WARNING! I'm writing this on the toilet. Got a problem with that? Then stop reading now.
ehhnnnunnngggggggg
Game Over targets the 13-to 40-year-old male gamer demographic. This review is for them.
eennn... eennn... nnnnggggggggg
My God, what did I have for dinner? Too much corn!
OK, I borrowed that corn part from the movie.
Spoiler: There is pooping.
OK, now that we've got rid of the fuddy duddies... What, you still here?
gggggggnnnnnnn aaaaaaaaaaahh it burnnnnns!!!
Plop.
Ok, that should do it.
Courtesy flush.
Look, you write a review or make a movie with lots of fart and poop jokes, you're taking a chance. The guys on FilmCouch #94 talk about this. Tell a plain old clean bad joke and everybody groans when they hear it and then move on. Tell a poop joke that flops and folks wonder where your head is at. The creators of Game Over, Larry Carrell and Josh Drapehs, made their coprophilistic choices with eyes wide open and nostrils clamped shut. It's the demographic, stupid. They've got a poop prop (I hope it's a prop) and they're not afraid to use it. This morning I unlocked my own fake-poops cabinet, trying to remember exactly what that expression was on my secretary's face the last time I used one on her.
Hey, I'm walking an effing tightrope here. My mom could read this.
ffflllaaaaaaaaappp
I read somewhere that you lose your PG-13 rating when you put more than one F-bomb in a movie. I was wondering how long it would take Game Over to go from PG-13 to R. The first 10 minutes of the movie:
1:01 first luchadore
1:05 first F-bomb
1:25 first look at Ungowa world headquarters (can also be viewed on Google Street View)
1:20 first use of the word "fart"
1:45 first cereal and beer, mixed
2:10 first actual fart
2:30 first socks with holes, underpants, and butt crack
3:35 first stream of urine, poorly aimed
4:20 first pop tart and sour milk
4:50 first cat
5:45 first hearse
6:15 first bird flipped
6:18 first overweight transvestite prostitute at the corner of McFarland and Navigation
8:11 second F-bomb and bird (there goes the PG-13)
8:39 first poop
9:47 first politically incorrect use of roaches
Now that I've sold you on the movie, you're probably asking yourself where you can get Game Over. Not easy. A trailer, yes, that you can watch right now. There's one on YouTube with the cockroaches in it. The movie is listed in IMDB, but so are 28 other Game Overs, and at the moment it's categorized as "in production." A second, R-rated trailer - the F trailer - provides you with a look at the main prop with its corn, plus Willie Nelson, Hunter Thompson, the Phantom Shitter, carpet F-bombing, the movie's climatic fart, and much, much more. You can also visit the film's website, which greets you with a voice asking "What's that smell?" I mean, who do you have to poop on in Houston to get a copy of this DVD? Ungowa is working with Amazon and Without A Box, now owned by Amazon, to provide you with Game Over; the arrangements should be complete by January '09. Ungowa is also working on distribution, festivals, pay per view, and DVD, at a price you can afford, at least until the U.S. and the rest of the world finish going to financial hell. For now though, your best bet is to head down to Houston - road trip! - for ONI-CON, Dec. 19 - 21, for Game Over's world premiere, two showings, plus a Q&A with Larry and Josh, plus Josh in his El Farto costume, made by his mom, who is a professional costume maker, plus DVDs of the movie for sale.
Those of you in the target demo, feel free to leave now, cause that's all the good parts. Bye.
When Kevin Smith made Clerks, did he create a genre? Because if he did, Game Over is in it. The clerks are in the store. Carrell, who has been working in a game store himself, wrote a script about something he knows. He and Drapehs rented a vacant bakery which served as the set for three different game stores and a video store, dressed over two and a half days with discount items. The set looks good to me, as do the customers who come into it. Carrell located the action mostly in one place, in the same way that Invaders From Mars, for example, featured a sheriff's office, a courtroom, a living room, etc., all using the same set with different dressing.
Carrell and Drapehs, best friends, movie lovers, both with a degenerate sense of humor, spent 20+ years working together in the haunted-house business, dealing with budgets in the $50K to 200K range, managing up to 40 actors. In Houston, they helped build the sets for Alice Cooper's Nightmare, an interactive horror movie. a couple of years ago, they decided to quit, take day jobs to make a buck, and create this movie. Carrell tells me that it's the story that moves people, but in Game Over, it's the bowels that move. But never forget, bowels don't move people; people moving bowels move people.
Karina Longworth moderated a panel at the Denver Film Festival called DIY Filmmaking in an Indie Apocalypse. She talks about the panel on a recent FilmCouch podcast - about the fact that the major studios are backing away from Indie filemaking - making the point, among others, that the Carrells and Drapehses of this world will keep making movies regardless of where the big money goes, and that the DIY movement is alive and well. Carrell and Drapehs did not go to film school. Everything they have learned, they have learned by reading, talking to others, trying things out, and, hey, making Game Over. They hustled and scraped to come up with some money. Drapehs and Carrell ran with the hounds and hunted with the foxes. That makes no sense but I wanted to get it in.
I myself personally have not made a movie per se, but I did decide to paint my house a while back. If I had known in advance what I was getting myself into, I wouldn't have started. The magnitude of the task - the prep issues, the paint issues, rounding up the help, the weather, surviving on a ladder, the random interruptions of everyday life - blossomed, ballooned, what's a good paint metaphor? Spread like a kicked-over can of bright red paint on your new oak floor. It's like when you say hey let's have a baby! It'll be fun! Twenty-two years later they leave the nest and break your heart. And then move back in. And then go mumblecore on you. You work, you slave, they rip your heart out and... aw just go watch Lee J. Cobb at the end of Twelve Angry Men and take his rant as written. But anyway, interviewing the filmmakers, I got the idea that making a movie is like that. The actual shoot took only nine days - that's all the time off that Larry had from the game store - and they were constrained also by their budget of $2,500 - but from the runup to the shoot to the post-production work - well, that's still going on - the project has consumed 2 or 3 years - and that's the last of the dashes I'm going to use - haha. I described in an earlier review how Jason Kohn decided to make Manda Bala and ended up spending five years on it. So making a movie is a lot of work, even more work than painting a house. Or at least as much. And then some more work after that. So be prepared if you set out to make one. Shooting the thing is just one part of a much larger effort.
Being realistic, Carrell wrote most of the roles in the movie for cast members who hadn't acted before, roles that allowed them to just be themselves. There are 77 names on the cast list. 77 is a lot of anything, including people. I couldn't find half that many for my firstborn's bris. Nobody got paid (but there were refreshments at the bris). Drapehs's mother, sister, and nephews are in the movie. Larry's brother Rex played Hunter Thompson in the movie. There are friends of many stripes in the movie. And several professionals. Larry and Josh used Craig's List to line up the rest. Everyone's lines are scripted and everyone learned their lines except for the writer/director/star, who was so busy with everything else that with the cameras rolling he kept finding himself winging it. It's fun to watch the non-professionals act naturally while the pros chew the scenery. I was wondering about the kids dropping F bombs. That is, about whether there are industry rules regarding language used by minors, or Houston child-labor laws, or an outraged Christian public, or whatever. The kids in Game Over all signed releases, and their parents were present for the shoot. One boy was a little unsure about letting the F word pass his lips but his parents told him it was ok. I'm trying to picture my mom dealing with this:
"Hey, Ma, I'm in a movie! Is it ok if I say f**k?... Hey! Ouch! Lay off! Mother f**k! Ow!"
Tip of the hat to the Blues Brothers and the nuns for that thought. There is nothing new.
Anyway, the day comes and everybody shows up. Nine days for the shoot. Turns out that Drapehs knows the owner of Smart Multimedia (industrial videos) and the owner came down, looked around, saw the Canon XL1 the crew was going to use, and went back and got a JVC Pro High Def to use instead. Then you shoot the film, 40 more hours of it than you need because you're just learning what you need to reshoot when you redo a scene, and then everybody goes home and you fire up Adobe Premier and get to work editing until Hurricane Ike rolls in and you lose power for two weeks, plus your computer is fried, but you've got everything backed up and you upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 3 because it has high res and BlueRay support, but when you import your film files, CS3 sort of scrambles them and there are audio issues to figure out and Premier, Sound Booth, Photoshop, After Effects, Encore, and Bridge to learn and the experienced editor/filmmaker you lined up through Craig's List (the only one to answer the listing: Larry Czach, Jack Everyman, IMDB 7.9, Houston) has to drop out due to illness in the family, but at least you can call him with questions. And you discover that because you used two mikes and they're out of sync, you've got to take one track out by hand, and the next thing you know, it's a year and a half later and you still need to put in extras such as a blooper reel and a commentary track. But at some point in there you have enough to begin peddling the results. One question that came up during the Longworth panel that I mentioned above dealt with submitting films to festivals and how to handle rejection: acknowledge that anyone can be rejected; think of a new door opening after the old door is slammed in your face; cry; keep going; keep a cool head; find a hobby; leave a flaming basket of dogpoop on somebody's doorstep.
Thought from the movie: "Just because he's new doesn't mean he doesn't have any common sense."
In the end, as with the pain of childbirth, you forget the bad and remember the good. The years of effort (making a movie, not having a baby) get telescoped in your brain and in due course you're ready to do it again. Ungawa's next movie will deal with Chupacabra (or this one). Carrell has also written a script about two brothers. De astra, ad astra.
The other day I dropped my sister off at the local Metroplex to see "The Duchess." We were running late and we knew that the movie would be half over by the time that she was in her seat, but my sister said that she didn't mind and that she'd catch what she missed by staying over for the next show. When I spoke to her later, she told me that in the case of The Duchess, it didn't seem to matter one way or the other which half she saw first, since for her it was all mostly about the costumes. She did mention that plot points in the first half that she might have missed if she had started at the beginning were perhaps a bit more striking because she knew what was coming. This reminded me that when I was in the second grade, I was allowed to walk downtown to the Saturday-morning movies with my sister (different sister), who was a year and a half older than me. Hard to believe it these days, but that was in a small Southern town a long time ago. For whatever reason, as I grew older I decided that I always wanted to sit in the last row and see the second half of the second movie first. This habit continued through grammar school, and then I lost it.
But then I watched "The Forsythe Saga" that way, back in the 60s. This became my all-time second-favorite TV mini-series, after the BBC's "War and Peace," and one reason for that, I think, is because I saw the last half of the series first. A strong sense of loss, regret, and nostalgia hangs over the second half of the Saga and I think that that atmosphere was strengthened by the fact that I could only guess at the origins of the regret. Note to self: next time you write a review, start in the middle. Fiddlesticks! I should have started this review here, not back up there. Too late now!
Can watching the second half first ruin a good movie? Make a bad movie better? Isn't the first half of a movie generally supposed to be better than the second half? The interesting premise, then the complications, the unfolding, but devolving in the second half into the chase, clever ideas petering out? Like life, see? You're young, starting out, anything could happen, it's all a big mystery, the future; then you're old, there's just the one story, in the past, no chase, few complications, and it turns out that not so much happened to you when you think about it. Jeez. No wonder movies can be depressing. But anyway, if you watch the lesser, second half first, does that allow you to end with the better first half, instead of wasting it up front in the first half its own self? Doesn't seem quite right. Does the playing out of ideas in the second half defuse the beginning of the movie? Or is it that watching the second half first makes the second half actually literally become the first half, now itself holding the mystery and promise, in addition to the action that is the consequence of the premise? Plus you're a lot closer to the end when you start. Thus the second half keeps its own strengths while simultaneously inheriting those of the first half. Wow. Course then the first half is drained, deflated, turned into backstory, or worse yet, flashback; there are folks hate flashbacks. Why go back and watch the first half anyway? Put it in with the other extras. But if we're talking about a really good movie that you'd want to see twice, then watching the first half would be like watching a good movie the second time for the first time. I mean, for the first time the second time; and if it isn't a good movie, then you can skip the first half and save that time and effort for the second half of some other movie. Or, wait. Why not just watch first halves only, and then move on? Or second halves only? Why does anybody watch both halves? Watching the second half first, when the credits roll at the end, do you want to go back to the beginning and see what you missed? Or is last-half-first just a crude way of watching a movie backwards? Do that in sixteenths, say, and Memento would become chronological? Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button would grow old normally? Primer would be just as confusing as it is in its regular order? I watched the second half of Sixth Sense only. New rule: watch any half of a Shyamalan flick and call it a day.
So I happened to have at hand "The Rules of the Game," the Jean Renoir 1939 classic that I've started a time or two before but somehow never managed to watch all the way through. This is the movie that was lost during the war and rediscovered in the 50s. Renoir comments in it on the degeneracy of the French upper crust before the war. Caused an uproar the night it opened; one critic tried to burn down the theater. The film runs 106 minutes on the Criterion DVD, so I put it in and advanced to the 53-minute mark. Immediately a man and his lover from earlier days say goodbye to each other (arguing over whether it's to be "adieu" or "au revoir"). The fellow's wife watches them smooch from afar. Then the lover and the wife quickly became friends in a sharp scene. Then lots of bedroom antics ensue. Most satisfying. Reminded me of that soap-opera truth: you can enter a soap at any random episode and get your footing within minutes. In fact, I felt exhilarated. Here was a "great" movie that I've been avoiding for years and in seconds, I'm already halfway though it! Sort of. I watched the third quarter and I must admit, when I came back the next evening for the final quarter, I did have a little trouble differentiating Christine from Genievieve. But hey, I knew that I'd get a primer in the first half; no worries. And I did. Back at the beginning I was introduced to the tragical characters, learning in the credits that Jean Renoir was one of them, not just the director. Second half: farce and cynicism. First half: more serious; interpersonal relationships. Last-to-first improved the movie.
Having watched a classic in this way, I thought that next I'd try a movie that was poorly received. I had "War, Inc." in the queue and Rotten Tomatoes pegs it at 30%, with critics like Stephen Holden and Roger Ebert panning it. I commenced watching it at the 53-minute mark of its 107 minutes. (Hey, Marisa Tomai. Joan Cusack. I wrote a word or two a while ago about actresses working into their 40s and 50s. Add Marisa Tomai and Joan Cusack to the list. Tomai is a great choice to match up romantically with John Cuscack in this flick. She's two years older than him and still getting it done, as she goes au natural in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.") The chief rap against the movie is that it's chaotic, but taking the last half as a 54-minute movie, the chaos comes across as a natural consequence of dropping into the film in media res. The result: a spritely, entertaining, less-than-an-hour-long movie. Great locations. Many of my favorite stars showing up for a riff or two. I laughed a lot at satirical, over-the-top, incongruously violent scenes. And then, going back to the beginning, as with Rules of the Game, I found myself focusing on the acting, the characters, the multiplying plot points - like a prequel that might be better or worse than the original but that is of interest just for giving me more of something that I enjoyed in the first place. Second half: plenty of action, stars, anti-war riffing, and other stuff to look at, and ignorable plot. First half: plot stuff but plenty of stuff to just look at, too. Last-to-first improved the movie.
Next, "Funny Ha Ha." I dealt with this one in an earlier review. Second half: most excellent angst of youth. First half: some romantic stuff I'm glad I didn't know in the second half. Last-to-first improved the movie.
And finally, "Game Over." The movie runs 84 minutes; I jumped in at minute 45, where begins by chance a major guitar-hero sequence featuring the music of Ozzie Osbourne ("Bark At The Moon"), with Carrell channeling Jack Black. The second half of the movie is plot-driven as situations evolve; the first half plays as day-in-the-life. In Game Over I'm thinking that setting the context in the first half is a good thing; here might be a movie where the second half is in fact strengthened by the first half. Unlike the previous three films I watched. Willie Nelson shows up in the second half, though, and the sooner he's onscreen the better. And going back-to-front you get that guitar sequence twice, beginning and end, which is a good thing... My God, can I get back to basics here? Does life have to be so complicated? There's a case to be made for watching a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, from the beginning, through the middle, to the end. For a story with three acts. For a story with an arc. For sitting back and letting the author and director lead you through the drama unfolding before you. Who am I, I ask myself rhetorically, to snatch this experience from their hands by wantonly dropping into their movie wherever I please? It's an outrage. Leave the poor movie alone! Game Over: first scene, the protagonist wakes up in bed in the morning, virginal and ready to embark, farting. Is that so wrong? What profitith me for to start with him at the pinnacle of his day, as a guitar god? Back off. OK, I apologize. I won't do it again.
Homework: watch High Noon in quarters, last quarter first, end-to-front. Extra credit: watch a full season of 24 in reverse order.
If you like Game Over, check out "Grandma's Boy" and "Clerks."