The Screengrab : grand theft auto

Precursors: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

Nick Schager — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Apparently only good enough to warrant a pre-summer-season release, Fast and the Furious pulls into theaters this weekend with the reunited cast from 2001’s original. Re-pairing bald baritone Vin Diesel with Ken doll-handsome Paul Walker – as well as throwing Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster back into the mix – is supposed to be this fourth installment’s enticing calling card (ooooh, they’re kickin’ it old school!). Yet if the series was ever worthwhile, it wasn’t during Diesel and Walker’s maiden outing but, rather, during Walker’s turn alongside Diesel replacement Tyrese in John Singleton’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, an adventure whose gleeful inanity was perfectly encapsulated by its title. With a plot too perfunctory to have been remembered by yours truly, Singleton’s sequel amped up its predecessor’s template to ludicrous heights, which made perfect sense given that there’s nothing to these car-thieving, street-racing sagas save for their manic auto-erotic madness, comprised of screeching tires, bodalicious babes, periodic shootouts, and stunts, stunts, stunts. Whereas director Rob Cohen took his dim-witted material at least slightly seriously, Singleton makes no such mistake. While his entry won’t be making the cut for any AFI action-film lists, its consistent willingness to indulge in extremeness – from cars taking turbo-boosting flight, to the raft of groan-worthy one-liners spouted by Walker and Tyrese, to the neon-flashy aesthetic – turns the proceedings into a self-consciously goofy, tongue-in-cheek live-action Grand Theft Auto cartoon.

Trailer Review: Crank 2: High Voltage

Paul Clark — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A quick’n’dirty cross between the worlds of D.O.A. and G.T.A., the original Crank was a major guilty pleasure of mine on its original release. Sure, it was an crazed gamer’s take on the action genre, but that’s what made it such a blast for those on its wavelength and, more surprisingly, for me, who’s never been into the whole video game thing. So while some might roll their eyes at the idea of a second crank (you know who you are) I’m actually pretty jazzed about it. The spirit of the enterprise begins with the premise of this second installment, in which Chev Chelios- the sort of name you rarely find outside Liberty City- actually survived the several-thousand-foot fall from a helicopter that closed the first Crank only to be resuscitated when doctors tried to harvest his organs. But wait, you ask- how would his bones still be intact from the impact? They wouldn’t, of course, and that’s all part of the fun, as the Neveldine/Taylor team embrace the inherent absurdities of the genre and add some of their own (a highlight of the first film: the subtitles Chev can actually read). So all you haters can back off. As a gamer might put it, Crank 2 will pwn u.

Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip “The Clone Wars”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

If there’s one thing that baffles me about 99% of my generation (which used to be called “Gen X,” but you never really hear that anymore, so let’s say “children of the ’80s”), it’s the unending fascination with Star Wars. Now, I’m not gonna pretend I never had any use for Star Wars (although I was always more of a Trekkist), but for me it’s a movie I liked as a kid, sorta like (as I’ve already confessed hereabouts) Herbie Rides Again or The Return of the Pink Panther. After Return of the Jedi (most of which had been spoiled for me by my asshole biology teacher, whose untimely demise I plotted for weeks afterward), Star Wars and I went our separate ways. I never even saw The Phantom Menace until three years after it was released, when I was assigned to review Attack of the Clones and figured I should get up to speed on all the important trade route issues.

I mention this not to paint myself as being somehow above movie geekdom – I certainly have my own obsessions that are probably much more embarrassing than Star Wars in the grand scheme of things – but merely as a warning to those of you who may not want to read anything negative about your beloved Lucasverse. For I have seen The Clone Wars and it is what the Greeks call “not so good.” To wit:

1. The animation sucks. This shouldn’t surprise, since the feature film version of The Clone Wars is basically an afterthought cobbled together in advance of a new cartoon series debuting this fall. Yet it did surprise me a little, since the last couple of Star Wars movies were 95% CGI anyway – you’d think they would have perfected it by now. It’s not like I was expecting Pixar here, but the human-types onscreen are so stiff, expressionless and generally carved-looking, they appear to be posing for their own action figures. The robots and other critters fare somewhat better, but the Lucasfolk could do the big battles and dogfights in their sleep by now, and it appears that they did. Which brings us to…

2. The Playstation factor. I enjoy playing videogames. What I don’t particularly enjoy is watching somebody else play a videogame. For nearly two hours. That’s the experience of watching The Clone Wars, however. It’s an endless series of suspense-free space battles, light saber duels, shootouts and narrow escapes connected by plot interludes that look and play like cut scenes from a Grand Theft Auto game, minus the wit and character development.

3. The “tween” Jedi. “Y’know, the Star Wars audience just isn’t big enough,” George Lucas muses, scratching his big blobby neck-thing. “I’ve gotta put something in there that appeals to the Hannah Montana crowd.” Enter Ahsoka Tano, the orange-hued tween introduced as Anakin Skywalker’s “padawan.” She’s spunky and sassy! And is there something just a little creepy about her following “Skyguy” around and calling him “Master”? I think there is.

4. “Stinky the Hutt.” The mission assigned to Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan Kenobi is to rescue the kidnapped son of Jabba the Hutt. (There are strategic reasons for this, but I won’t bore us all to death attempting to explain them.) The offspring in question – called “Rotta the Huttlet” in the credits, but referred to onscreen as “Stinky” – is such a cute widdle critter, I’m sure the dolls are already flying off the shelves at Toys R Us. Attention, geeks: Lucas didn’t care that you hated Jar Jar Binks and he won’t care if you hate Stinky the Hutt. He’s a toymaker and he’s just doing his job.

5. The Clone Wars. This epic intergalactic battle is so integral to the Star Wars mythos that most of it took place offscreen between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. That’s the setting for this movie, and the upcoming cartoon series as well. So hooray, we get more of Anakin Skywalker before he turns into Darth Vader! I mean, seriously, you’re George Lucas, you’re making an animated Star Wars movie, you can do whatever the fuck you want. So why do you pick the least interesting part of the story imaginable? Wouldn’t it be more fun to pick up the adventures of Luke Skywalker and crew after Return of the Jedi? You know, like that third trilogy Lucas used to talk about before he decided he really only meant to do two all along? Mark Hamill has been making a living doing cartoon voices for years now – I’m sure he could spare a few hours lending his pipes to that.

Just to let you know that I’m not a complete curmudgeon, there is one part of The Clone Wars I sort of enjoyed. It was a brief interlude in the seedy side of the Star Wars universe (which we haven’t seen much since the cantina sequence from the original movie) involving Jabba’s uncle, Ziro the Hutt. For whatever inexplicable reason, Ziro is a hookah-smoking drag queen who sounds like Truman Capote on a Bourbon Street bender. If Lucas came up with this, I can only imagine he’s gotten so bored with his own creation that he finally snapped. If that’s the case, maybe I’ll check out the cartoon series after all.

Related:
George Lucas and the License to Print Money
Tarkin 'n' Friends

Grand Theft Auto IV vs. Iron Man

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

My friend and fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak gets nervous when he watches me play Grand Theft Auto, since I tend to skip the missions and just barrel-ass around Rockstar Games’ big, fake virtual cities in a variety of stolen cars, tanks and cement-mixers, randomly killing as many pedestrians as possible until some Vice City or San Andreas S.W.A.T. sniper puts me down like a rabid dog.

While this kind of videogame behavior may demonstrate uncomfortably revealing things about the darker corners of my id, I’ve never been a proponent of the “video games lead to violence” argument for one simple reason: just like online porn is a release valve (so to speak) for those who don’t have the time, skills, money and/or moral inclination to go out and get some actual sex, violent video games strike me as a fairly harmless method for polite, law-abiding citizens like myself to unleash our pent-up road rage and fury at all the bad drivers, asshole co-workers and neo-conservative Executive Branch turd blossoms we have to suffer in real life. If I were an actual sociopath, I’d be out doing real crimes and/or running for higher office instead of sitting around playing with my computer.

But while the psychological impact of violent video games is debatable, the financial realities are not: with projected sales of $400 million in its first week (according to Nick Lewis of the Canwest News Service), the Suits in Hollywood are worried that all the computer-generated mayhem enthusiasts they’ve been counting on to make the May 2nd release of Iron Man a blockbuster event may instead just hunker down with their Xboxes for a bunch of CGI mayhem starring themselves instead of Robert Downey, Jr.

In his story for Canwest, Lewis quotes somebody named Victor Lucas from something called Electric Playground, who claims, “This will be the first major release in what is considered Hollywood's summer movie period, and if there's any title that could put a dent in box office for a major movie, it's Grand Theft Auto.”

As proof of gaming's potential to affect Hollywood box office, Lewis goes on to note that Ben Stiller’s The Heartbreak Kid may have been harmed in September 2007 by the release of Halo 3 (rather than just being, y’know, a crappy Ben Stiller movie).

And while the results of Iron Man’s bout with Grand Theft Auto IV may ultimately impact the release strategy of future Hollywood movies, we here at The Screengrab can guarantee with some confidence that, no matter the outcome, the preferences of 15-year-old boys will continue to be the firm, guiding force of mainstream American culture well into the foreseeable future.

Whew!

Non-Stories Of The Year

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:30:00 GMT

With every entertainment section, film magazine, and industry website racing to fill up their top tens and year-in-review articles, Variety takes a somewhat different and altogether refreshing tack: Timothy Gray and a number of staffers combine resources and give us an equally informative recap of what didn't happen in 2007. Among the more important non-stories of the year: familiar movie franchises that were expected to bomb over the summer didn't; the Writer's Guild of America defied industry expectations that they would wait until after the holidays to strike; a number of predicted mergers and acquisitions (including GE divesting its entertainment division, Time Warner spinning off America OnLine, and the proposed sale of Yahoo!) didn't take place; and the high-definition DVD war never reached a satisfactory conclusion and looks to drag on for at least another year. One Variety non-story -- the delay in releasing Grand Theft Auto IV -- seems like a bit of a stretch; while the game was expected to drop this year, delays were always possible, and other huge sellers like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 and Rock Band more than compensated for the lost holiday revenue the latest GTA iteration was supposed to produce, and all in all, 2007 was the most profitable year for the video game industry in history, with over $10 billion in profits (outperforming movie industry growth by a staggering 44%). Which, we suppose, makes it a non-non-story.