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.
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
People are starting to say smart things about Speed Racer, sight unseen. The film has been screened for journalists who attended junkets, but those journalists have so far stuck to stuck to the studio’s review embargo––all of the really interesting stuff is being written by bloggers who are basing their critiques solely on promo materials like stills, trailers, and now clips.
It’s these seven new clips posted by Colider.com that prompted iO9’s Annalee Newitz to start spouting sci-fi philosophy. “In this scene, where Speed and his pals race through a geometrically-impossible “ice mountain,” it’s clear we’re inside an artificial world where humans and machines have become interchangeable,” she writes. “Watching Speed and his car is like seeing the movie Tron from the point of view of one of the programs.” Tron references are always sexy.
You can watch the clips at either Colider or iO9, but they don’t seem to be easily embeddable. Colider’s are crisp and HD sparkly; it looks like Newitz’ crack Gawker Media tech team scraped the clips in order to re-post them on their own site, but I kind of prefer the lower resolution. Especially with that ice cave clip, the pixelation causes the image to blur into a wild four-dimensional abstract expressionist canvas. It made my eyes cross, but in a good way.
According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewedTron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:
Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.
“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.
[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)
In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”
Director Andy Fickman and stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Carla Gugino discuss the “reimagining” of the Witch Mountain movies — this one is called Race to Witch Mountain. But really, all I remember is the new footage from Tron 2, which actually stars Jeff Bridges.
