I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

As Good As It Gets

Absolutely Fantastic

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) suffers from unspecified mental handicap and often wanders off to go to California. He lives with his mother Christine Bateman and stepfather. The stepfather institutionalizes him in a home. Corey (Fred Savage) and Nick (Christian Slater) live with their father Sam Woods (Beau Bridges). There is little that Sam can do without custody. Corey takes his half-brother Jimmy away from the home on a trip to California. Bateman hires Putnam (Will Seltzer) to track down Jimmy while Sam and Nick follow the boys on their own. While at a bus station, they meet Haley Brooks (Jenny Lewis) and discover that Jimmy is a real wizard at video games. Haley suggests entering him in a big video game contest in L.A.This is a fun little adventure for kids. Of course, it's insanely dangerous to promote hitchhiking for little kids and it's a thinly disguised commercial for Nintendo. Nevertheless, Lewis and Savage are cute together. The power glove sounded awesome. The B story has some fun comedy. Beau Bridges getting hooked on video games is funny. If not for 3 little kids hitchhiking around in what essentially is a commercial, I would be more fully behind this movie.

Welcome to a bad example of Nintendo Propaganda! 8-Bit Nintendo. 2 Bit Script. The Wizard is a lousy movie, but it's a guilty pleasure of mine. Directed by Todd Holland, the movie reminds me of Wonder Years meets 'Rain Man' with Nintendo. The Wizard also known as Joy Stick Heroes, Sweet Road, The Video Game Genius, Game Over and Gameboy in other countries is an adventure comedy-drama film about three children who decide to runaway to California after the death of a family member. The weak main plot is undermined, by the superior sub-plot of one of the children, Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards), while being emotionally withdrawn, has a useful skill in video games. He's so good, that he's allow to take part of a video game tournament. This 20% part of the film, brings most of the entertaining value; while the other 80% is under par. The whole emotional depth of Jimmy trying to overcome his grief for his sister, is truly not develop, right. That plot is not emotion enough, to care about, and nearly forgotten over the superior entertaining video game sub-plot. The jokes with Jimmy's father, Sam (Beau Bridges) & older brother, Nick (Christian Slater) trying to reach the children, first, between Putnam (Will Seltzer), a greedy and sleazy runaway-child bounty hunter does, is pretty awful and unfunny. Why are both groups sabotaging each other's efforts? Isn't the child well-being more important than this childish badgering? Why is the adults in this film, acting like children, while the children is acting more like adults? Most of the humor are really bad in this film. A young girl loudly accusing the man of molesting her is supposed to be funny? Not funny. Not funny at all. Lots of unrealistic kid movie moments that kinda hurt the film, a bit. How could a 9-year-old boy walk miles along a desert highway without being noticed? I doubt the kids would find enough old rich people playing video games to gambling against. It's not like today, where video games have more appeal to an older generation that lived through video games eras like Atari. Games were pretty mediocre, in graphics and story back then. I doubt many adults played video games at the time. The Wizard is famous for its numerous references to video games and accessories for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Power Glove is one of those scenes that make the product look amazing; while in truth, the power glove is indeed truly bad. It doesn't even work, most of the time with it hard to control difficulty. Playing the game, Rad Racer on it, isn't easy at all! The film was also well known for the debut of Super Mario Bros. 3. The whole game tournament was indeed tense. Still, it was a bit odd for Jimmy to find a cheap code on a yet to debut game. Honestly, how did he know where to find the warp levels? There were a lot of Inaccuracies BS moments throughout this film. A good example is when Jimmy plays Double Dragon at the bus stop, Corey remarks that Jimmy scored 50,000 points. Jimmy achieved this in less than two minutes of play when in reality it would take playing through nearly the entire game to do so, which would take much more time. Nearly every video game that's played for any length of time in this movie is depicted incorrectly. And this as Product Placement paid for by Nintendo. It is things like this; that would turn off viewers. Still, a lot of old school gamers, would love to revisit this film as it show cast gameplay from Nintendo hits like Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Contra, Double Dragon, Mega Man 2, Metroid, Ninja Gaiden. It was a bit odd for Nintendo to showcase, some of their really crappy games as well like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Zelda II: the Adventure of Link. As much, as it's nice to see somebody else, play the games well. It's well better to play it yourself. The movie is full of product placement, examples ranges from the family passes by the Cabazon Dinosaurs, a highway tourist attractions to the last part of the film taking place at Universal Studios in California. Large amounts of the time toward the end is use just to showcase extended advertisement for the studio tour. I think that one of the reasons, this movie fails. It felt like a feature length commercial than a movie. The supporting acting in the film was pretty alright at the time. Fred Savage as Jimmy's brother, Corey and Jenny Lewis as Haley were pretty good in their roles. The music by J. Peter Robinson is alright. Overall: This PG-rated 97 minutes, commercial movie has maintains a cult following within the video game culture for good reasons. It's clearly not for the story, but the nostalgia factor of the games that were represented here. So check it out if you want to. Other than that. This movie is game over.

I first saw The Wizard somewhere over Greenland in July 1990. After a long US holiday it was nice seeing a road movie to pass the long hours stuck on the plane. The movie is an utterly shameless 100-minute commercial for Nintendo products, the then imminent release of Super Mario Bros. 3 (even though 2 was never released in the US) and Universal's own Los Angeles theme park, but at the time I was just interested because of all the video games on show, though it does not speak well of youth that even in 1989 video games were still the number 1 sport.The actual plot woven into the commercial is truly heartbreaking though. Young, possibly autistic, catatonic Jimmy Woods (James Woods?) keeps wandering away from home, desperate to get to California. Half-brother Cory (Fred Savage) goes after him, attempting to pacify his desire to get to the west coast state. Cory thinks that Jimmy wants to enter a video game competition at Universal Studios but really he just wants to visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs - the last place of happy memories before the death of his twin sister, and he just wants to let her go.Really heavy-going stuff, and not a film I can enjoy watching as an adult in that regard. The film is poorly directed and features innumerable errors regarding the Nintendo products that they are promoting. How can the kids shout out the secrets of a video game that they have never played and that has only just been announced? For a commercial they sure didn't research their material very well. But it does win back some points for effective use of the original "Send me an Angel" by Real Life.Christian Slater and Beau Bridges pursue the boys as the older brother and dad, while a feisty teenage girl called Hayley helps them get to their destination on time. The travel montages and locations are all memorable and turn the journey into a nice rites-of-passage.It's become a cult classic in recent years, and will provoke even more nostalgia another 24 years down the line, but the heavy subject matter beneath the Nintendo-plugging means I can't go back again.

So back in the 80's there was this clever little gadget known as the Nintendo entertainment system, which brought all of us young and old alike together for some head smashin, hockey playing, mushroom eating good times...There were several things attached to NES back then that would transform a bystander into a hard core fan. One of those things which held much importance at the time was the magazine Nintendo Power. I have seen everything from early Atari with my grandad to Ps3, but never was there anything like NES. For what seems like ten years it had the market cornered and somewhere in that time the execs at NES decided, smartly i might add, to make a film with the best child star actor of all time, Fred Savage! At some point during this time there was a Major rumbling about this movie in Nintendo Power. This is pre-internet here, we had to get together and pass the magazine around to read about this movie, and the kicker was the secret game to be introduced during the climax of the movie. All i can say is this was a total watershed moment in NES history, peoples heads nearly exploded seeing Super Mario 3 on the big screen at the end. It's a movie packed to the brim with one liners and heart. And what i mean by heart is they didn't have to make a movie so utterly depressing about video games. Fred Savage's brother has lost his twin sister who DROWN, and he just wants to go to "cccalifornia" to put her things back inside a dinosaur. Well this movie confronts all kinds of issues, its a time-capsule and like i said its got a deeper plot then you could imagine for a movie about Italion plumbers. But they did it. And thank god for that! Ten thumbs up.