Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how Schulz really likes the Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls biopic Air — the acting, the writing — in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) Ben Affleck’s participation (“he’s got a lot of turkeys to live down,” Schulz writes); Paint, the bizarre not-Bob Ross trip starring Owen Wilson, whose character paints the same mountain on his PBS program and who has a devoted senior audience, is described tonally by Schulz as “Wes Anderson meets Christopher Guest meets Errol Morris meets Napoleon Dynamite,” and doesn’t quite come together satisfactorily, but was enjoyable nonetheless; and everyone marvels at the first-weekend gross of The Super Mario Bros Movie — $146 million domestically — which manages to shock Schulz at how “nakedly what it is”: An extended product-push with some fun voice cameos (Jack Black unleashes his Tenacious D) and a plot that “doesn’t make a lick of sense.” The three also anticipate Nicolas Cage’s turn in the forthcoming Renfield — Cage, having portrayed a deluded yuppie who thinks he’s a bloodsucker in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss, has come full circle; Mafia Mama, with Toni Collette as an American mother who inherits her grandfather’s mobster enterprise in Italy (“cornball, but sounds like fun”); and Russell Crowe in The Pope’s Exorcist (“Crowe has gotten so fun now that he’s become full Brando, y’know, where he’s three hundred pounds and could give a damn now, [he’s] gonna emote [his] heart out”).

“Air,” “Paint,” and “The Super Mario Bros Movie”