Posts Tagged ‘Christian Metz’

What exactly makes the summer movie season so alluring?

People go to the movies at all times during the course of the year, but summertime always seems to be the period when movies are most popular. It’s the time of year when we can usually look forward to a blockbuster or two, whether they be special effects extravaganzas or what have you, which attract massive crowds of patrons young and old to the local cinemas where they eat tubs of popcorn and drink frosty beverages. What is it exactly, though, that attracts, or even compels so many to see summer releases? Is there something special about the films themselves, or the audiences who watch them? The answers to these questions can be found by figuring out what all of these various audience members have in common, and how what that is relates to the movies they’re seeing.

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Although video games are the second largest competitor with movies in the entertainment industry, behind only television, movie adaptations of video games haven't been received very well thus far. Why is that?

Disclaimer - We have painted video games with an overly large brush, and trust us that we have done so begrudgingly. However, because perception always takes time to catch up to reality when it comes to public opinion, and perhaps in this case critical and executive opinion as well, we felt it was necessary in order to make things more explicable.

It has been interesting to note how critics have commented on the source material for the recently released Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. As most of you know by now, if you didn’t know before the release, the film is based off of a video game of the same name. And like with most films that are adapted from video games critics have pointed out the various congruencies between the two productions, such as story structure and character construction. In the case of Prince of Persia, these two things along with the aesthetics of the movie’s action sequences have been said to resemble (some say closer than others) their corresponding elements in the source material, but the intriguing thing is that the comments written that illuminate these similarities usually paint them as being faults. Anymore if the reception of a movie can be compared to the manner that video games are received (though there are many inherent differences between the mediums) it is taken to be as a deficiency or imperfection. Why should it be considered an automatic negative that a movie resembles its source material if that source material is a video game? Before we get into any sort of discussion that might explain a possible discrimination against video games, let us first try to discover why it is that so many critics find the storytelling techniques of video games and movies to be so incompatible. Read the rest of this entry »