Movies Based on Board Games

With Battleship coming out, I have been pondering what other board games would make great movies.  And since Clue was a smash success, I think my movies wouldn't do so bad either.

Monopoly:  In 1920's New York City, a eccentric billionaire invites a group of millionaire business men to a dangerous game.  The men must buy up as mush of New York City property as possible.  The game gets out of hand when the millionaires take it too seriously and trick each other's families into staying at tourist trap hotels.  Who will survive the vicious game of buying and selling?  Starring Michael Douglas, Alec Baldwin, and Ryan Gosling as Thimble, Race Car and Yorkshire and Martin Sheen as Montgomery Moneybags.




Pass The Pigs:  A community of farmers in Soviet Russia learn to coexist in economic hard times by renting out (or passing) livestock to each other.  A warm heartfelt comedy about being a true neighbor and looking out for one another.  Guest cameo from Martin Sheen as Wilbert the talking pig.  Subtitles in English.

Apples to Apples:  Hilary Swank plays an OCD English teacher that tells her students to be brutally honest when confronted with different nouns.  Eventually all her students start yelling out "ugly," "creepy," and "Delicious" when confronted with family, girlfriends and Helen Keller.  Things go topside when the protagonist played by Shia Lebouf reveals that he thinks his girlfriend is "smelly," "rich," "disgusting," "beautiful," and "dazzling."




Connect Four:  Four government spies find out that one of them is a mole.  Now they have to connect how their fellow spy is entangled in this dangerous game of betrayal and sabotage.  How do they connect?  Will they connect before the whole government topples from its grid?




Don't Wake Daddy:  A psycho drama about an alcoholic father who is in charge of an estranged daughter.  Though he is very abusive to her, she dreams of a perfect life with him.  In a heart wrenching ending, the father gets into a coma and has the same dream as his daughter.  Billy Bob Thorton steals the show as Gordy, the retired Nascar driver, and Dakota Fanning is the daughter pining for a better life.

 Sorry:  Two Alaskan fishers get stuck on an iceberg.  Tensions flare as global warming melts the ice berg and they soon learn that they cannot coexist on the same space.  Who will survive and who will be sorry?  Harrison Ford and Topher Grace star as the Alaskan farmers.  Natalie Portman plays the mysterious voice from Aurora.






Parcheesi: A gold hearted musical about, Teddy, an old man who finds that his house is blocked off by a wall.  The only way he can get home is by going around the world and getting home from the other side.  Along the way he meets Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Jackie Chan.  A feel good movie about coming of age.




Operation:  Ryan Reynolds wakes up on an operating bed in Afghanistan to find that he has 8 bombs sewn into his torso.  It's a race against time as Kirsten Dunst, a retired doctor, must remove all bombs without moving them drastically.  Johnny Depp plays the sadistic terrorist doctor, Doctor Rednose.  From the director of Phone Booth comes this horrifying nightmare.

Jenga:  Michael Bay's finest science fiction piece to date.  Two demolition experts, Andy Sanberg and Jonah Hill, accidentally blow up a building created by an ancient race of aliens.  Now the aliens exact revenge by destroying popular buildings around the world.  Featuring unused CGI from Transformers.   

Resistance 3

Is Resistance Useless?

 The number 3 is magical this season.  We have Resistance, Gears of War, Battlefield, Uncharted and Modern Warfare 3 just waiting to blow away our minds.  Resistance 3 was the first to come out and its definitely the under dog in the list.  It's a PS3 original with not a huge following behind it compared to the other big guns.  With that said, Resistance puts a very solid effort together.

Resistance tells the story of an alien virus that infects the Earth and creates an army of Chimera beings.  Like most alien games, the intrusive invaders are feral, mindless beasts hellbent on destruction and yet they are smart enough to build weapons, space crafts and huge towers.  In the third Resistance, you play Joseph Capelli, a former soldier who decides to ignore the whole alien invasion thing and start a family.  Unfortunately, opportunity knocks, and Joseph must journey with a doctor into alien occupied New York to stop a worm hole.

Anyone who has just gotten comfortable with Resistance 2 will notice some differences.  This comes with pros and cons.  The major change is that you no longer have recovering health (unless you unlock the cheat).  If you are low on health you need to scour the area for a health kit.  This gets annoying because you have to leave the heat of battle to look for a health kit.  Sometimes you are pinned down by fire and you have one bar of health left and there's absolutely no hope for you of getting out.  The upside is that its harder to kill you than in the second one.

Resistance also removed the two guns at a time rule in favor of the Doom style buffet of weapons.  This was a smart idea because you never really got much exposure to guns in R2.  Now you can pull out an ice gun, electricity gun, machine gun, tag gun, shotgun, missile launcher and mutator at any second.  The reason behind having millions of guns at your disposal is the ability to upgrade them as you use them.  Your shotgun gets flame rounds, the electricity gun develops an arc caster that shocks multiple enemies and the carbine gets a bayonet.  This makes every gun useful in its own way and necessary for different sections.  The only drawback is that there are no hotkeys to get a certain gun.  You have to stop the action and pick out a gun in order to use it.

The campaign mode is pretty straight forward.  You don't have one epic journey as much as you have a lot of levels with mini games inside of them.  In one level you are defending a bar from enemies coming out of a drop ship.  In another level you are running through the sewers trying to fend off the egg hatchlings.  Some levels start off slow, while others propel you straight into the action.  One of the new concepts that Resistance 2 didn't have is the open ended battlegrounds where you can strategize how you get into the battle.  Overall, the levels are all fast paced and gripping in their own way.  You can also get into the action with a friend over co-op.  You either have a human friend or an online friend, but the game has no matchmaking service to help you find an online friend.  That means you'll actually have to meet someone face to face and talk to them (shudder).

Resistance has always had a confusing story and I am convinced that the writers are as confused as we are.  It almost seems like they were trying to fuse Half-Life, Gears of War, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty 2 and Halo into one epic bundle.  The result is a muddy universe that no one can get sucked into.  I groan at games where you have to go to Wikipedia in order to understand their story.  I'm not majoring in Resistance Studies so why do I have homework?  Resistance 3 has some of the best cut scenes and touching moments, which is not the biggest feat considering that the other 2 games had as much drama as bread mold.  After six hours the campaign ends and the final cutscene drops the curtain on the franchise. No epic ending, no twisted plot turns and absolutely no super boss-it just ends.   Resistance seems to live off its crazy gameplay and innovative weapons more than its story.

Multiplayer is changed from the previous two games.  You no longer get XP just by shooting people; now you have to kill your opponent to level up.  This means that I didn't get points for some matches because I couldn't get a single kill.  Resistance's multiplayer plays a lot like Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare.  You select your class, perks and you get more stuff as you level up.  The gameplay loves throwing perks, berserks and tons of little upgrades at you so that you feel like you are doing stuff.  Some of the perks include having a mirage of yourself to distract enemies and the ability to track footsteps.  But even with all those little add-ons it's hard to get into the action if you are not an intense multiplayer addict.  The second Resistance gave you much more incentive to stick it out because of partial XP rewards and the fact that your perks would build up over time instead of waiting for you to get 3 kills in a row.  It's not a trashy multiplayer by any means, it's just not as easy to get into.

The graphics are a mixed bag.  The game is excellent at portraying a war torn post apocalyptic America.  Each level is beautiful in its own way.  but the textures on some of the aliens are a little weak.  I've always had a problem with the fact that the Chimera race has no distinct art concept.  It's almost as if the artists copy pasted their textures onto Left 4 Dead and Halo enemies.

Resistance 3 is all about Joseph Capelli leaving his comfortable life with his wife and child to end a war.  He had a choice to make and he chose the greater good.  Sounds very similar to Jesus in the choices he had to make.  Jesus could have chosen to stay in Heaven, but he opted to do ministry on Earth.  Jesus could have chosen to live the rest of his years on Earth, but he choose to get arrested and crucified for our benefit.  Reminds me of the Bible verse from Phil 2:5-6

 Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human!

 Resistance 3 was supposed to be a counter for Xbox fans getting Gears of War 3.  While Gears of War got higher praises because of story, I don't think Resistance is out of the running.  The gameplay is tight and intense, the weapons are insanely fun and ultimately you are going to have a good romping time.  But if you already own the other two Resistance games than you should think long and hard before you shell 60 bucks to get this one.

Score out of 7

Graphics and Sound 5: Gorgeous vistas and environments, but not so pretty monsters.

Gameplay 6: Fast and intense campaign modes with exciting weapons.  You'll be done with the campaign mode in 6 hours.  Finding health kits and changing weapons takes you out of the action.

Multiplayer 5: Multiplayer is kind of slow for newcomers. It competes fairly well with the top shooters of today, but it still lacks some polish.

Content 3: It wears its M rating like a badge.  Lots of blood, gibbing and swearing.  Jesus' is mentioned more in this game than in some books of the Bible.  The mutator gun is not for the squeamish.

Final 5:  A very solid effort from Insomniac Games.  They still prove that they have a handle on the FPS market.  I'm relieved that I don't have to go solely to Halo to get my sci-fi shooter fix.  But I wish some of the elements that made Resistance 2 so great were in here.

Guide To Parody/Satire Movies

Scary Movie 1-4, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, Naked Gun, Disaster Movie, Top Secret, Airplane 1-2, Epic Movie, Here Come The Spartans, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Part Deux, Silence of the Hams, Vampires Suck and Loaded Weapon all have something in common...they could not make more money than Titanic.  But strangely that is okay because all those movies would have no problem mocking Titanic.  The irreverent clown inside each one of us loves the slapstick parody movie, but due to a consistent steaming pile of crappy offerings we have been afraid to watch them.  This post does not want to solve this dilemma, but remind us what made us fall in love with the parody movie.

Here's what we love about parody movies:

1. Run-On Jokes- whenever a joke involves an ever evolving list of crazier and crazier jokes.

2. Popular Culture Inside Joke- using some popular time piece from culture into your video.  Jive talk was taken from the movie Shaft.  No one remembers Shaft's version.

3. Puns- it's the little stupid jokes that make us shout "genius" when we hear them.

4. The Fart in Church- taking something meant to be serious and making it sound silly at the last second

5. Actor debuts- it's always a fun Easter Egg to see a well known character pop out of nowhere

6.  The Set-up- jokes that are prepared in such a way that something silly can easily come after them.

Michael Bay Awarded For Best Slow Motion Transformer Jump

After a three movie struggle, acclaimed director, Michael Bay, is receiving the award for most slow motion large robot jumps in the air.  With a staggering 100 slow motion jumps, taking up a solid hour of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay has earned this prestigious award.

At the award ceremony Michael Bay had this to say, "Some directors strive for plot clarity and riveting emotional scenes, but I want my movies to be about robots tumbling through the air in slow motion.  It's never been done and I am pretty good at it."

Those who shared this honor with Michael Bay clearly confessed that his movie had the most tumbling robots jumping in slow motion of any genre in existence.  Due to his fear that a movie might try to steal this feat, Michael Bay made sure that no scene was left untouched by his patented robot tumbling through the air in slow motion.

"What I was trying to capture," he commented, "is that robots sometimes jump and when they do jump its important that the audiences truly capture it frame by frame repeatedly.  I didn't want the audience leaving the theater wondering 'I wonder if robots can jump slowly.'"

Though not without its obstacles, some of the execs tried to hamper Michael Bay's style with character development, romance, and robots that stood perfectly still on the ground.  It didn't take away from the goal he was trying to accomplish.  Though in one seen, Shia Lebeouf was going to turn into a robot so he could jump through the air slowly.

Analysts say that if the slow motion jumps were taken out of the movie it would only be twelve minutes long.  Michael Bay commented on this saying, "I don't make robots jump in slow motion through the air because it automatically makes them better; I do it because I have an obvious compulsive obsession and need help immediately."

We look forward to Michael Bay's newest movie, Jumpo the Slow Motion Jumping Robot.

Avengers Reboot in the Making

The Avengers movie is scheduled to hit theaters in May 2012, but Marvel studios is already setting up the reboot for April 2012.  Seems a bit premature?  Apparently the Studio thinks that the movie is way too outdated and completely forgettable and thus a reboot is coming out to bring the older one into the modern age.

Prebooting, or remaking a movie before it comes out, is becoming all the rage in cinema trends.  It started with simple reboots of movies in the 70's and 80's like Tron and Captain America.  But current fan stats show that reboots are not coming out fast enough.  One fan stated: "Spiderman is so old.  It came out in 2001, but that was like fifty years ago.  We need something fresh."

To answer the cry for rebooting demands, Hollywood has set up a branch of writers who are directly prebooting.  Just recently Kevin Smith wrote the script to the new Flash movie and then threw out and started writing Flash Begins.  Conan the Barbarian is receiving a reboot, but not a reboot of the one that just came out.  They are prebooting a release of Conan that they are planning to make in 2013.  Director of prebooting, Al Jacobs said, "We have to stay one step ahead of the movies that haven't been made yet.  Right now we are working on some preboots for Toy Story 4, Indiana Jones 5 and Footloose 3.  The trick is to remake the movie before the movie is made."

Movies like Batman Begins and Iron Man are starting to show their rust and that is exactly why prebooting needs to be made.  Hollywood needs to let the cinema enthusiasts know that they not only can make something that was already made, but they can remake something that hasn't even been made yet.  With today's technology running at break neck speed making a movie with an original idea seems ancient.  They now need to make sure a movie has the most current technology at the very moment it is made.

Movies are coming equipped with self-prebooting technology.  Instead of a production company having to fear that a movie might get one year old the movie can automatically reboot itself.  This technology was shown at a premiere in NYC as the audience was treated to a reboot of Ironman Begins.  During one of the scenes where Ironman is flying through the air, the movie automatically paused, downloaded new actors and green screen technology and rebooted itself. Robert Downey Jr. commented on this, "The technology is amazing.  We might never need a new script again."

But prebooting may have its critics.  Some argue that this has made Hollywood writers lazy and copacetic.  But head writer of the preboot of Jurassic Park Begins, Jeff Winters, had this to say about it, "There's a lot of hard work in copy and pasting other people's scripts.  It's even harder getting inspiration for a reboot that hasn't even been made yet."