Operation: the game: the movie

Lion’s Gate Plays More Mind Games


Yesterday, Lion’s Gate announced that they are reviving an old classic, the board game Operation. But this film is by no means child friendly.

Operation is set to shoot in June but the production company is already releasing information regarding the script. Screenwriter Leigh Whinnel seemed to take great joy in dashing out the grim details.

“We, and by we, I mean me, wanted to keep the feel of the original game,” explained Whinnel. “When Lion’s Gate came to us with the idea, and by us, I mean me, I called up [James] Wan and was like ‘hey, wanna make another [explicit]-ed up movie?’ And he was like ‘[explicit] yeah!’”

Director James Wan, infamous for initating the Saw series, was also at yesterday’s panel.

“Leigh and I got thinking and we decided to go all out. We want to surprised you,” smiled Wan. “This film is going to be messed up. It’s going to be three levels above that! And then more!”

Both Leigh and Wan cut the build up and let the information bleed out onto the press. The film is to star Leigh Whinnel and Cary Elwes, the stars from the original Saw film, as they wake in an abandoned room with a board game between them. As their eyes settle, they realize the board game is, you guessed it, Operation. A mysterious voice appears in the room and instructs them to operate on the board game, but as they operate, all of their surgical mistakes will happen onto real people in other rooms.

“We want to return to the philosophy of the first Saw movie,” spoke Wan. “Watching people get killed so someone else can live is difficult for our characters. Now its our audience’s turn, it’s going to be dramatic irony to the max!”

Our two protagonists continue to remove buckets and horseshoes from the board game until Elwes’ character just cant take it anymore. He refuses to remove any more body parts from real people and the mysterious voice conducts a montage of torture scenes, warning of what happened to those that did not play.

“It’s gonna be big,” laughed Whinnel, “uh… spines exploding and legs flying off and acid and we’ve even, and by we I mean myself, though of one scene where a guy drinks a ton of milk in a hot room and it curdles and he dies as a big piece of cheese.”

Lion’s Gate made the big surprise by beating the bloggers to the big reveal.

“You find out at the end,” grins Wan, “that they have been operating on themselves this whole time! Oh god, it’s gonna be soo good!”

Operation is scheduled to shoot this summer and will be released Thanksgiving, 2010.

A Haunting of Ex-Girlfriends Past

Politics, the human condition and a discourse on semiotics: not what you’d expect from a Mathew McConaughey film. But then again, when dealing with ghost films, what you expect is never what you get.

Loveable beach-bum Mathew McConaughey plays loveable suburban-bum Mathew McConahow, a 30-something bachelor who is still reeling from the loss of first (and up until now, only) girlfriend, Janet Walkin (played by Megan Fox). The film begins with McConahow and Walkin’s last date. They eat a nice Thai dinner, go out dancing, and go on a carriage ride. But the sweet moment turns sour when Walkin collapses into a vomit-induced coma. McConahow wakes in a cold sweat and we see how truly haunted our protagonist is.

“I wanted McConahow to be really traumatized, he is my allegory for our traumatized nation,” admits writer/director Steven Soderbergh as he sipped on his macchiato. “McConahow is our voice, one that howls in the night.”

McConahow deals with his loss by visiting Dr Lisa Madow (played by Jennifer Garner), together they work through the trauma and slowly form a romantic bond. Just as McConahow has found love again, we see Walkin’s ghastly image appear in a background mirror.

“It’s an argument against teleological history, you know,” chuckles McConaughey, also billed as executive producer. “Most horror films are cheap thrills, but we wanted to shake the foundation of American education. Janet represents a crisis, a human ‘death instinct’ if we’re going to go from the Freud angle, and she doesn’t appear in one point in history. She reoccurs, she is a continuous struggle. It’s pretty chill.”

Walkin doesn’t just return to peer menacingly, she is out to exact vengeance. After the usual floating vases and broken windows, Walkin reaches out from the mist and posses the body of Dr. Madow.

“It’s all about Lacan,” laughs Garner. “It’s about discovering past trauma and limit in a ‘big’ other, the other that Lacan puts a bar through. Lacan ascribes the bar through the other because for him it does not exist. We are not dealing with syntax and semiotics so instead of placing a bar through the other, we put a ghost in her.”

McConahow must make the ultimate decision that every love-struck bachelor must make at some point: keep the animated body of their lover despite his ex-girlfriend feeding off of her soul or banish both body and souls into the hellmouth.

“You think you know what’s coming but you don’t,” smiles Fox. “It’s very Foucault, in the sense of sentence syntax. You don’t know what the sentence’s context and content is until you get to the end. What’s the argument, what’s the meaning? You read ‘This Is Not A Pipe’? Well, this is not a horror film.”

A Haunting of Ex-Girlfriends is to premier in art-house cinemas around the nation in July.

“I’d d some reading before you see this film”, again chuckles McConaughey, “it’s gonna blow your dome.”

Al Gore's I Told Ya So

Oh fuck, the world is getting hot and the oceans are rising and the hurricanes are happening and tornadoes are six stories wide and avalanches are going on and the bees are dying and ice shelf breaks are breaking and glaciers are melting and there's more pollution in the air and holy shit the amount of mercury in landfills is going up and our population is expanding too much and fuck fuck FUCK our forests are getting depleted and they are drilling in Alaska and ah no, no, no, NO, we are getting fucked in the ass by coastal erosion and people are visiting our national parks waaaay too much and recycling has gone to shit and graphs.

We shoulda listened. He told us so.

Al Gore's "I Told Ya So". All proceeds go to the overall Environmental Salvage Movement and each ticket is made of recycled waste.

Dance, Singh!

Maninderpal "Manny" Singh (Shahrukh Khan) is your average Sikh culinary student. Manny goes to school, he plays cricket, and most importantly, he does not dance. But when the cutest girl at his university Mayree "Mary" Mangeshkar (Preeti Zinta) makes it to CCTV's "Best Dance Duo", Singh decides to put down his spatula and really heat things up. But Manny realizes he is in deeper than he thinks when he runs across Mary's father, the mafia boss Mohinderpratap Mangeshkar (Salman Khan), or as he is known in his crime circle, "Daddy Tapdat". Along side his estranged twin brother (Shahrukh Khan), Manny must stop Daddy Tapdat from turning the Best Dance Duo stage into a hostage situation and save Mary from her criminal father.

With a hit soundtrack from Oscar-winning composer A. R. Rahman, this film's contemporary cinematography, fast action and phat beatz will keep you on your feet all the way to the discos. You know what they say, if you can't handle the heat, get off the dance floor.

The Atheist

Tagline: He only believes in one thing. Corrupting your family.

Summary: Hollywood producer David Goldstein (Tom Cruise) has a dark secret, he is the son of the devil. In between attending Mosque and reading Richard Dawkins books, he's building a homosexual army armed with electronic cell phones to take down God and bring his father back into power to settle a gambling debt. Our fate rests in the hands of one family- Father Sheppard (Mel Gibson), Joanna Sheppard (Reese Witherspoon) and their 17 children.

Visionary director Jebediah Archibald the 5th brings you this chilling tale of brutal violence, liberal mentality and disbelief. The final chapter of his "What to tell your children to be afraid of" trilogy, The Atheist is a perfect follow up to Barn Doors Left Open.

The Atheist is an instant horror classic. This film will make you believe.

Lost: The Musical

This weekend, theatres across America are going to get LOST. LOST: The Musical that is. In this Rodgers and Hammerstein reproduction of the popular ABC series, Doctor Jack, outcast Sawyer and cutie Kate will not be the only ones stirring up drama.

"We always wanted LOST to be a musical, it just made sense to us," comments show conductor J.J. Abrams, "but the conventions of television just don't allow for that kinda thing. It is such a joy to see the story come to life the way we originally imagined it."

"A lot of people have come up to me and said 'LOST the musical?! Really?!?' and I would just say 'yeah, really'", laughs show producer Damon Lindelof, "everyone is extremely excited about this."

The production is to run about 2 hours with one 15 minute intermission during which the bigger theatres plan on selling LOST paraphernalia.

"We're going to sell little Dharma cookies with the Dharma symbol on them", chuckles Chuck Willstof, manager of the Napa Valley Opera House. "And we are going to sell bottled water we say came from a waterfall up the hill. Haha, but no, it's just bottled water."

Bloggers and theatre patrons alike are already buzzing about the production. Songs such as "What's In The Hatch", "Lock's Got Legs" and "The Theme of the Smoke Monster" are already best selling singles on iTunes, and the show stopper "We Have To Go Back, Kate" is the newest radio sensation.

But is the play a hit with die hard fans or is it just a plane crash waiting to happen?

"I'm a huge fan of the show and I was a little uncertain about seeing it on stage", comments Carl Whitenose, a devoted fan that attended a sneak preview of the play through a contest the show hosted that had viewers allocate meaning to Jack's tattoos. "But they really got us in the spirit. It was all dark in the beginning and they had us count down and so everyone was like " 42! 23! 16! 15! 8!!' and by '4' people were screaming and standing up and cheering and crying!!"

"I was blown away!" gasped another fan, Josh Willaby, directly after the sneak preview, "man, that was so freaking cool! They did everything right, even the title coming at you, they did it all! It even got blurry and clear at the right moments!"

With fan enthusiasm fanning the build-up flame, LOST: The Musical's opening night is bound to be explosive. But the theatre production has a bigger role than just entertainment.

"Since this is how we originally wrote it, the show is finally going to make sense after seeing it done this way," laughs Abrams. Just before the show runner left, he left us one clue as to LOST's future.

"And I don't want to give too much away buuuuttt....who knows, if this works out, maybe we'll do an ice show."

You can get LOST in LOST: The Musical at your local theatres starting July 15th. For tickets, contact your local ticket master.

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