NationMaster - Encyclopedia: The Game (film)

The Game is a 1997 psychological thriller film directed by David Fincher and produced by Polygram, telling the story of an investment banker who is gifted with prepaid access to a game that integrates in strange ways with his life. As the lines between the banker's real life and the game become more and more uncertain, there are hints of a larger conspiracy. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... David Leo Fincher (born August 28, 1962) is an American music video and film director known for his dark and stylish portraits of the human experience, particularly Fight Club and Se7en. ... Steve Golin is founder and CEO of Anonymous Content LLP, a multimedia development, production and talent management company based in Culver City, California. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Andrew Kevin Walker (born August 14, 1964 in Altoona, Pennsylvania) is an American screenwriter. ... For other people bearing this name, see Michael Douglas (disambiguation). ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Deborah Kara Unger (born May 12, 1964[1] or 1963 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian actress. ... James Rebhorn (born September 1, 1948) is an American character actor who has appeared in over one hundred television shows, feature films, and plays. ... Peter Donat (born 20 January 1928 in Nova Scotia, Canada) is an actor best known for his roles in American television. ... Howard Leslie Shore (born October 18, 1946) is an Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy Award-winning Canadian composer, best known for composing the scores to The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and films of David Cronenberg. ... Harris Savides is a contemporary American cinematographer. ... PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE) was a London-based film studio, founded in 1991 as a European competitor to Hollywood, but eventually sold and merged with Universal Pictures in 1999. ... Buena Vista International is a division of The Walt Disney Company which handles non-U.S. distribution of Disney films. ... is the 255th day of the year (256th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1997 Gregorian calendar). ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Indian Ocean Territory,[1] the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 2. ... ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Indian Ocean Territory,[1] the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 2. ... Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. ... David Leo Fincher (born August 28, 1962) is an American music video and film director known for his dark and stylish portraits of the human experience, particularly Fight Club and Se7en. ... PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE) was a London-based film studio, founded in 1991 as a European competitor to Hollywood, but eventually sold and merged with Universal Pictures in 1999. ...

The game in the movie can be viewed as a sort of alternate reality game with a large live action role-playing game component. Participants in real life versions of alternate reality games and live action role-playing games find the movie interesting and a source of inspiration for this reason. (See also The Game (treasure hunt) for a real-life equivalent to the fictional events in the film.) Alternate Reality, see Alternate Reality (computer game). ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... The Game is a non-stop 24-48 hour treasure hunt / puzzlehunt / road rally that is currently active in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle Area. ...

The Game was #44 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments.^{[citation needed]} This article is about the U.S. cable network. ... The 100 Scariest Movie Moments was a TV mini series first shown in late October of 2004 on Bravo TV. It was a countdown for the 100 most shocking moments in the history of movies, with interviews from horror experts or other celebrities who experienced the films on the list. ...

Cast

For other people bearing this name, see Michael Douglas (disambiguation). ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Deborah Kara Unger (born May 12, 1964[1] or 1963 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian actress. ... James Rebhorn (born September 1, 1948) is an American character actor who has appeared in over one hundred television shows, feature films, and plays. ... Peter Donat (born 20 January 1928 in Nova Scotia, Canada) is an actor best known for his roles in American television. ... Carroll Baker, born on May 28, 1931, is a Golden Globe Award winning and Oscar nominated American actress who has enjoyed popularity as both a serious dramatic actress and, particularly in the sixties, a movie sex symbol. ... Anna Katarina is an actress. ... Armin Mueller-Stahl (born December 17, 1930) is a German film actor. ... Charles Martinet Charles Martinet (born September 17, 1955, in San Jose, California) is an American voice actor, best known for providing the voice of Mario, the star of Nintendos flagship franchise. ... Elizabeth Dennehy (born November 1, 1960) is an American actress. ... Daniel Schorr (born August 31, 1916) is a journalist who has covered the world for more than 60 years. ... John Aprea (born March 4, 1941 in Englewood, New Jersey) is an Italian-American actor, best known for in movies for his role as Young Sal Tessio in The Godfather: Part II (1974) and on television as Lucas Castigliano on the soap opera Another World, from 1989 to 1992. ...

Plot

The main character of The Game, Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is a successful businessman, but his success has come at the cost of his family life; when the movie opens, he is divorced and estranged from his wife. Nicholas goes about life in a cold, detached manner and seems incapable of expressing emotion or caring for anyone outside of himself. For other people bearing this name, see Michael Douglas (disambiguation). ...

On Nicholas's 48^th birthday, his younger brother Conrad (Penn) presents him with an unusual gift—a prepaid game offered by a company called Consumer Recreation Services—promising that it will change Nicholas' life. The nature of the game is unclear at first, but it appears to be a sort of live action role-playing game that integrates directly into the player's real life. After taking a full day test and physical, Nicholas is informed that the game company cannot serve him. However, Nicholas soon discovers that this is false and the game has begun. The game focuses on a key moment of Nicholas's life when, as a child, he witnessed his father committing suicide by leaping off their family home, the same home Nicholas lives in. Significantly, Nicholas's father took his life on his 48^th birthday—the same age as Nicholas is now. This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... Rather than surrender to US soldiers, the Mayor (BÃ¼rgermeister) of Leipzig, Germany, committed suicide along with his wife and daughter on April 20, 1945. ...

As the movie progresses, evidence mounts that the game is actually an elaborate scheme, but each time Nicholas thinks he has uncovered the truth, he finds that a new layer of complexity has been revealed and that his previous assumptions were false. The Game quickly escalates into a no-holds-barred assault on everything Nicholas values, and his carefully ordered life and business empire rapidly disintegrate around him as The Game takes control. An employee (Unger) at first assists him in escaping from the clutches of the CRS operatives, but after a series of narrow escapes and repeated attempts on his life, Nicholas is captured, transported to Mexico and subjected to a premature burial (albeit one he easily escapes from), all while having his bank accounts drained by the employee who was pretending to help him. The Game is now revealed to be an elaborate scam to relieve the power elite of their property and their lives. Deborah Kara Unger (born May 12, 1964[1] or 1963 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian actress. ... â€œBuried Aliveâ€ redirects here. ...

Alienated from his friends and his trusted lawyer, Nicholas comes to a realization about his life and reconciles himself with his ex-wife, who has happily remarried and is about to give birth to her second child. Nicholas soon becomes desperate and retrieves a hidden handgun from his home, whereupon he heads directly into the offices of The Game company and takes one of the staff hostage. The movie comes to a climax on the roof of the game company's skyscraper. A jumpy Nicholas demands answers. The employee appears surprised by the gun, telling Nicholas that the game company thought they had replaced any real firearms Nicholas could access with fakes. A door opens, surprising Nicholas, and he fires without looking, only to reveal that he has shot his brother holding a bottle of champagne and dressed for his birthday celebration. Stricken with remorse, Nicholas leaps off the skyscraper and crashes through a glass ceiling, but he lands safely in an airbag. There he finds his family and friends awaiting his arrival and The Game is revealed to have just been a game. The accounts have not been drained, the gun was replaced with one firing blanks, and his brother is alive. As they embrace, Conrad confesses that he orchestrated the entire game as a way to shake his brother back to reality and make his brother enjoy life, to which the two break down in tears. A lawyer, according to Blacks Law Dictionary, is a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person licensed to practice law. ... A Browning 9 millimeter Hi-Power Ordnance pistol of the French Navy, 19th century, using a Percussion cap mechanism Derringers were small and easily hidden. ...

As a party is in full swing with friends and family, Nicholas meets several of the guests who at all points, were operatives in the game in various guises. When he finds out that the employee is about to depart for the night, Nicholas proceeds to run outside and strikes up a conversation with her as the film ends.

Production

According to David Fincher, there were three primary influences on The Game. Michael Douglas' character was a "fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting."^[3] He said in an interview that his movie differs from others of that kind because "movies usually make a pact with the audience that says: we're going to play it straight. What we show you is going to add up. But we don't do that. In that respect, it's about movies and how movies dole out information."^[4] Scrooge is the surname of Ebenezer Scrooge, the selfish and miserly protagonist of Charles Dickens 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. ... Mission: Impossible is the name of an American television series which aired on the CBS network from September 1966 to September 1973. ... This article is about the 1973 film involving con artists. ...

For the scene where Nicholas Van Orton's taxi drives in the San Francisco Bay, the close-up with Douglas was filmed on a soundstage that contained a large tank of water.^[5] The actor was in a small compartment that was designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action. San Francisco Bay, San Pablo Bay, and the Golden Gate San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining approximately forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains, enters the Pacific Ocean. ...

Locations

The movie was filmed primarily in San Francisco, using Hotel Nikko. The use of San Francisco as the primary locale was clearly a deliberate choice by Fincher; the city was of great significance in Michael Douglas' own career—he rose to fame as the co-star (with Karl Malden) of the popular 1970s police series The Streets of San Francisco, and also starred in the San Francisco-based hit thriller Basic Instinct. This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... Karl Malden (born on March 22, 1912) is an Emmy Award-winning, Oscar-winning and Golden Globe-nominated American actor, known for his expansive manner. ... The Streets of San Francisco was a successful 1970s television police drama filmed on location in San Francisco, California, and produced by Quinn Martin Productions, with the first season produced in association with Warner Bros. ... Basic Instinct is a 1992 thriller film, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Joe Eszterhas. ...

Nicholas's mansion was actually the historic Filoli Mansion, 25 miles south of San Francisco in Woodside, California. The plain gravel forecourt of the mansion was made to look more like a wrap-around driveway by the addition of the fountain, which was constructed of lightweight foam. The interior shots of the kitchen were made in the original time-worn kitchen, which is displayed on tours but no longer used. The kitchen was in a failing state of repair, so very dim lighting was used in the kitchen scenes to hide this. The scenes in which the walls were defaced with graffiti was done by tacking up lightweight graffiti-painted foamcore boards over the wood paneling. Filoli is a famous mansion and 654 acre (2. ... Woodside (pop. ...

Response

The Game opened to fairly positive reviews, and grossed $48 million domestically and $61 million overseas.^[2] As of July, 2007, It ranks 77% 'Fresh' at Rotten Tomatoes, with 26 counted reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, praising the dialogue and casting of Michael Douglas.^[6] 2007 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Roger Joseph Ebert (born June 18, 1942) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American film critic. ...

In his review for the Boston Globe, Jay Carr wrote, "The Game doesn't pretend to be more than a deftly fabricated construct, but it will keep you guessing and then outguess you and leave you feeling dazzled as opposed to dazed."^[7] Janet Maslin wrote in her New York Times review, "Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times."^[8] The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle wrote, "At times The Game is frustrating to watch, but that's just a measure of how well Fincher succeeds in putting us in his hero's shoes." The Boston Globe is the most widely-circulated daily newspaper in Boston, Massachusetts and in the greater New England region. ... Janet Maslin is a book critic for the daily New York Times. ... The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ... Todays San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. ...

Trivia

1999-2000 BMW 735iL The BMW E38 automobile platform was the basis for the 1994 through 2001 BMW 7 Series automobiles. ...

Contents

Cast

Plot

Production

Locations

Response

Trivia

See also

References

External links

Contents

Cast var ACE_AR = {Site: '756743', Size: '300250'};

Plot

Production

Locations

Response

Trivia

See also

References

External links

Cast