Super Mario of the Flower Moon is my personal Barbenheimer

polygon.com:

Today — Friday, Oct. 20 — two wildly clashing and yet somehow complementary works from creators at the top of their game, both sitting right at the intersection of art and commerce, arrive at the same time. It’s Barbenheimer all over again, but this time it’s just for me. Today, we are blessed with both Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

I’m very excited. But is there really more going on here than just the confluence of two things I’ve been looking forward to, from two diminutive Italian men that have been very important in my life? Yes, obviously. Beyond both being extremely good, this game and this movie share a fascinating cultural resonance with each other — as well as with Barbie and Oppenheimer — which I will now proceed to explain.

The whole Barbenheimer thing began with the amusing contrast of those two movies on their coincidental release date — feminine and masculine, bubblegum and serious, dolls and bombs. Well, you don’t get more contrasting than an anarchic, surreal platform game that constantly reinvents its own rules and a three-and-a-half-hour neo-Western about the murder of the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma.

But the true joy of Barbenheimer was in discovering that both movies ruled, that they could play to each other’s audiences, and that under their strikingly different artistic poses, they shared a common sense of purpose. They were both about something and even shared some themes. The same is true of the latest from Mario and Marty: Hats. Flowers. The specter of mortality. The inevitability of weakness. The sexiness of elephants. It’s all there.

In this new unwitting duology, Killers of the Flower Moon clearly plays the role of Barbie: Leonardo