in alternating combinations.

Maybe Hoskins and Leguizamo should have offered him a drink. If everyone had been sloshed, we all might have gotten into the cheap (emphasis on cheap) riff on <Blade Runner (1982)> or <Total Recall (1990)>. Instead, things seem as off as they did when I was eight.

Then again, my usual standard for a good adaptation of a pre-existing property is that it makes me want to take in the original source material. I’m fairly sure that each and every time I’ve seen the movie, I’ve wanted to play one of the Mario games, if only to wash the taste out of my mouth**.

*Sure, a movie like Casino Royale (1967) is filled with overpaid, overly relaxed people, and is perhaps the dictionary definition of a train wreck and by all accounts Bill Murray would have preferred to be eaten alive by wildebeests than continue shooting <Groundhog Day (1993)>, but these exceptions would have to be unusual bordering on unique.

**In the movies defense, we were sufficiently inoculated from having to force ourselves to try and play a terrible SNES game adapted from the movie.

Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hopper

Cast: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black

Have I Seen it Before: Yeah…

Did I Like It: This film might very well be the single greatest argument for the auteur theory. The entire experience is what one imagines having a conversation with Dennis Hopper must have been like, especially at that time. It’s digressive and almost always chaotic. The only real passages which feel like a real movie taking flight are those where Jack Nicholson incontrovertibly introduced himself to the world as a movie star for the ages. 

And yet, there are occasional moments of profundity. The palpable discomfort—their most rational thought by the time the film comes to a sudden stop—of the nonconformist has never and likely will never be depicted with such lethal efficiency. Even if the complaints of the so-called normal people have become somewhat quaint—to say nothing of the fact that Hopper’s own politics would take a 180 degree turn over the years—the feelings associated with those interactions keep the film surprisingly fresh, more than fifty years later.

Also, after an hour and a half, it still feels like it’s gone on far too long and you’re not entirely sure what the whole thing was about. The prolonged sequence in New Orleans is so aggressively odd, that I’m left wondering if Hopper was a genius, a madman, both, or an absolutely bore pretending to be brilliant and insane. In an effort to try and answer to that question, I even went ahead and listened to Hopper’s commentary tracks. Aside from his warm remarks about Phil Spector, I’m no closer to understanding the man or the film for which he is most remembered.

Maybe that’s the point? Perhaps Hopper hated being pigeonholed so much that his film about rebellion couldn’t help but rebel against the idea of being much of a movie at all.

Speed (1994)

Director: Jan de Bont

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Certainly. Several times. Hell, the title of one of my upcoming books is a reference to the film.

Did I Like It: We could fill the entire bandwidth of the various streaming services several times over with the clones of Die Hard (1988) that were produced in the ten-fifteen years after that film’s release. Many of them are truly bad. More than a few of them beg an investigation as to why they even exist in the first place.

Then there’s Speed.

Every piece of Speed fits together. That is not to say any moment of it is believable, but I have a hard time picking a moment from the film that feels incongruous with any of the other parts. One might say that the film really ends when the passengers get off the bus, and the movie definitely runs out of narrative when Howard Payne (Hopper—oh, sweet, sweet, Hopper*) loses his head. But these are nitpicks from a film that ages far better than some of the contemporary films, like The Rock (1996) or Bad Boys (1995), or really any of Michael Bay’s films, now that I’ve had a minute to think about it.

I will say that this film rests squarely in the least-engaging (although not entirely un-engaging) period in the screen career of Keanu Reeves. He has tried to shed the early exuberance of a Ted “Theodore” Logan, and is content to be merely earnest as all get-out. He’ll work through this period and become the shy near-Buddha we all know and love today, but is any character in an action movie from this era anything more than a prop designed to move plot forward? Just ask Jason Patric.

*Come to think of it, both of my upcoming books have some pretty direct lines into this movie. Maybe in the far flung future, people will refer to this as my “Dennis Hopper period” and be supremely disappointed when they realize what that really means.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Title: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper

Have I Seen It Before?: Here’s the weird thing, especially when you consider the name of my company. I think I’ve seen it before. I recently procured a deluxe blu-ray of the film that includes the original theatrical cut from 1979, the Redux version released in 2001, and Hearts of Darkness (which, if I’m being honest, is the real reason I bought the set again). The opening minutes of Redux felt like it was significantly different from the film I remember. But, as I restarted the film with the theatrical cut, it’s largely unchanged so far as the first few minutes are concerned.

I’m honestly not sure what the hell I’ve seen.

Did I like it?: Orson Welles tried to make it, and before any sizable portion of the country would be skeptical about war to make it work. George Lucas was all set to make it, before he ended up becoming an action figure salesman. Only Coppola got it done, and given his output afterwards, it probably broke him far more than we could see at the time.

I’d go into the staggering scope of the film, but that may be a topic more at home in my eventual review for Hearts of Darkness. However, I will note that in the early scenes of the film—before it really has said much about war and the madness therein—where helicopters bob and weave off the coastline is staggering. They don’t—won’t, really—make movies like that anymore. Now such terrible things will look only slightly more realistic than Mario jumping for coins.

And they are terrible things. I can’t think of another war movie that not only makes the view feel what I can only imagine is the violence of war, but the deep, unrelenting insanity of the effort as well. It’s also deeply unsettling to see Martin Sheen this upset about anything, but then again I would feel that way about any of the cast of The West Wing.