Thompson On Hollywood

Grand Theft Auto IV: Early Review

Ben Fritz reviews the new Grand Theft Auto game. He likes it---a lot. My vidgame experience is strictly throwing things in the cave of the Mountain King, trying to survive the Oregon Trail, noodling around on the island in Myst and Riven, and playing with various iterations of The Sims. In other words, I am a girl.

Boys however are trading in their old games, throwing yard sales and hectoring their parents to get their hands on this bloody game, which actually threatens to deflate this weekend's b.o. talleys.

Here's some of the review:

"Grand Theft Auto IV” marks a huge leap forward for videogames as an immersive experience while making little more than a few tweaks to the ultra-successful franchise's formula. The technological prowess and artistic detail are so phenomenal and the sheer amount of content is so staggeringly deep that players will find themselves drawn into Liberty City like no other fictional place. Such deep immersion sometimes highlights the flaws in “Grand Theft Auto’s” well-worn formula, but that will be little more than an asterisk for the millions of gamers sure to be carjacking their way through “GTA IV” for a long, long time to come.

UPDATE: The NYT put its Grand Theft Auto IV review on the front page of its arts section. So did the LAT. And while LAT op ed columnist Tim Rutten admits the game is a "work of genius," he is dismayed by this media acceptance of "an art form in search of an artist."

The Digital Future: Are These the Good Old Days?

David Cohen here, while Anne Thompson is away for the week. Had lunch recently with tech legend Ray Feeney to talk about what's going on with visual effects, digital production and 3-D. Ray has been saying for a while now that the industry is undergoing it's biggest transformation since the advent of sound. Bigger than color, certainly.

But the question is, what is the industry being transformed into? Ray's argument is that an all-digital pipeline -- everything from cameras to post to digital projectors to mobile video -- isn't just a different way of making movies, it's a new medium. But when every new medium is introduced, people start by doing what they already know how to do. In early movies, they tried filming stage plays. ("The Cocoanuts," anyone?) In early television, they did soaps (borrowed from radio), long-form dramas (like the movies) and variety shows (like vaudeville) until "I Love Lucy" pointed the way to the mega-hit sitcom. That's where we are now with digital moviemaking: using the new tools to make the same kind of thing. We're still waiting for the "I Love Lucy" of the digital age.

Ray says:

I joke with the people on our group who are working with this stuff that when I started in the industry in the ’70s, it was a time when Technicolor was shutting down three-strip stuff and there was a lot of nostalgic looking back on that era, like, 'Wow, as a technologist it must have been really incredible to be around when they were just getting the color in motion pictures and all that.' So when we came along, we were the young puppies and those were the good-old days we would talk to the old guard about.

I tell the people working on our projects that these are the good old days. This (digital) stuff, nobody knows how this should be done. There are no standards and people are trying anything.

Whatever's coming, though, I think one thing's almost certain: It'll be disorienting to Baby Boomers like me whose tastes were formed in the analog age. Videogames are going to have more influence on storytelling and film grammar. Visual effects will be used in more stylized ways, as in "Sin City" and "300."

Personally, I'm looking forward to it. I think. Even if the only thing that would get me to buy a PS3 is the Blu-Ray player.

Pirates Director Verbinski Disses Disney

Ben Fritz's new video game blog The Cut Scene is off to a flying start. Here he reports on D.I.C.E. keynote speaker Gore Verbinski's trashing of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean videogames.

Video Games: Immersing in 3-D Wii

True confession: I don't play videogames. I'm one of those people who threw things in the cave of the mountain king, played Myst and Riven and The Sims and that's about the extent of it. But this how-to video fascinates me and reminds me of the power of the people on the wild and crazy tech frontier. Check out this mindblowing college kid's ability to turn Wii inside out.

[Hat Tip: Cinerati]

Boxoffice vs. Vidgames

Technology Expert has an interesting theory on why boxoffice has been lagging of late: Halo 3. What? A videogame? UPDATE: Ad Age pursues the same notion.

Poor box office receipts have been blamed on a number of things (besides a bad movie, that is), including poor weather, natural disasters, embarrassing news for the stars, strong box office competition, etc. This is the first time we have heard a video game blamed for bad box office.

Halo 3 was officially released on Sept. 26th, and 1 1/2 weeks later, "The Heartbreak Kid," released to far lower receipts than expected: predictions had been for a $20 - 25 million opening weekend, and it only brought in $14 million. The receipts for that weekend were 27% below the same weekend the year before, according to research firm Media by Numbers. That's the movie industry's worst performance for an October weekend since 1999.

Movie executives are blaming it all on the Master Chief, which we all know is a mega-hit. But are they just saying this to save face?

Let's take a look at the weekend prior to the disappointing Oct. 5. Receipts for that weekend (once again by Media by Numbers) show a 9% overall drop from 2006, a 4% from for the top 12 films from the prior weekend, and a 12% drop for the top 12 films from 2006.

Hmmm, maybe they're on to something here. Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket On the other hand, based on the IMDB rating of 5.7 for "The Heartbreak Kid," could it just be a bad movie?

Fox Is Not Taming Hitman Vidgame

[Posted by Ben Fritz and Tatiana Siegel] Rumors are ricochetting like a hail of bullets across the Internet (see here and here, for example) that Fox is radically re-editing its upcoming vidgame adaptation Hitman to earn a PG-13 rating. Film is in the midst of post-production and, as with all films, changes are undoubtedly being made. But a source close to the project and a Fox rep both confirmed that director Xavier Gens is still on board, and the movie will absolutely come out with an R rating. Sources say it will most likely be a "hard R," in fact. Which makes sense, since turning intense action game Hitman into a PG-13 movie would be like making a PG-13 biopic about Paris Hilton: What's the point?