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      in Music

      Debussy and Final Fantasy Are Peers on This Radio Stream

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      Arcade, a new project by Classical California, aims to dispel preconceptions about classical music and video game soundtracks.A treacherous puzzle that lies near the end of Myst, the 1993 point-and-click video game, involves a pipe organ and a spaceship.But Jennifer Miller Hammel, a pianist who got the game as a child for Christmas that year, did not have much trouble finding the solution. The experience even showed her that video games could deeply incorporate music.Hammel, 44, is now a trained opera singer and a host at Classical California, a classical musical radio network that is a collaboration between KUSC in Los Angeles and KDFC in San Francisco. But she still loves video games, gravitating toward action-adventure and role-playing series like Fallout and Mass Effect. After nearly 150 hours of space exploration, she recently completed Starfield.The musical themes to Fallout 3 or Skyrim would occasionally be played at Classical California, Hammel said. But whenever she pitched an hourly show or a podcast that would dig deeper into video game music, she was told that the genre was polarizing. More

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      in Movies

      Before Gran Turismo Inspired a Movie, It Drove Jann Mardenborough to Greatness

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      The PlayStation video game’s realistic cars and racetracks helped Jann Mardenborough find his calling as a professional driver.Jann Mardenborough can vividly recount the first time he ever played Gran Turismo, the popular racing video game that would completely alter his life.While seeking refuge on Bonfire Night, a British holiday full of firework celebrations, an 8-year-old Mardenborough stumbled upon the game at his neighbors’ house. He selected a violet Mitsubishi 3000GT and began racing on the Autumn Ring track. Mardenborough went on to play the game all night, and then every day after that, showing up at his neighbors’ door immediately after school.“They got so fed up with me turning up at their house, one day the wife came across the street, knocked on our door and had in hand the PlayStation and GT 1, and gave it to my parents,” the 31-year-old racecar driver recently recalled during an video interview.It’s the origin story to the other origin story: the true, improbable one depicted in the film “Gran Turismo,” which was directed by Neill Blomkamp and opens on Friday. The movie dramatizes Mardenborough’s journey, from gaming in his bedroom to winning the 2011 GT Academy — an annual competition that, from 2008 to 2016, put the game’s best players in real vehicles — to driving formula cars professionally.The eight main games in the Gran Turismo franchise, which debuted in Europe and North America in 1998, are known for their scrupulously reproduced cars and exacting racing simulations. In the months before he attended GT Academy, Mardenborough upgraded from a plastic PlayStation controller to a homemade wooden racing frame along with a steering wheel and pedal that he bought with money his parents gave him for good grades.The competition was a godsend for Mardenborough, who was trying to sell car parts on eBay after losing a retail job; he had dropped out of college after realizing that studying motor sport engineering did not mean he could actually drive the cars.Even so, Mardenborough said he was skeptical of his chances. He had played Gran Turismo no more than an average teenage gamer after his initial fixation, had never competed in a tournament and had barely any experience driving a normal car. The first time he brought his rickety 1991 laser blue BMW E30 onto a highway was on his way to the competition.Mardenborough’s perspective took a visceral turn when he qualified for racing camp — a stretch depicted in the film that follows the finalists training in actual cars — and was given his first taste of the track.“After my first few laps, when I got out the car, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to go through life never experiencing that again,’” said Mardenborough, who served as a producer on “Gran Turismo” and as the stunt double for his own character.The director Neill Blomkamp, center, and Mardenborough, right, on the set of “Gran Turismo.” Mardenborough was the stunt driver for his own character.Gordon Timpen/Columbia Pictures/Sony Entertainment, via Associated PressMardenborough can eagerly describe the technicalities that distinguish game from reality — the sensation, for instance, of the vibration through the car seat — but said that much of the real-world feeling and reactions mirrored Gran Turismo.“When you race against real people,” he said, “everything is real.”Mardenborough, who is played by Archie Madekwe in “Gran Turismo,” went line by line with Sony over early drafts of the script, which he noted is mostly true to his life. The characters played by David Harbour and Orlando Bloom are both fictionalized but loosely based on real people. And a crash involving Mardenborough in Germany that left a spectator dead really happened, although detractors have complained about how the tragic event was translated to the screen.In the film, the crash occurs right before Mardenborough returns to the track for a podium finish at Le Mans, the famous endurance race in France — back-to-back events that form an emotional arc of setback and triumph. In reality, Mardenborough’s crash in Germany came two years after that podium finish, leading to criticism that the film’s timeline was edited to serve a narratively pat movie ending.“The order is the order, but those events happened in my life,” Mardenborough, who avoided serious injuries, said in response. “This isn’t a documentary.” He did race in Le Mans one year after the crash, and Mardenborough said the emotional battle the film constructed was consistent with his feelings.“When you believe the reason why you’re put on earth is to race a racing car, and then you’re asking yourself, ‘Do I still want to do this?’” he said. “It’s not a pleasant question to ask.”Mardenborough last competed in May and is talking to teams about potentially racing in the United States next year. And occasionally, the driver who fidgeted with a gaming steering wheel during our interview will still play Gran Turismo.If he were to race against his 19-year-old self in the game right now, who would win? Mardenborough thought for a moment.“Me,” he said with a competitive smirk. “If I put in the amount of hours I did back then, considering my experience in real life, I would be quicker. But all it is is hours.” More

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      in Theater

      PlayStation and BTS Help Lea Salonga Clear Her Head

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      The “Here Lies Love” actress finds inspiration in Alex Newell’s “Shucked” performance and a good night’s sleep in the sounds of “Forensic Files.”Lea Salonga was feeling under the weather earlier this month.“I had to miss shows, which is unfortunate,” she said before one of her final performances in the Broadway disco musical “Here Lies Love.” “But I was still able to stand over a stove and cook this soup that had a lot of garlic and a lot of ginger,” she recalled during a phone interview from her Manhattan home. “It’s called tinola, which is a Filipino chicken soup. It’s what would be cooked every time I was sick at home.”That connection to the Philippines — where Salonga was born and raised — is one she also feels with “Here Lies Love,” which recounts the rise and fall of the country’s ousted leader and first lady, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.“Normally, if I’m watching a theater piece, I could just feel whatever feelings there are, or that the show wants me to feel,” said Salonga, 52, who on Saturday finishes her guest run as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s political rival. “But with something like this, where there is actual history of my country entwined in the story, my brain didn’t know what to do.”Though Salonga has had a long and distinguished Broadway career, winning a Tony Award in 1991 for her performance in “Miss Saigon” as the doomed Vietnamese mother Kim, “Here Lies Love” is the first time she has played a Filipino onstage and the first time she has served as a producer.Salonga, who next heads to London to begin rehearsals for the West End musical revue “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” discussed 10 of her cultural essentials, including her surprise love affair with BTS and how Alex Newell turned her world upside down in “Shucked.” These are edited excerpts.1PlayStation 5It’s a great way for me to escape after a show, to kind of cleanse my mind, especially if I’m doing a show that’s exhausting mentally and emotionally. Lately I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West; I still have to finish the downloadable content.2BTSAbout six months into the pandemic, I saw “Dynamite.” I can’t remember how I stumbled onto it, but I couldn’t move and I was like, “I have to finish this now.” The dancing and the synchronization and the charm — obviously, they’re beautiful people. It was a great way to find joy and something to look forward to when I woke up for the day in the midst of the world falling apart.3Leche FlanWhen I was growing up in the Philippines, my grandma would make leche flan, which was always so creamy and so delicious. So over the pandemic, when I was living in the Philippines, I learned how to make it. I would send samples of it over to my mother’s house to taste-test, and she would say, “No, that’s too sweet, can you bring down the sugar content?” When I finally got it right, I had to make sure I had written the recipe down!4Essential OilsThey help make me feel relaxed and grounded. You can choose different ones depending on what you feel you need — sometimes I need a little respiratory help, so there are certain oils I’ll either diffuse or massage or rub onto my body, which calm my mind. I gifted everyone in the company of “Here Lies Love” with a little vial of something to remind everyone to just breathe.5Cute PajamasSometimes I don’t really want to dress in a pair of jeans and a shirt to go down and pick something up from the communal pantry in a hotel. If I’m wearing cute pajamas, I can throw on a hoodie or a jacket, and I’ll still look presentable. My cousin gifted me “Family Guy” pajamas — a Stewie T-shirt and matching pants.6Portable PeripheralsI bring a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to use when I’m traveling, which make it much easier to type. Because I text bilingually sometimes, a voice memo is not able to grab everything.7Over-the-Ear HeadphonesAs much as I love the portability of my earbuds, my ears tend to get irritated after lengthy use. I have the Apple AirPods Max in light green, which are over-the-ear, Bluetooth-enabled and comfortable. I like that there’s a button you can just push so you can hear what’s going on around you.8‘Forensic Files’I find things like chromatography and DNA analysis fascinating. But also, Peter Thomas’s voice has lulled me to sleep more times than I can count.9‘Steven Universe’I just adore it for its themes of queer acceptance and girl power. Not to mention the number of musical theater folks that voice characters on it, including Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.10Alex Newell in ‘Shucked’Dear God, Alex Newell is every single thing. That is a cultural reset to see what it’s like when this superstar stops the show and commands a standing ovation in the middle of the first half. But it’s Alex Newell — of course the show’s going to stop! More

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      in Television

      Video Games at MoMA: Do They Belong There?

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      “Never Alone,” which closes Sunday, was an important first step in breaking the firewall between art lovers and game designers. When the Museum of Modern Art began collecting video games a decade ago, curators boldly asserted that games were an artistic medium. Now contemporary culture is dominated by them.The MoMA exhibition “Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design,” which runs through Sunday, represents the museum’s cautious advance into the gaming world at a time when digital culture has overtaken its galleries. Refik Anadol’s algorithmic homage to art history still twinkles in the museum lobby; an exhibition about the importance of video swallowed the sixth floor until July 8; and galleries for its permanent collection include contemporary artifacts like the Google Maps pin and a massive schematic devoted to the interlaced chain of resources needed to create an Amazon Echo as an artificial intelligence system.However, the museum could do more to break the firewall between art lovers and game designers. After all, this is the same institution that began a film library in 1935, exhibited utilitarian toasters and cash registers as “Machine Art” in 1934 and presented modular houses in the 1950s. Curators need to unleash that same passion for games, which struggle in the current exhibition to convey the profundity, and complexity, of their designers’ thinking.On the first floor, old computer monitors cantilevered above visitors are drawn from the museum’s collection of video games. Eleven are playable; 35 games in all are viewable. Jamming buttons on their keyboards, users were hard-pressed to crane their necks to see the flickering displays above them — a series of digital experiments from the 1990s by John Maeda, a graphic designer who now serves as Microsoft’s vice president of design and artificial intelligence.MoMA’s standards for assessing the cultural importance of video games require an upgrade worthy of the medium, whose revenue is projected to reach $385 billion in 2023 and technologies contribute to the ongoing A.I. revolution.For the curators Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, gaming is a psychological act that has defined an era when many of our relationships are mediated through screens.SimCity 2000, from 1993, an open-ended city-building video game designed by Will Wright.Electronic Arts; via Museum of Modern ArtAnd the vision of designers like Will Wright is letting players choose what lessons they want to learn — or nothing at all. One player might experience Wright’s most popular game, The Sims (included in the MoMA exhibition), as a gateway into the worlds of architecture and interior decorating; another might focus on its family-planning aspect or its staging of murder mysteries and ghost encounters.The decision to allow games into the museum has been debated since the 2010s, when critics like Roger Ebert and Jonathan Jones declared that the medium would never rise to the status of art.“Chess is a great game, but even the finest chess player in the world isn’t an artist,” Jones opined in The Guardian, “She is a chess player.”At the center of these critiques was a belief that playtime belonged to children. A similar logic harmed performance art until museums started making the genre a staple in their programming, coincidentally, around the same time that MoMA started collecting games.“People want to be taken to a new place,” Donna De Salvo, a Whitney Museum curator said of performance art in 2012 during an interview with The New York Times. “In the age of the digital and the virtual and the mediated experience, there is something very visceral about watching live performance.”The same could be said for gaming, which embraces immersion by allowing players into their virtual worlds with the touch of a controller. The simplicity of that relationship is evident in the exhibition “Never Alone,” where Zen games like Flower ask players to weave petals through the wind on a journey across an imaginary landscape. But the concept flows through the veins of modern gaming, ever since Super Mario 64 tasked players with jumping into paintings stored within a museum-like castle to progress through its story.The video game Flower, from 2012, designed by Jenova Chen.Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC; via Museum of Modern ArtSo what prevents museums from developing more ambitious programming around games? And why has a serious institution like MoMA not staged the first major retrospective of a video game designer when it has enough material for obvious picks like Will Wright or Shigeru Miyamoto?There are a few practical reasons. Designers rarely own rights to their creations, which are held by the publishers financing their games. In an interview, Antonelli singled out other hurdles: legal negotiations, lost source codes and obsolete technology that challenge the acquisition process. And then there are the headaches involved with hard wiring all those electronic systems in the galleries.Yet there seems no better time for MoMA’s curators to show why gaming belongs in their museum and to help visitors to understand the difference between what is scholarship and what is for sale at the Nintendo store a few blocks down the street.Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive DesignThrough Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, moma.org. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Daddy’ Review: Deeper Into the Internet’s Darkest Corners

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      In Marion Siéfert’s much-anticipated new show, the French director explores the dynamics of online grooming.The French stage director Marion Siéfert has her finger on the pulse of our digital lives. In “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” she playfully tackled oversharing on Facebook, before turning to the perils of online streaming in “_jeanne_dark_” — a show that fell foul of Instagram’s moderation policies when it was relayed live on the platform.With “Daddy,” a sharp, no-holds-barred new production at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, Siéfert has ventured even further into the internet’s dark corners. In it, a 13-year-old is groomed online by an older man and gets lost in a virtual reality game that exploits teenage girls for profit.It also marks a new stage in Siéfert’s career. “Daddy” is her first big-budget production for a major playhouse, and one of the Paris season’s most anticipated premieres. So Siéfert is swinging much bigger, on every level: larger cast, more atmospheric sets and a somewhat indulgent running time of three and a half hours. Yet her biting originality remains intact.Reality is no match for screen entertainment in “Daddy.” The central character, Mara, is a quiet teenager from southern France. A subtly written scene, early on, introduces her family: Her parents, a nurse and a security guard, are too exhausted by their poorly paid jobs to devote much attention to their daughters. It’s no surprise that whenever she can, Mara escapes to the brighter landscape of online gaming.In an unnamed video game, she joins Julien, a smooth-talking 27-year-old who is her frequent online partner in crime. The easy intimacy they have built is showcased through a spectacular video sequence: On a screen the size of the Odéon’s stage, we see a 3-D game designed by the video artist Antoine Briot in which Mara and Julien’s avatars who shoot at enemies with assault rifles before hopping on fluorescent skateboards.Throughout, we hear Mara and Julien banter over their headsets. “You’re the most badass girl in this game,” Julien says.The groundwork is laid for the abusive dynamic that ensues. When they first meet outside the game, on a video call, Mara confides in Julien that she dreams of being an actress. He compliments her, and tells her about “Daddy” — a new game that allows players, Julien says, to become avatars sponsored by sugar daddies, and showcase their talents to a “fan base.”Peres, right, has appeared in several French television shows and movies; Houel is a newcomer to professional acting.Mathieu BareyreSiéfert has a knack for assembling captivatingly unconventional actors, and just as “_jeanne_dark_” was tailor-made for Helena de Laurens, a shape-shifter unafraid to lean into grotesque physicality, “Daddy” owes much to its two central performers. As Mara, the 15-year-old Lila Houel, who came to the production with limited stage experience, is coarsely candid in these early scenes, with turns of phrase that emphasize the character’s working-class background. Opposite her, Louis Peres, best known as a screen actor, is a startling tech-generation descendant of Christian Bale in “American Psycho”: clean-cut, in control, smoothly scary.Siéfert’s smartest move is to leave video and special effects behind once the two enter the game world of “Daddy.” The virtual space becomes a sinister, near-empty stage dotted with what look like snow mounds, where Mara encounters other preyed-upon young women.The rules of “Daddy” aren’t wholly clear. Men invest so teenage girls can perform routines that earn them points with fans. Houel, for instance, interprets a scene from the movie “Interview with the Vampire”; the sparkling Jennifer Gold, who plays the game’s reigning star Jessica, delivers cabaret-style numbers, including Marilyn Monroe’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from the 1960 film “Let’s Make Love.”The points and the fans are never shown — Siéfert keeps things deliberately vague. The focus is on the dynamics of child abuse, and the erosion of Mara’s individuality and willpower by Julien. While some scenes of verbal and physical violence are troubling enough to make you fear for Houel’s mental health, she rises to the occasion with astonishing sang-froid, quietly haunted then seething in the second act.Siéfert co-wrote “Daddy” with Matthieu Bareyre, and some of the points they make don’t need so much time to come across: Cuts would be welcome. Yet “Daddy” speaks to the zeitgeist and the lives of teenagers today with a mix of ease and critical distance that few stage directors can match.And even at 11:30 p.m., one final scene had the audience sitting up and leaning forward. After a bloody narrative twist, the back wall of the stage slid away to reveal the street outside, and a performer staggered out of the game into the Odéon’s leafy neighborhood — while a few passers-by stopped, puzzled, to peek at the action onstage. In Siéfert’s theater, the real and the virtual keep colliding in invigorating ways.DaddyThrough May 26 at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris; theatre-odeon.eu. More

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      in Music

      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      in Movies

      In 1993 ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Bombed; in 2023, It’s a Hit With a New Generation

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      A critical and commercial disaster in its day, the video-game adaptation was trashed even by its star, Bob Hoskins. But a reappraisal is underway.The new animated film “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” recreates the sunny spirit, effervescent action and confectionary aesthetic of the namesake video games, with the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach. Expect periwinkle skies, green warp pipes and squeaky-voiced, mushroom-headed characters.The mustachioed Nintendo mascot has been on the big screen before — even though some of the people involved would prefer to forget about it.Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The live-action “Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. It looked and felt nothing like the video games.To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. origin story.“It felt like such a great opportunity,” Morton said in a recent phone interview, of turning the video game phenomenon into a movie. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do. And it would have a built-in audience. It was made in heaven.”The result was a critical and commercial disaster. Roger Ebert declared it “a complete waste of time and money.” (Though Gene Siskel allowed, “I like the Goombas,” referring to Koopa’s oversized henchmen.) Several of the actors spoke disparagingly about the production, with Hoskins calling the shoot a “nightmare.” It was game over for any sequel, and for the Hollywood careers of its directors too.In more recent years, millennial Nintendophiles who were put off by the movie in 1993 — or, like me, simply avoided it — have given it another chance.Today, “Super Mario Bros.” has been the subject of something of a reappraisal, achieving a surprising cult status in the process. Its listing on the cinephile movie rating site Letterboxd is accompanied by a host of passionate, discerning reviews. “Super Mario Bros.” is “film-literate, daring, political, and unapologetically insane,” wrote the user Zeke Knott. While awaiting the coming fan-made documentary, “Trust the Fungus: Bob-Omb to Cult Classic,” fans can listen to a podcast dedicated to a minute-by-minute dissection of the movie, or visit the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, which is holding an exhibition on it. This month, Nitehawk Cinemas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will screen “Super Mario Bros.” as part of Re-Consider This!, a series showcasing misunderstood masterpieces.The excessive artistic license taken with the adaptation is part of the fun of it, said Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk. “In an age when we’re inundated with video game and comic book adaptations that take a more literal approach, it’s refreshing to look back at ‘Super Mario Bros.’ 30 years later,” he said. “You have to admire the huge swings that it took.” For “huge swings,” see, for example, the scene in which Dennis Hopper takes a mud bath with Fiona Shaw.But even the most ardent fans will admit that “Super Mario Bros.” is kind of a mess. Morton said the problems began after Disney purchased the distribution rights, demanding an extensive rewrite of the screenplay — less effects-heavy, more family-friendly — that arrived 10 days before principal photography began. (Disney was unable to locate anyone involved in the production for comment.)But it’s a fantastic and inspired mess with densely artificial sets concocted by the “Blade Runner” production designer David L. Snyder; cartoonish costumes by Joseph Porro (who most recently worked on “The Mandalorian”); and a lunatic score by the composer Alan Silvestri. Elsewhere, Patrick Tatopoulos’s creature designs anticipate his work on “Independence Day.”“The film is such a kitchen sink in terms of inspiration and execution,” the superfan Ryan Hoss said. “Practical sets, makeup, costumes, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, animatronics and puppets. It has tone issues, and too many cooks in the kitchen, but you can point to any part of the story of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and it’s fascinating to someone on some level.”In 2007, when Hoss was in college, he created the website Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive. “I felt that the conversation around the film just wasn’t what it deserved,” he said. The site was “a place to get as much of the background and history of the film out in the open.”Since then, Hoss, along with the site’s editor in chief, Steven Applebaum, has tracked down alternate versions of the script, set photos, and props, and published numerous interviews with crew members. Most recently, they uncovered and restored an early work print of the film, creating an extended edition available to watch online.They’ve also held screenings and other events for like-minded fans. “It’s one of the most enthusiastic and positive fandoms I’ve ever seen,” Hoss said.He added, “The biggest surprise has been getting to know so many of the talented cast and crew that worked on the film. They’ve all said that ‘Super Mario Bros.’ was one of the most memorable films of their career.”Leguizamo has said he’s proud to have been involved in the film. “I’m O.G.,” he told IndieWire recently, also praising Jankel and Morton for their commitment to diverse casting. They “fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man,” he said. “It was such a breakthrough.”Today, Morton looks back at the whole experience as one of utter humiliation. “It was horrible, just a really horrible experience.” (Jankel did not respond to an interview request and apparently has not participated in any stories about the making of the movie. “It really did affect her,” said Morton.)The re-evaluation of “Super Mario Bros.” is “heartening,” said Morton. And yet, the fact that the once-reviled movie is being celebrated and enjoyed — without irony — doesn’t seem to have sunk in for its director. The day after our interview, he agreed to attend a Hollywood screening of the movie, his first time seeing it in about 20 years. “They wanted me to introduce it but I can’t think of anything positive to say.”As for the new film, if all goes well, it might signal the launch of yet another movie franchise, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Which, Morton admitted, is probably what audiences expected 30 years ago. “That’s the film that everybody wanted,” he said. “And they’ve got it now.” More

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      in Movies

      Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

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      Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More