It’s hard to really make fun of videogame culture. For every Cow Clicker there are dozens of noobz, the attempted comedy from writer and director Blake Freeman about a group of friends that travel to Los Angeles to compete in a Gears of War tournament.
Rather than make fun of the particularities of games themselves, the movie is a comic pastiche that could be applied to almost any subject: the straight-man protagonist, the loud “vagina-repellent” friend, and a wild night out at a strip club, where the presence of an overweight black woman is meant to be a punchline. noobz seems like anti-comedy in its formulaic insistence on applying other people’s punchlines to a subject where they don’t shed any light. (And it’s hard to imagine a subject where they would shed any light.)
Wunderkind Pictures, the company behind noobz, has announced a “strategic marketing partnership” with CBS Interactive, a company that owns GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, ComicVine and broadcasts Major League Gaming events. Details of the deal are still vague but CBS will promote the movie’s anti-comedy across its various sites while Wunderkind will “develop exclusive noobz-related content and original programming based on new intellectual properties that are in development.”
The movie, which also features former G4 host Adam Sessler, Zelda Williams, and Jason Mewes is scheduled for theatrical release in August. It’s ugly, unfunny, and unflattering, but it’s also a perfect example of how people make money in videogame culture today: using weak topical connections to exploit each other’s user demographics. Laugh it up. These are the jokes.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]