It wasn’t that long ago that Activision announced they’d struck a deal with Brett Ratner to develop movies based on their video games –– and that he wants to direct a Guitar Hero film. Now the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction as Electronic Arts just announced that they’ve struck a three video game deal with Zack Snyder.
We caught up with Zack at last night’s Watchmen event to find out the details. As it turns out, he’s a late-night gaming addict, even in the middle of trying to finish a huge Hollywood movie.
The doomsday scenarios in movies can be pretty outlandish, but some of them are actually plausible. After all, in world where pirates have tanks, Hollywood doesn’t need to stray far from reality for a good yarn.
Below the jump, we put five doomsday movie scenarios to the plausibility test. If you’ve always secretly thought Waterworld was a work of dead-on global warming prophecy, read on.
As the shit hits the fan on Wall St., a more gradual, but equally serious shake-up is happening in the world of independent film. Paul shares stories from Independent Film Week, a tumultuous clash of ideas about what the future of cinema sans Hollywood will look like.
Karina checks in to tell us about Fantastic Fest. Along with alcohol, karaoke, and BBQ, she’s enjoyed the films Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer.
Choke, the new film based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), comes out tonight. Is this Sundance alum truly provocative cinema, or just the same old thing with some extra sex thrown in?
There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.
That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.
Today Lionsgate releases Midnight Meat Train––by all indications a cousin to the studio’s, um, classic fare like Saw and Hostel, but actually starring some name actors, like Bradley Cooperin just a hundred-something theaters, with no reviews. According to Grady Hendrix, it’s part of the studio’s effort to essentially slap the R-rated horror fans responsible for a decade’s worth of success in the face.
In the wake of the massive success of Stuff White People Like––the sometimes funny (but usually in a really annoying, condescending, post-collegiate know-it-all jerk-off sort of way) blog-to-book sensation that’s taken, um, seven or eight other blogs by storm over the pas six months––there have been, of course, imitators. The most recent is Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like, the most recent in a short line of semi0nonymous blogs which purport to offer tales from inside the drudgery of minimum wag Hollywood employment (see also Hollywood Temp Diaries, and wasn’t this the original gimmick behind Defamer?)
I like SHAL more than some of its competitors, if for no other reason than it actually has a voice and an idiosyncratic sense of humor … you know, like a blog should? Some recent entries of note: Earthquakes, Las Vegas, and Swingers (the diner, not the movie).
During Spout’s coverage of Comic-Con last week, my ears perked up during the Entertainment Weekly: Visionaries panel when Watchmendirector Zack Snyder started railing about the disconnect between video games and Hollywood. It’s nice to know that the director of next year’s mega-tentpole hopeful doesn’t want the marketing department at Warner Bros. to rush something craptacular to the waiting masses. Just like Steven Spielberg did in 1983.
Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.
If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.
The WGA strike is over, the Director’s Guild just signed an agreement, eyes turn to the the Screen Actors Guild whose contract expires this June and everyone is making statements laden with slippery subtext.
The Writers Guild made a statement about how their contract is ratified and everyone can expect them to work well with others now. P.S. Thanks to all the actors, producers and directors who lost work because of the strike. (Translation: We’ll be really, really, really cooperative with studios now. Unless, of course, our Screen Actor’s Guild brothers and sisters hit the picket line this summer.)
An AMPTP (studios) statement basically says what a pleasure it has been to work with the Director’s Guild. (Translation: If SAG strikes this summer, they’ll look like the thespian prima-donnas they are.)
CBS’s CEO makes a statement saying the strike was great! Kind of like a bad stomach flu that gets you to your bathing suit weight, CBS had no idea how much money it was wasting on writing new shows until they tightened their belts for strike time. Meanwhile, NBC leaves dozens biting their nails as Vegas’ season finale cliffhanger becomes strike casualty. (Translation: No more posh gigs for strikers.)
A call with Michel Gondry clears up our misconceptions of Be Kind Rewind–a movie I think is deceptively amazing but Kevin’s on the fence about–and both of us decide he’s a fascinating director. This Sunday, Diablo Cody will be crowned greatest screenwriter of 2008 at the Academy Awards (I predict) for Juno and I also predict it will crush her (and I’m not just saying that because I’m bitter there’s only a minute worth of interview to play here).
*Transcript of Michel Gondry interview after the jump
Portfolio points to this short film starring Robert Evans, designed to promote a line of luxury sunglasses inspired by the legendary producer. Mind Games, styled as a trailer for a film noir, briefly summarizes the Evans character’s infatuation with a cool blonde described by Fred Schreurs as “a raging, memoir-typing harridan on the order, one guesses, of some of Evans’ seven ex-wives.” I read it as a straight Ali MacGraw thing––”Whatever was in her eyes, it sure wasn’t love,” Evans says, in the hindsight of a betrayal, and then, in his trademarked rhetorical-inquisitive manner, admits to having been cuckolded: “Was I smart? No, I was dumb, with a capital ‘d’.” But any read is probably more than this guilty, late afternoon pleasure deserves––it is, after all, an ad for sunglasses that you and I cannot afford.
At The Circuit, John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga offer a number of signs that “the mantle of greatness is rapidly slipping over” Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas. I’m surely not going to argue with that, but I do think it’s interesting that Mayorga and Hopewell make it a point to set Reygadas apart from other hot young Mexican directors, such as Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro González Iñárritu, who crossed over to Hollywood success:
Reygadas has a niche in a pantheon - not new Mexican cinema; given the accessibility of and interest in film-making worldwide, the very concept of new national cinemas may be arcane -but new, left-field world cinema, up there with other unorthodoz film-makers such as, say, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Read: he’s making art films for die hards, and that’s never gonna translate to the masses.
I don’t know. I don’t want to be an elitist. I feel like I’m a woman of the people, or whatever. But I like it that Silent Light requires work to enjoy. It’s hard for me to reconcile the sad truth that popular culture as a whole feels more comfortable with Crash with subtitles.
Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:
My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.
Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:
But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.
The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.
Tom Cruise’s tabloid covers have lined a lot of bird cages, however we saw something fascinating behind his orthodontic masterpiece smile. Once a Hollywood boy-wonder, in recent years he has deconstructed his all-american persona. Now, with the release of the political thriller Lions for Lambs, Cruise tries his hand as studio mogul, heading United Artists. Will it work? What does the future hold for Cruise? Most interesting: What does a deep look into Cruise reveal about our culture’s progress or lack there of?
Today Lionsgate releases 
