627 The Game

Discuss releases by Criterion and the films on them. Threads may contain spoilers!
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colinr0380
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Re: 627 The Game

#51 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 16, 2012 6:32 am

The big idea carried over to Fight Club is as the way that events are spiralling out of your control in response to an initial action that you did without fully comphrehending the consequences. It's egotistical and self-delusional in a way that Fight Club only emphasised with its split-personalities, but it also has elements of shock at seeing yourself reflected back through the actions of others and the paranoia as to whether or not they are working in your best interests or playing their own game that goes far beyond your initial, limited seeming input (I guess you could also throw the growth of Facebook in The Social Network in there too).
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The issues people have with the ending I think might be that it does get pulled back to being just about the initial input and (apparently) nothing more. Something which only emphasises the way that this 'game' has taken over an entire city to play with the main character's mind and the city is nothing more than an adventure playground for those who can afford it (In a sense that final plummet is more a parody of a Wall Street Crash banker than the future events of 9/11).

Whereas Fight Club climaxes with an act of terrorism that transfers the actions of a fractured psyche onto the cityscape in a tangible, unignorable way - the only way the working/under class can manipulate their environment?

Re: the attempt to draw the main character back from suicide by pushing him to that edge, with Deborah Kara Unger in there the year after her role in Crash, I always keep expecting her to go up to Douglas's character at the end when the other party guests are not looking and say "Don't worry. Maybe the next one!"

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warren oates
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Re: 627 The Game

#52 Post by warren oates » Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:04 pm

The beauty of the ending for me is that it's so powerfully resonant that colinr, chris, jeff, john cope, knives and the Onion A/V Club guy can all agree that it's great but love it for slightly different and not mutually exclusive reasons. I'd add that the extent ending is the only way in which the film and Douglas can have it both ways.
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Because he has to live with his choice to jump and all its implications.
So far this discussion has made me curiouser and curiouser about those who purport to enjoy the film but just don't like the ending. The ending seems to encompass so much of what the film is about emotionally, dramatically, thematically. So what is the film about for people who don't like the ending? Just a decent thrill ride with one twist too many?

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rspaight
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Re: 627 The Game

#53 Post by rspaight » Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:05 pm

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I think it's interesting how a common reaction to The Game is disappointment that the scenarios weren't "real," just as many (most?) people who watch Fight Club assume the film is advancing "Tyler Durden's" POV (i.e., I hear lots of people parrot Tyler's monologues as "the message of Fight Club"). Fincher seems to be good at toying with how the audience assumes movies work.

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greggster59
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Re: 627 The Game

#54 Post by greggster59 » Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:13 pm

I always saw The Game as a well constructed immersive board game. Highly imaginative and a lot more realistic than the cinematic renditions of popular video games that were often released in the last decade or so.

The ending is a huge catharsis for both the protagonist and the audience.

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domino harvey
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Re: 627 The Game

#55 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jun 16, 2012 12:46 pm

It's been a long time since I've seen the film, so these specific details may be a product of a smeared memory, but I side with those who were disappointed with the ending.
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I don't necessarily think the big reveal is the problem, but in how it goes about it-- I've spent the entire film suspending disbelief and it made a sort of sense when it was tied into a conspiracy to defraud Douglas, because if the paranoid cinema of the seventies taught us anything, it's that there's never any shortage of people working together to screw over a given protagonist! But when Douglas goes tumbling off the roof and conveniently lands in the landing pad or whatever I was just insulted. It was like a child's trajectory of plot resolution. I may be misremembering but doesn't Douglas have a mid-way realization that those on the rooftop are there to celebrate his birthday (doesn't one even have a cake?)? If the film ended right at the moment of doubt, of Douglas' unsure epiphany that negates the paranoia while still being resonant-- I could see that working. But then the cartoonish "safe" fall, coupled with the wince-inducing line about how one of the participants was worried he'd have to push Douglas off so as to achieve the landing, I was just out of it completely and could not be bothered to care about anything that led to such malarkey.
That said, I'm more than willing to give it another chance ten-plus years after having seen it last with some of these defenses in mind

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knives
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Re: 627 The Game

#56 Post by knives » Sat Jun 16, 2012 1:40 pm

The ending is more or less how you remember it right down to that line about pushing.

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colinr0380
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Re: 627 The Game

#57 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jun 16, 2012 1:54 pm

knives wrote:The ending is more or less how you remember it right down to that line about pushing.
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How else would they have been able to put the ETA on the party invitations? :D

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swo17
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Re: 627 The Game

#58 Post by swo17 » Sat Jun 16, 2012 2:49 pm

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Not that I have that much experience in pushing people off buildings, but it seems to me that if you can get someone to jump off at a predetermined point (give or take maybe twenty feet around this point) you can predict with some accuracy where they're going to land. I mean, stunt men jump off buildings all the time, and it's not like everyone's just crossing their fingers that they'll land safely. What I don't remember is how much control the players in the game exerted over getting Douglas to jump at the spot on the roof where he did. If it really was just blind luck, the ending would be a lot harder to swallow.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 627 The Game

#59 Post by Roger Ryan » Sat Jun 16, 2012 2:52 pm

I agree with "domino"...
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The ruse becomes too elaborate to be believable. "swo17" has hit on it: that Douglas falls at that specific time in that specific place (involving a degree of complexity that a trained stunt man would have rehearsed for weeks to attempt) feels way too coincidental for comfort. I understand how important it is that the character jumps (to tie in to the father's suicide) but if everything was scaled down with a less risky leap, I think it would have been easier for me to stay focused on the theme of the film instead of being distracted by the implausibility.

Now that THE GAME will be on Blu-ray, I, too, may give it another chance.

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knives
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Re: 627 The Game

#60 Post by knives » Sat Jun 16, 2012 2:53 pm

Of course that complaint should be quelled by the movie clearly being a fantasy with different laws of whatever you feel apply. Economics?

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 627 The Game

#61 Post by Roger Ryan » Sat Jun 16, 2012 3:03 pm

knives wrote:Of course that complaint should be quelled by the movie clearly being a fantasy with different laws of whatever you feel apply. Economics?
I agree that it should, but something about the tone of the film and the way Fincher handles the build-up makes the resolution seem outsized and awkward. FIGHT CLUB is equally ridiculous, but since this tone is established right at the beginning and is supported throughout, I have no problem accepting the "fantasy".

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knives
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Re: 627 The Game

#62 Post by knives » Sat Jun 16, 2012 3:08 pm

I can see how tone fits with things, but how is the ending anymore ridiculous than any other explanation for this insanity? Short of the matrix it's a very outsized plot no matter how you end it.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: 627 The Game

#63 Post by Roger Ryan » Sat Jun 16, 2012 3:15 pm

Again, it's not so much the idea of the resolution as the scale of it that soured me. I look forward to viewing THE GAME a second time; hopefully I will appreciate it more.

jkierste27
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Re: 627 The Game

#64 Post by jkierste27 » Sun Jun 17, 2012 5:37 am

"The Game" is my favorite Fincher film, though the ending always felt 'off,' or at the very least, uncomfortable.
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For a while, I always thought that the screenplay should have fenced in the roof, thus driving Douglas to jump from that one spot. On my latest watch, however, I realized that this shoehorning of his character would undermine the entire film. The point of CRS is that they can understand any of us, down to the exact moment and location of an attempted suicide. The ending of the film is such a contradiction: on one hand, Van Orton is permitted to have romance and a new zest for life; on the other, his wholly predictable behavior is damning of human nature. By having the 'illogical' act of jumping right to where CRS had the bullseye, the discomfort for the audience comes from having to strain to believe that this character can be so easily understood and predicted. It is a postmodern move, indeed, as individuality is lost among the technology of 1's and 0's earlier in the film.
I would suggest that those who soured on the film due to this ending revisit and reconsider it as a subversive critique of the modern 'individual.'

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warren oates
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Re: 627 The Game

#65 Post by warren oates » Sun Jun 17, 2012 1:46 pm

jkierste27 wrote:"The Game" is my favorite Fincher film, though the ending always felt 'off,' or at the very least, uncomfortable.
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For a while, I always thought that the screenplay should have fenced in the roof, thus driving Douglas to jump from that one spot. On my latest watch, however, I realized that this shoehorning of his character would undermine the entire film. The point of CRS is that they can understand any of us, down to the exact moment and location of an attempted suicide. The ending of the film is such a contradiction: on one hand, Van Orton is permitted to have romance and a new zest for life; on the other, his wholly predictable behavior is damning of human nature. By having the 'illogical' act of jumping right to where CRS had the bullseye, the discomfort for the audience comes from having to strain to believe that this character can be so easily understood and predicted. It is a postmodern move, indeed, as individuality is lost among the technology of 1's and 0's earlier in the film.
I would suggest that those who soured on the film due to this ending revisit and reconsider it as a subversive critique of the modern 'individual.'
This is an astute observation. It's the same thing that makes people uncomfortable with a lot of the major discoveries of Social Psychology -- like Milgram's Study in Obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cast into the right roles with convincing "actors" prodding us all around, humans are easier to predict and manipulate than most of us would like to believe.

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zedz
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Re: 627 The Game

#66 Post by zedz » Sun Jun 17, 2012 4:26 pm

warren oates wrote:Well, I don't mean to be a dick about it, but you've told us you think the ending sucks and it doesn't work. Many of us have disagreed -- but in detail -- explaining specifically how it does work for us. Have you thought at all about how you would do it differently? What, in your mind, should happen to the Douglas character so as to make it a more effective and affecting film and a more satisfying thriller? If there's a stronger ending out there, I really want to hear it.
I always thought that the stock complaint (and cetainly mine) about the ending wasn't about its thematic resonance or message or anything - it is what it is - but about its absurd defiance of logic.
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So, the guys setting Douglas up not only can predict that he's going to throw himself off the roof, but they can predict the exact spot from which he's going to throw himself? Yeah, right. I guess one of those expert psychologists devising all this was a wizard.
For me, this film, Seven and Fight Club are all besotted with twists that simply aren't believable within the world of the film, and for all their panache, this really harms their rewatchability.
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In Seven, we're expected to swallow a serial killer so obsessive and meticulous that he sets up some of his careful series of thematic murders up to a year ahead but who is happy to vamp the last couple, which he could only have conceived after the investigation had begun.

In Fight Club, we have a gang of thugs / followers who blindly follow a guy when he's adopting one of his split personalities, but ignore him when he's adopting another - and yet never seen to worry that their fearless leader might be mentally unstable. This is the kind of conceit that might sidle past on the page but is really hard to overcome when you've got real people on the screen trying to sell it.
EDIT: I see some other people have made the same point. And I have to say that I don't see anything 'post-modern' about lazy plotting. This stuff is the fabric of modern filmmaking and I don't see why Fincher should get a free pass for it because you like his art direction.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: 627 The Game

#67 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Jun 17, 2012 8:53 pm

warren oates wrote: This is an astute observation. It's the same thing that makes people uncomfortable with a lot of the major discoveries of Social Psychology -- like Milgram's Study in Obedience and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Cast into the right roles with convincing "actors" prodding us all around, humans are easier to predict and manipulate than most of us would like to believe.
Just going to point out here that both of those studies were run in an incredibly unscientific manner without proper guidelines or controls, and as such really should not be taken any more seriously than a fictional movie. Zimbardo in particular is a quack of the first water.

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knives
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Re: 627 The Game

#68 Post by knives » Sun Jun 17, 2012 8:56 pm

There's a reason that at least in the case of Milgram that psychology students are still taught about them though. As unethically done as they were they do reveal certain very scientific things about the human condition.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: 627 The Game

#69 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Jun 17, 2012 9:02 pm

Haha, well the Bible tells one a lot about human psychology too, that doesn't mean that I take people citing it all that seriously

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knives
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Re: 627 The Game

#70 Post by knives » Sun Jun 17, 2012 9:28 pm

I get your point, but these tests are allowed by the scientific community to be cited in peer reviewed scientific journals which is good enough for me especially regarding Oates point that people are largely predictable.

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warren oates
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Re: 627 The Game

#71 Post by warren oates » Sun Jun 17, 2012 9:45 pm

Unscientific? I'll take issue with that, especially when it comes to the Milgram study, where many consistently repeatable results as well as fascinating and telling variations were performed by Milgram and later on by many others all over the world right up to the present.

I'll even go further though and take issue with many of those who later questioned the ethics of both studies. There's no evidence that any participant in either study was permanently harmed by his/her participation. And plenty of important knowledge was gained about the malleability of the human mind from these studies, which we would not have without them. The real reason that Psych 101 students are indoctrinated to believe Milgram and Zimbardo did wrong nowadays has very little to do with ethics and much more to do with maintaing the status quo set down by skittish university lawyers and unimaginative Psych department chairs. This is precisely why my formal study of the field ended after one or two classes, when I found out that there were structural reasons why the institution of academic psychology wished to repress its boldest innovators. (Zimbardo was a brilliant one-hit wonder, but Milgram was a serious genius.)

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mfunk9786
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Re: 627 The Game

#72 Post by mfunk9786 » Sat Aug 04, 2012 8:58 am

According to an e-mail I just got from Amazon, this has been pushed up to a September 11th release.

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Re: 627 The Game

#73 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sat Aug 04, 2012 11:16 am

Eerie.

TheEmpireNeverEnded
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Re: 627 The Game

#74 Post by TheEmpireNeverEnded » Mon Aug 13, 2012 3:04 pm

Psyched for the 35mm screening of THE GAME in New York tomorrow night!
http://www.92y.org/Tribeca/Event/The-Game.aspx

neal
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Re: 627 The Game

#75 Post by neal » Mon Aug 13, 2012 7:34 pm

TheEmpireNeverEnded wrote:Psyched for the 35mm screening of THE GAME in New York tomorrow night!
http://www.92y.org/Tribeca/Event/The-Game.aspx
Psyched for the spam! \:D/

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