Gamer

Please ignore 99.7% of the Gamer Reviews and "comments" -- the boat has been missed and the Lemmings have supplied chorus.

So way back when we stumbled into Crank alone. Movie buddies shook their collective heads.."dude, that shite ain't worth turnin' off my cellphone for 80 minutes"...

We all know now exactly how different Crank is/was will be -- clever, daring, amplified with a DIY in your face style that took no prisoners. To borrow a term from the other tabooland, Gonzo filmmakin'.

Gamer takes it to the next level.

I am trying to remember the movie from a few years back full of violence and gore where the fourth wall is broken and the character screams at the audience why are you watching this!

We have all seen the trite tsk tsk movies about games. We have all been disappointed by our games being made into truly awful movies, and endured the scorn of so called adults pawing through our media calling us 13 still.

Well my answer is: science fiction paved the way for your damn cell phone flashlight you use sitting in front of me in the dark. Science fiction tried to warn you about now needing a calculator to multiply 72 x 3. They also warned you about microflash transactions -- the trades that brought the first world to its knees last year. But please, keep up your condescension. I know you don't read anymore so by all means post that iPic to your Facebook and move on.

Wow, touched my own nerve writin' a dang review.

Gamer isn't perfect, even for what it thinks it is doing. It does it better than most though. Movie 2.0 if you will, and there are a scant handful of directors/camera-peeps even thinking at that level, never mind delivering.

I am reminded of the first 20 minutes of Magnolia where information is pile driven quickly to bring you up to speed then the movie relaxes and slows down. Gamer does not until the very end. It is not so much frenetic as it is deconstructed.

Its "message" is hung on a trope we have all seen before -- Running Man, Rollerball, Death Race etc. I loved the remake of Death Race -- real cars, tough gritty performances, but it was an homage, a cover version if you will. Gamer goes beyond that.

FPS games get all the bad press -- responsible for every male child loner with a handgun and no girlfriend after all -- and the foreground of Gamer advertising is in fact that particular brand of game. Second Life and the Sims -- where the other gender games -- are also subjects of Gamer, as is Capitalism, role playing, and the Wall-E thing.

My favorite is the complicity of the IT department who have apparently never heard the Google motto "do no evil".

Highly recommended, a must see on a screen bigger than the one you aren't allowed to watch the Superbowl on.