Every week or so you’ll hear about a video game being adapted for the big screen, especially with the gaming industry raking it in hand over fist these days. In the past year alone studios have touted the announcements of deals for game-based movies like World of Warcraft, Halo, and Metal Gear Solid. But what about the movies that already seem like video games? There are a fair share of flicks that feature everything from gimmicky camera styles to plotlines that seem like they were ripped right out of the latest console bestseller and plunked into multiplexes. Check out the list below and watch these video game movies that aren’t video game movies.

1. Elephant (2003): This Gus Van Sant film was inspired by the Columbine school shooters, who were in turn supposedly inspired by video games Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. The movie is made up of extremely long tracking shots, filmed just behind the character the story is currently following. By design, this makes the film look like a thirdperson game like Grand Theft Auto, except without all the hookers and drug-running.
…Read more

One of the things I love about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is the way it treats its two stars, John Cho (as Harold, or “Rold”) and Kal Penn (as Kumar). The plot could have been played with any hot young dudes in Hollywood in the roles – you’d maybe expect two white guys, one with blonde hair, one with brown – but instead the characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American. And it isn’t a big deal. Aside from a few derogatory, stereotypical comments made by unfavorable guys the duo meets on their adventure to find a White Castle, race isn’t an issue and doesn’t really come into play story wise.

However, the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, turns the color of their skin into the impetus of the story, which revolves around them being mistaken for terrorists (“North Korea and Al-Qaeda working together”). Almost disguised as a smarter, more politically satirical follow-up, Guantanamo Bay, which was directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote this movie and the original, is basically just an adaptation of a Truly Tasteless Jokes book — if every other page of that book were annotated with updates, apologies, corrections and clarifications. It’s a movie that wants to have its offensively stereotypical cake and eat it, too – using a kind of utensil we’re not accustomed to seeing used for such a meal. What I mean is that each joke is a play on a socially recognized stereotype. Easily stereotyped characters are set up as clichés (dumb white-trash hick from Alabama) only to be revealed as the opposite (he has a classy home with refined interior decorating and accoutrements), yet ultimately they’re also exposed as being a part of that stereotype (he’s married to his sister and they have an inbred cyclops child in the basement).

…Read more