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    Not Just Another Brick In the Wall

    Roger Waters' The Wall 2.0 is the year's best concert (so far)

    Michael D. Clark
    Nov 27, 2010 | 7:07 pm

    Seal up the ballot boxes.

    There is little need for any more mulling, politicking, or debating about what concert will win my vote for best show of 2010. After watching former Pink Floyd bassist/lyricist/vocalist Roger Waters bring the band’s epic 1979 art rock opera, The Wall, back to life at the Toyota Center there is little left to talk about.

    The year has seen the re-emergence of past alt-rock staples like Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and Hole, and welcomed chic, new fringe favorites to the stage like LCD Soundsystem and Deer Tick. Classic rock staples like Rush, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Robert Plant all made this summer’s Cynthia Wood Mitchell Pavilion concert season one of the most memorable in recent years.

    And all will come in second place (at best) to what Waters unfurled when he decided to rebuild the sights around the well-known sounds of The Wall — one of the best-selling albums in rock n’ roll history — for the first time in three decades.

    Even more cathartic were the updates made to this story of personal alienation and governmental control through the use of new digital video and light technology, as well as Waters' own updated anti-war pleas that fit in seamlessly with the original on-stage story line.

    Both Waters and David Gilmour wrote the music for The Wall as members of Pink Floyd, but 30 years later it is Waters who seems in firm control its artistic legacy.

    For two hours he led a band that included guitarist/vocalist Dave Kilminster (he has toured with Waters in the past to sing the soaring falsetto Gilmour parts on Pink Floyd gems), guitarist/bassist G.E. Smith (formerly the musical director for Saturday Night Live ) and Snowy White (a backing guitarist on the original tour for The Wall).

    Even more important: The faceless stagehands who kept filling in the white brick wall that stretched beyond the width of the Toyota Center floor.

    After a pyro-spectacular to get the crowd’s attention for the opening carny-barking of “In The Flesh,” the haunting balladry of “The Thin Ice” was the soundtrack to a slideshow of the equally startling faces of armed conflict taking place in the world right now. After each picture was displayed on a giant center stage screen, it was shifted onto an empty block face until the incomplete wall was a graffiti box of disparate souls caught in the crossfire.

    And the wall kept being built, even as a local children’s choir sang the all-too-familiar, “Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone!” refrain from “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” under a giant puppet of the villainous Schoolmaster.

    It kept rising as Waters strummed a guitar on a darkened stage for “Mother,” accompanied only by a younger, scruffier, video of himself from 1980 performing the same song.

    With a completed wall for the second set, Waters had a giant video screen for the faux-Nazi rally and marching hammers that represent governmental interference, paranoia and grief in songs like “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Comfortably Numb.”

    And by the time it was over, the wall had tumbled before our eyes into the audience close to the stage. It’s a multi-layered story with a moral — how protagonist Pink escapes his own mental prison to rejoin society, as well as how Pink Floyd helped art rock briefly reach the mainstream – that became very tangible once again.

    Scarier yet, it’s a monstrous allegory that seems more fitting to the politics of the world we live in now than it did to the one Pink Floyd lived in when they wrote The Wall.

    unspecified
    news/entertainment

    Movie Review

    The Super Mario Galaxy Movie serves fans with Easter Eggs galore

    Alex Bentley
    Apr 1, 2026 | 1:30 pm
    Yoshi, Mario, and Luigi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    Photo courtesy of Nintendo and Illumination
    Yoshi, Mario, and Luigi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

    When The Super Mario Bros. Movie came out in 2023, it had two big things going for it. Audiences had little experience with a fully-animated video game adaptation, and certainly not from a property as revered as Super Mario Bros. And coming from Illumination Entertainment and featuring an all-star cast, the massive budget for the film was on the screen, showing how much effort the filmmakers put into at least the visuals.

    Three years later comes the sequel, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, passing over a massive number of Mario games to go straight to 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy, originally put out for Nintendo’s Wii system. This time, the returning Mario (Chris Pratt), Luigi (Charlie Day), Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), and Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), now joined by Yoshi (Donald Glover), are sent on a mission to save Princess Rosalina (Brie Larson) from the evil clutches of Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie), who’s trying to prove his worth to his dad, Bowser (Jack Black).

    And that is about as much actual story there is to be found in a film that feels like a slog even at a brief 98 minutes. The filmmakers — directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, co-directors Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack, and writer Matthew Fogel — have lots of fun inserting references from a bunch of different Mario games, but they pay little attention to giving the characters anything to do that makes sense.

    Instead, small groups are shuttled around different points in the galaxy — sometimes using game mechanics, sometimes not — to accomplish minor goals that are forgotten almost as soon as they’re named. Nothing they do rises to the level of exciting or even interesting; everything is merely an excuse to showcase another part of Mario lore for the masses.

    It’s impossible to call the filmmaking lazy, as the visuals remain top notch and it’s clear the entire crew put a lot of effort into making every scene as appealing as possible. But the film is certainly cynical, throwing out empty treats like Fox McCloud (Glen Powell) or Bowser Jr.’s magic paintbrush to give Nintendo mega-fans a rush of serotonin without attaching those elements to anything substantial.

    This critic has long railed against using big-name actors in voiceover roles, arguing that few people know or care whose voice they’re hearing in animated films. Somehow, this film makes the idea worse, as the voices of people like Key, Glover, and Safdie are changed so that you would never know it’s them, something that’s especially strange for Glover since Yoshi only says one word — “Yoshi.”

    Even stranger is that, after making a joke in the first film about Mario not having an Italian accent, Pratt goes in and out of an accent in this film. At least he and Day feel like they’re having fun. Bowser is sidelined for a good amount of this film, giving Black not much to do overall. Taylor-Joy and Larson might as well be anonymous actors for all the impact they make on their roles.

    The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the worst kind of fan service, delivering a shiny product that might make some people feel good in the moment, but something that is forgotten the second they step out of the theater. If Nintendo is to continue adapting their properties, they’d do well to give their fans a film they want to see more than once.

    ---

    The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is now playing in theaters.

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