The Best Video Game Movie Ever

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It’s something of a truism that movies based on video games are, well, terrible. Really, truly, unabashedly terrible. I’m still trying to get my money back for having sat through Wing Commander (USA, 1999), even though it was a matinee. And I went on a free pass.

The attempt to transfer the experience of playing a game, interacting as an active participant, to the decidedly passive experience of watching a film, fails, without fail, time and time again (cf. Uwe Boll). Not to assign value to the various modes of culture consumption—film, at its best, offers a transcendent experience and forces active mental participation, while the mere fact of interactivity in video games does not guarantee a worthwhile, active thinking experience—but the basic expectations one brings to playing games differ from those one brings to watching a film.

Choices, options, paths are, of course, constrained by the game as readily as a director positions actors in a scene, but the illusion of choice, of agency, remains, and this sense of being in control appeals to the gamer—and it’s this sense that doesn’t translate across genres.

Video game films fail most often because they attempt to portray figures from the games that the gamers themselves control. If the long delayed Halo film ever comes to fruition, it will fail, because what the screen Master Chief does is not necessarily what I would have done; his thoughts, given voice on the screen, as he mows through the Covenant forces, were not my thoughts as I did the same in the game.

But they finally did it. I finally saw not just a good video game movie, but the best video game movie ever.

Best Video Game Movie. Ever!

What is it? The Damned United (UK, 2009). But, you protest, that’s not a video game movie! Isn’t, it, though?

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Great Moments in Cinema: The Giant Head in The Sun Also Rises

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When you’re willing to waste the talents of Ava Gardner, Errol Flynn, and Eddie Albert, you better have something to show for your efforts, and Henry King’s sadly mediocre The Sun Also Rises (USA, 1957) makes up for the film’s non-Hemingway-esque ending with a gem of a shot:

It's a giant drinking head. Huh. Don't see that often.

With all of Hollywood’s focus on CGI effects these days, you just don’t find such fine papier-mâché craftsmanship anymore, and I doubt there are many actors who could pull one off (literally, perhaps). The entire fiesta sequence of the film is, indeed, one long paean to the giant papier-mâché head in all its glory.

Lost Toys: Marx Toys’ Navarone Play Set

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At some point, I suppose it’s inevitable that one looks back upon childhood and thinks about toys. No matter your generation, your toys were much cooler than the new-fangled gizmos the current generation plays with, and darn it, I’m right about that. Because not much can compare to Marx Toys’ Navarone Play Set!

Installing the Guns of Navarone

Note that this large, grey play set, displayed here in a happy moment on Christmas Day, 1976, does not seem to be officially linked to Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone action-thriller novel from 1957 nor the 1961 movie based upon the same. There’s no tie-in language on the packaging, which can be seen in a story on the Official Marx Toy Museum from the July 13, 2008, Reading Eagle, and the name of the play set from the box is “Famous World War II Battle of Navarone Giant Play Set,” not “The Guns of Navarone Play Set.”

But, um, Navarone doesn’t actually exist outside of MacLean’s fervid imagination, and there was no “Famous World War II Battle” there outside of book covers or movie theaters. I suppose IP lawyers were less active in those days. To live in simpler times…

The play set itself was, for a young lad, a work of beauty and genius all at once. Lots of cannons, rope ladders for scaling the face of the mountain, a working elevator in the back, and even bunk beds! And tons and tons of plastic army men—not that I didn’t have tons anyway, but more was always better. It was, in truth, sort of a Barbie house for plastic army men, though one bristled at the comparison at the time.

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The TastyPie’s New Clothes

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I’m certainly no traditionalist when it comes to Philadelphia foods—my iconoclastic leanings see me prefer the roast pork sandwich over the cheesesteak, wit or witout—but changing my beloved TastyPie? What manner of sacrilege is this?

New Box. Same Pie?

On entering a trusty Wawa not too long ago, I was confronted with one of these creme-colored boxes, purporting to house an authentic TastyPie.

For the sadly uninitiated, a TastyPie is traditionally housed in a blue cardboard box, the top wrapped in cellophane (a Coconut Creme example shown below, opened in the only proper TastyPie extraction method):

Why change a good thing?

Were these changes merely box-deep, or had some terrible, marketing-driven alchemy altered the substance within?

I had to find out…

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A Rendezvous with "C’était un rendez-vous"

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Now, I’m no gearhead, but through my recent experiences with Forza 3, I’ve gained a slight appreciation for the sound of a fine engine as it pushes the redline then drops down after a smooth shift. Engines actually sound differently at different revolutions. Who would have thunk?

So when Wired ran a story featuring a short film with Jay Leno taking his new AMG SLS out for a spin on the near-deserted early-morning streets of Los Angeles in homage to a film called C’était un rendez-vous, I was curious:

You’d have to be mad to try to remake Rendezvous, Claude Lelouche’s high-speed dash through the streets of Paris at dawn. Rendezvous is a classic. A one-off. It is best left alone, as that remake The Run showed.

But that’s not to say you can’t riff off it.

So I located the source film thanks to the magical Internet, and while I was disappointed that the engine noises are seemingly dubbed in, unlike the Leno film, I wasn’t disappointed at all in the nine-minute slice of cinéma vérité I found.

(Update: The video was pulled by the rights holder. There’s a short trailer on YouTube posted by the rights holder, but I can’t recommend it, as they place annoying synth-pop over the driving, which is even worse than the dubbed engine noise.)

It’s the little bit of artifice at the very end that makes this film art, rather than a reckless stunt. Without that scene, the literal “date” of the title, this is just a car driving very quickly through Paris.