Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Movie Review: the Cine-Sib on "Gamer" and "Final Destination 3D"

The intrepid sibling went to see two flicks that I wasn't going to waste my money on (sorry, Gerard Butler), and his mini-reviews are in:
Gamer, while high-concept in premise of visualizing the zeitgeist of the gaming era, fails more than it succeeds, relying more on gratuitous excesses than its sharp social commentary on how massive multiplayer online gaming (MMOG) has affected pop culture, its obvious trappings, where in a future dystopia convicts vying for freedom are mind-controlled as players in real-life death matches a la Running Man & Death Race. (MM notes: the Cine-Sib did like Death Race.)

Final Destination 3D succeeds in taking advantage of the growing 3D medium, placing the viewer right in the middle of the action of Death's Rube Goldberg machine as chain reactions of events lead the characters one by one in sequence to their in...evitable grimly depicted demise, despite attempts to alter their fate, though ultimately becoming anti-climatic due to the very premise of the movie and its unoriginality.
The Cinema-Mad Sibling, by the way, laughingly told me that he tried to make the mini-reviews sound like Nerdspeak.

The summer movie season is over, and now we're in the usual morass of mediocrity until the Christmas movie season of Oscar-bait. I kind of want to see Surrogates, though.

A footnote to the whole MMO/MMOG/MMORPG Internet gaming subculture thing. You're probably far better off enjoying the delightful web series The Guild (now in season 3).

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