"Tetris" and "Pinball"

There was a previous attempt to turn the beloved video game "Tetris" into a movie, roughly a decade ago.  It was supposed to be a science fiction adventure that didn't sound like it had anything to do with the actual game.  The second attempt to turn "Tetris" into a movie takes an entirely different approach, presenting a highly exaggerated version of the fight among several companies and individuals to license Tetris from its Soviet creators in the late 1980s.  Our main character, and the eventual winner, is businessman Henk Rogers (Taron Edgerton), who runs a small Japanese game company with his lovely wife Akemi (Ayane Nagabuchi).  His competitors are the billionaire Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), and shady licensor Robert Stein (Toby Jones).  Eventually all of them end up in the USSR together, trying to win the lucrative deal for rights.

Significant liberties are taken with actual history, as Rogers has to contend with a comically corrupt official named Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov), and eventually everything builds to a thrilling escape sequence and car chase.  However, the messiness of the business dealings and the culture clash between the Western businessmen and the Communist system feels fairly plausible and is a lot of fun to see play out.  Rogers befriends the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), and Pajitnov's plight gives the story more crucial stakes beyond the financial ones.  The portrayal of the U.S.S.R. in its decline is fairly cartoonish, but the whole story takes place during the '80s, and the Soviets were our go-to movie villains in that era, so it also feels oddly appropriate.  And it goes with the 8 bit pixel art for the film's chapter breaks, and a soundtrack full of '80s standards.  Reorchestrated versions of the Tetris theme also feature constantly, to get your nostalgia going.

I appreciate the filmmakers including some of the nerdier aspects of the story and video game history.  The unveiling of the prototype of Nintendo's Gameboy is hilariously reverent.  However, "Tetris" should still be plenty accessible for non-fans, as it's far more of a farcical biopic and stranger-than-fiction slice of history than the usual video game themed film.  I thought it was a fun watch, and Toby Jones stole the show the way he always does, but all in all pretty middling.  There was a lot more they could have done to make the story interesting beyond awkwardly adding some 8-bit graphics to the unnecessary car chase.   

     

And that brings us to "Pinball: the Man Who Saved the Game," which is a biopic of a man named Roger Sharpe, played by Mike Faist as a young man and Dennis Boutsikaris in the present day.  Sharpe came to New York in the '70s to make it as a writer, got a job at GQ Magazine, and fell in love with a single mother named Ellen (Crystal Reed).  Sharpe was also the star witness at a 1976 hearing that convinced the City of New York to lift their decades long ban on pinball, which used to be considered a game of chance, and therefore a gambling device.  Sharpe, a pinball obsessive, was able to show that it was a game of skill.

The movie's not really about the legalization fight, however, but about Roger Sharpe and his relationship to a game that he loves.  And what's absolutely irresistible about the film is that it employs a framing device where an unseen director (Jeff Yass) is interviewing the older Sharpe in the present day, and both are commenting on the dramatized past events starring the younger Sharpe.  They're constantly talking about filmmaking particulars in the process - spending too long on the love story, having to replace swear words because the movie is going to be PG-13, and no, we can't use John Lennon's "Imagine," because the song is too slow and it costs too much.  The older Sharpe does the fun trick from "American Splendor" and "American Animals" where he'll occasionally wander into the margins of a dramatized scene to offer additional commentary.  At the end, he even offers some fact-checking and an update on what happened to all the characters in real life.  This is tremendously fun to watch, and executed wonderfully.   

What really won me over in the end was Faist's performance as Sharpe, an ordinary but very specific man.  I bought his love and enthusiasm for pinball, while Edgerton's love for video games in "Tetris" seemed rather more convenient.  And I bought into his romance with Ellen, such that I really wouldn't have minded if we'd spent the whole movie on their relationship and never made it to the legalization hearing at all.  I think it helps that I wasn't expecting much from the movie, giving it the chance to overdeliver.  "Pinball" wound up being one of the best surprises of my movie year so far.    

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