Hacker Cinema
Mario
2018 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Marcel Gisler
Mario is a promising young footballer in Switzerland on his way to the top, closing in on the success he and his father always dreamed of. But when the talented striker Leon joins the team, they'll get caught up between the politics of the game and the politics of love, as rumours and prejudice threaten their careers and everything they've managed to build.
4 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Nope.
Because late stage capitalism demands endless growth in order to pay executives and shareholders (especially those late to the train) more and more YoY.
And those requirements for growth mean that cost cutting is needed. Over the past few decades cost _have_ been cut, building things more efficiently, components becoming cheaper, larger volumes in mass manufacturing.
But we have already reached a point where there are no other places to cut than the quality of the product itself. Look to shrinkflation in food and other places - look at how "live action" versions are being made of previously animated movies, how game franchises from 2 decades ago are being brought back from the dead, the huge influx of remasters etc.
Why? Because it's cheaper to revive/reuse an existing IP than it is to create a new one + it guarantees success with the drooling consumer masses. And cheaper = more Ferraris for the multi millionaire/billionaire execs.
See how much Mario movie made? Just wait...bet you there'll be a live action version. ;)
> The point of IP is to encourage the creation of new things.
Then why are corporations allowed to milk successful works for all eternity? Why do we have Disney monopolizing films made half a century ago? Why do we have Nintendo selling people the exact same Mario ROMs from the 80s every single console generation?
They should have like 10 years of copyright so they can turn a profit. Once it expires it's over and the work enters the public domain where it belongs. If they want to keep profiting they should have to keep creating new things. They shouldn't be able to turn shared culture into eternal intellectual property portfolios that they monopolize and then sit on like dragons.
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
> I'm pretty sure she would have found it funny
Exactly!
I think Italian-Americans see "cultural appropriation", caricature, non-Italians portraying Italians in movies, etc as part of the process of integration.
If someone with no Italian heritage wants to open up a pizza shop or sell pasta and put a big statue of Mario in front, go right ahead! If it's good, we'll eat there.
You know who made the best pizzelles in my family - by far? My mom's Irish-German stepfather.