Game movies
Jul. 28th, 2011 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomSo apparently they're making a movie based on the game Battleship? The movie is apparently about space aliens engaging humanity in a naval battle where neither side knows exactly where the enemy ships are.
And it occurs to me, the space of board-game movies seems like a largely untapped one, doesn't it? There's Clue of course, which while not necessarily a good movie is at least an awesome movie. But consider the following:
Monopoly could very easily be a David Mamet–style drama about cutthroat real-estate investors in Atlantic City.
Candy Land would be an unutterably terrible computer-animated film for six-year-olds that's a blatant ripoff of Strawberry Shortcake except without the depth of character and plot.
Mastermind is a psychological-suspense spy thriller in which an enemy spymaster captures several American agents and only communicates with them through mysterious patterns of flashing lights in their cell.
Sorry! is an ontological mystery—twelve people from all walks of life find themselves trapped in a featureless labyrinth (where the floors occasionally turn into slides with no warning) with no memory of how they got there, and have to work together to figure out where they are and how to get out. (Spoiler: it's Purgatory!)
Trivial Pursuit would be a documentary-style competition movie about the no-holds-barred world of quiz bowl.
And those are just classic traditional games. We can get even more variety in plots by looking at German-style designer games.
Ghost Stories: This game is practically a horror movie already: a team of four monks defend an ancient Chinese city from the ghosts and monsters that plague it every night. Shadows Over Camelot is similarly easy to adapt.
Ticket to Ride is a comic adventure film set in the 1890s in which an eccentric railroad investor makes five hobos the following offer: whichever of them can ride the rails from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in the shortest amount of time will win fabulous wealth. (Seriously, I'd go see this movie.)
Basari: An Indiana Jones–style adventure archeologist finds that bandits have made off with a cache of priceless gems found in an Egyptian tomb, and must track them down at the marketplace before the gems have all been sold off.
Carcassonne: Peasants in medieval France discover that the very layout of the countryside around them changes when they're not watching it. As the monks in their cloisters work against time to find out what is going on, the peasants solve the problem the only way they know how: send people out into the countryside to stand around and watch the landscape constantly.
And of course... an adventure film set in the age of exploration in which pioneers voyage across the sea to colonize a newly discovered island, forging a new civilization out of stone, wood, brick, wheat, and sheep.
...What else?
And it occurs to me, the space of board-game movies seems like a largely untapped one, doesn't it? There's Clue of course, which while not necessarily a good movie is at least an awesome movie. But consider the following:
Monopoly could very easily be a David Mamet–style drama about cutthroat real-estate investors in Atlantic City.
Candy Land would be an unutterably terrible computer-animated film for six-year-olds that's a blatant ripoff of Strawberry Shortcake except without the depth of character and plot.
Mastermind is a psychological-suspense spy thriller in which an enemy spymaster captures several American agents and only communicates with them through mysterious patterns of flashing lights in their cell.
Sorry! is an ontological mystery—twelve people from all walks of life find themselves trapped in a featureless labyrinth (where the floors occasionally turn into slides with no warning) with no memory of how they got there, and have to work together to figure out where they are and how to get out. (Spoiler: it's Purgatory!)
Trivial Pursuit would be a documentary-style competition movie about the no-holds-barred world of quiz bowl.
And those are just classic traditional games. We can get even more variety in plots by looking at German-style designer games.
Ghost Stories: This game is practically a horror movie already: a team of four monks defend an ancient Chinese city from the ghosts and monsters that plague it every night. Shadows Over Camelot is similarly easy to adapt.
Ticket to Ride is a comic adventure film set in the 1890s in which an eccentric railroad investor makes five hobos the following offer: whichever of them can ride the rails from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles in the shortest amount of time will win fabulous wealth. (Seriously, I'd go see this movie.)
Basari: An Indiana Jones–style adventure archeologist finds that bandits have made off with a cache of priceless gems found in an Egyptian tomb, and must track them down at the marketplace before the gems have all been sold off.
Carcassonne: Peasants in medieval France discover that the very layout of the countryside around them changes when they're not watching it. As the monks in their cloisters work against time to find out what is going on, the peasants solve the problem the only way they know how: send people out into the countryside to stand around and watch the landscape constantly.
And of course... an adventure film set in the age of exploration in which pioneers voyage across the sea to colonize a newly discovered island, forging a new civilization out of stone, wood, brick, wheat, and sheep.
...What else?
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Date: 2011-07-29 01:20 am (UTC)the only board game i really want to see in film form is Kill Doctor Lucky.
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Date: 2011-07-29 01:50 am (UTC)He's modestly refraining from mentioning that we've already cast this.
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Date: 2011-07-29 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 02:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 03:27 am (UTC)To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 02:50 am (UTC)Various Wacky Hijinks ensue.
KV manages to retrieve his object very quickly, only to belatedly discover, following a run-in with a mysterious woman (LVK), that he has run afoul of the railroad investor's arch-nemesis, a wealthy banker (TL), and now he has both of them on his tail. The mysterious woman is the banker's mistress, but she ends up switching sides and she and KV decide to become bank robbers.
CE-L, who somehow turns out to be
Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 03:08 am (UTC)- KV's is a sort of honky-tonk piano.
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- CE-L's has a sort of Appalachian feel; it's played on fiddles at a fast tempo.
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The main version of the theme is a typical orchestral film score arrangement, albeit with a somewhat more nineteenth-century flavour. Bryn Terfel would sing over the closing credits.
Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 03:09 am (UTC)And the ending where-are-they-now narration, of course, after he's said what's happened to himself and the other three hobos, he says, "And as for [
Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 03:17 am (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 09:28 pm (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 02:23 am (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 05:54 am (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 12:41 pm (UTC)One suspects that there are lots of really minor roles that are played by the same handful of people, each of whom also gets a slightly more featured small part (as in my case and
Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 05:46 am (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-29 10:24 pm (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 02:11 am (UTC)Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 02:22 am (UTC)Probably JLaR and I have an entertaining argument or two, which ought to make
Re: To Wit...
Date: 2011-07-30 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 02:41 am (UTC)Oops. Sorry. I got a little carried away there.
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Date: 2011-07-29 02:57 am (UTC)Pandemic, of course, is fairly obvious.
And what would Diplomacy be but a four-hour World War I epic?
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Date: 2011-07-29 04:10 am (UTC)Me, I'd like to see them make a movie out of Stone Age.
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Date: 2011-07-29 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 04:42 am (UTC)Innovation is actually a 4 sided LARP written by ophlebkwu, with evolving societies and jostling mechanics for political domination.
Dixit is an Aronofsky like surrealist film about a group of friends trying to convince their drug addled friend to come back to reality, but can only reach him when they interpret everyday images the same way he does.
Turing Game the movie was already written by yaleartificer.
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Date: 2011-07-29 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-29 06:38 am (UTC)Alan Grant icon up today, how fitting.
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Date: 2011-07-29 07:08 am (UTC)"All you see are the markets and the gold, and even though you yourself came from a shanty town and earned your first provincial government through the sweat of the village smithies, now you claim yourself above them, and would see the village trashed if it got you a few coin... so you can retain the services of torturers, and hire goons to do your dirty work. Your chancellor's only idea is to start over, your bureaucrats are just in the way, and when all your officials come to you at once, then you wish you had the village to get things done for you, don't you?"
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Date: 2011-07-29 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-30 03:51 am (UTC)Give Me the Brain, directed by Kevin Smith, as a reworked script for Clerks III.
Munchkin, a Coen brothers movie about an adventuring party that gets together for one last job, only to find that when you're deep in the dungeon, it's every man for himself.
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Date: 2011-07-30 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-30 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-30 05:12 am (UTC)It's preceded by a 10-minute short animation in the same universe, named Space Alert.
Through the Ages: World War III strikes and wipes out humanity. An experimental, immortal military robot with a soft spot for humanity is apparently the sole survivor. He discovers time travel and travels back to the classical era, trying to alter history. He gets caught up in events and finds himself accidentally taking the place of famous historical leaders.
In addition to having to survive various disasters and invasions, he finds that he has a nemesis working against him: an amoral fem-bot that Nikola Tesla originally built to be his romantic partner, who has also traveled back in time, and wants to destroy humanity and create a world inhabited only by robots. Spoiler: in the end, our hero becomes a board game designer, and humanity is saved when world leaders are too caught up playing playing eurogames against each other to declare war. An ambitious, extensive plot, but when has that stopped Pixar before?
Can't Stop: This movie has already been written.
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Date: 2011-07-30 05:51 am (UTC)Palastgeflüster is a black-comic satire about a short-tempered but short-sighted king, easily manipulated by his Lord Chamberlain, as all the courtiers and servants jockey for position and attempt to prevent the king from finding out who the queen is sleeping with.
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Date: 2011-08-01 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-28 03:19 pm (UTC)