Stanley
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Midday Games: Directed by Adam Haynes. With Tom Demar, Angela Gulner, Tonya Kay, Everett Stillwell. Stanley stalks a beautiful woman. At a coffee house she magically turns into another beautiful woman who mistakes Stanley as her blind date. They proceed to have a strange, hot, funny blind date.
- Adam Haynes
- 70
- Comedy, Drama, Romance
- Tom Demar, Angela Gulner, Tonya Kay
Feb 20, 2024 · Former Midway Games art director Josh Tsui takes viewers on a nostalgic journey on the rise an fall of the most rebellious game makers of the '90s.
- A story of rebels, game-changing ultra-violence, and the battles of Midway deserves far more panache.
- Every IGN Mortal Kombat Game Review
- Verdict
By Kristy Puchko
Updated: Nov 24, 2020 10:15 pm
Posted: Nov 24, 2020 9:10 pm
Insert Coin opens in virtual cinemas and on Alamo On Demand on November 25.
If you walked into an arcade in the '90s, you've played a Midway game. At that time, Midway was the "Sex Pistols of the gaming industry," rebellious pioneers delivering arcade games that were loud, weird, and unapologetically violent. This video game studio gave us the flaming basketballs of NBA Jam, the promise of a Pleasure Dome in Smash TV, and the spine-ripping finishing moves of Mortal Kombat. Now all this and much, much more are dutifully recounted in the behind-the-scenes documentary Insert Coin.
Insert Coin begins in the '80s, when the arcade market had been flooded with "rip-offs" and "garbage." Gamers were hungry for something new and bold, and designer Eugene Jarvis was roaring to deliver. Onto a landscape littered with fantasy games, he unleashed NARC, an ultra-violent crime game with graphics that were much more realistic than the symbolic pixels of Pac-Man. When you blew a band of baddies to bits, you were rewarded with an explosion of flaming limbs. Players went crazy for it, and so began the rise of Midway. Over the course of the coming decades, a scrappy team of visionaries, misfits, and rebels made a fortune one quarter at a time by putting their wildest fantasies into arcades. Along the way, they pissed off parents, politicians, and the NBA, turning video games into the latest cultural battleground. Yet despite all this conflict, this doc is shockingly drained of drama.
The movie mentions how Terminator 2 drew national attention for its alleged glorifying of cop killing, how Mortal Kombat sparked a national debate about video game violence that went all the way to Congress, and how the bosses at Midway encouraged in-fighting and hostility among their employees, believing it made them more competitive in making their games the best. Yet, Tsui never digs into these issues to uncover how they impacted the workers or the work. Each is presented more like a bump in the road as opposed to a dynamic obstacle, which makes this journey a slog.
Further hurting the movie's momentum, Tsui tells his tale in clunky chapters rather than a dramatic arc. Title cars like "Building A Smash," "Cinematic Ambitions," or "From Filler To Killer" proclaims a new topic is about to be presented, and the last issue is officially closed. It gives the film all the flow of a poorly curated YouTube playlist, as Tsui uses the devices as an easy out for a touchy topic. Thus, a clumsy version of "all publicity is good publicity" becomes the last word on the T2 dust-up, a conclusion that is neither informative nor entertaining. It's just frustrating and becomes increasingly so as each chapter lumbers into another with a similarly anti-climactic end.
Through interviews and engaging archival footage, Insert Coin unfurls a story of professional rivalries, comical missteps, fame, fortune, and brutal backlash. Yet it's a pretty boring watch as any tension is cut off at the next title card. Aside from some visual effects that plop VHS-style glitches over some shots, there's little visual panache to ...
Midday Games (2013) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more.
Jul 3, 2019 · Midsommar: Directed by Ari Aster. With Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper. A couple travels to Northern Europe to visit a rural hometown's fabled Swedish mid-summer festival.
- (410K)
- Drama, Horror, Mystery
- Ari Aster
- 2019-07-03
1h 10m. Comedy/Drama/Romance. Cast. Tom Demar (Stanley) Angela Gulner (Claire 1) Tonya Kay (Claire 2) Everett Stillwell (Dave) Director. Adam Haynes. Synopsis. Stanley stalks a beautiful woman. At...
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