Second Skin Tagged Articles at Cinematical

They say truth is stranger than fiction. To that I say "you obviously haven't seen Naked Lunch," but reality is certainly a fertile ground for film makers and today we've got five trailers for films based, to varying degrees, on real events.

The Perfect Game
I've never enjoyed watching sports so baseball movies usually leave me cold, but this one has a couple of things going for it: a true tale of a bunch of kids rising up from poverty to become world champions, and former drug culture icon Cheech Marin playing a priest. Based on true events, a former coach for the St. Louis Cardinals (Clifton Collins Jr.) takes a group of poor Mexican kids under his wing and teaches them the fine art of baseball, which ultimately leads them to the 1957 Little League World Series. There are the usual sports metaphors: "Love ain't like baseball," says Collins' character. "Yes it is," replies one of his bright eyed proteges. I'm teetering between cute and cringe-inducing on that one, but this kind of rags to riches story is pretty appealing and the period setting is pretty cool. The Perfect Game hits theaters on August 8.

If you know absolutely nothing about Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), Second Skin will get you up to speed in a hurry. Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza's documentary specifically revolves around a group of players who are obsessed with the World of Warcraft game, spending every waking moment in front of their computers, lost in an animated, medieval world of honor, loyalty, battles, romance, ceremony, and gold, always the gold. But it's not just World of Warcroft that attracts players -- it could just as easily be Second Life, Everquest, or dozens of others.

The film wants us to know that MMORPG are not just for kids. Of the 50 million players, two-thirds are in the much coveted 18-35 age range. (Here is your lost audience, Hollywood.) The folks that appear on camera are, by and large, wonderfully pleasant people, well aware of the outsider status that gaming places upon them in the eyes of the general public and (mostly) not caring. As one of the interview subjects says, maybe there are better ways gamers could spend their time, but the same could be said for people who watch sports all day long, guys who tinker with their cars all night long, or, really, any other hobby on the face of the earth.

Second Skin pumps out a lot of on-screen facts, offers plenty of sincere testimony from gamers, talks to various experts, gives lip service to the idea that gamers come from all walks of life -- and then proceeds to reinforce many of the worst stereotypes about gamers.

Yesterday we brought you the trailer for Second Skin, a new documentary premiering at the South by Southwest Film Festival in early March. To continue our pre-coverage of that festival, above you'll find the trailer for Reformat the Planet -- yet another documentary premiering at SXSW that, like Second Skin, deals somewhat in the world of video games. This one, however, is a tad different, as it follows several people who use their old Nintendo systems to create some pretty amazing music. How do they do it? I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that they use the actual music from, say, the Nintendo Game Boy, and transform it into these epic tracks.

It's definitely very cool, and I'm real interested in the film itself, yet I couldn't help but laugh watching these guys absolutely rock out while jamming on the buttons of a Game Boy. It's just comical, I don't know -- I mean these guys get REALLY into it. And their audience -- all sweaty and whatnot -- get REALLY into it. It's pretty awesome, I guess, and it just blows my mind to stumble upon these little worlds of art you never knew existed. Anyway, check out the trailer above and let us know what you think.

[via Matt Dentler's Blog]

One of the more interesting-looking films in the SXSW lineup is Second Skin, directed by Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza. The film is a documentary about people who are utterly obsessed with the virtual worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). The film follows several folks who spend all or most of their spare time (and perhaps even their time that's not really spare) immersed in virtual worlds in places like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Second Life and other MMOs. Firstshowing.net has the trailer up, and from watching it, it seems the filmmakers handle the subject matter without looking down on or making fun of these folks for whom virtual life is as important as real life.

It looks also like they examine both the dark and light sides of gaming. There's Kevin and Heather, who met online as a knight and a cleric slaying dragons on Norrath in Everquest, fell in love and then met in real life; then there's a guy on the trailer who talks about playing obsessively for 14-16 hours a day, to the point that his addiction to gaming was ruining his life and he became suicidal. I wonder if they'll delve at all into people using Second Life as a virtual space for sexual encounters and affairs (which personally, I find beyond creepy, but whatever gets you off, I guess). I'll be the first to admit that I don't get the whole appeal of virtual worlds and virtual identities; I can grok the concept that people get really into their video games, but the idea of not having much of a life outside of a virtual reality game puzzles the hell out of me.