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.”