SCREENING

Extended Play: Videogames Meet Cinema

Extended Play: Videogames Meet Cinema contemplates the evolving, enduring relationship between games, digital culture and contemporary cinema.

Presented in dialogue with Virtual Realms: Videogames Transformed, this programme of screenings looks at films that have established a cross-medial relationship with videogames, and how this connection is inflected in different ways.

First launched in September, the programme continues with cult classic TRON (1982); the Asian premiere of Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest (2021), a comedic offbeat documentary about a man who attempts to be the first in the world to play 100 hours in a row on an arcade machine; and Taiwanese psychological horror film Detention (2019) based on the popular video game of same name developed by Red Candle Games.

Line-Up

Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest (2021)

97 minutes | NC16 (Some Coarse Language)
Dir. Mads Hedegaard
Danish with English subtitles

Kim Cannon Arm is not your average grandpa. With killer hand-eye coordination and a mean mullet, he's a legendary fixture at Copenhagen's Bip Bip Bar, and renowned for playing the 80s arcade game Gyruss for 49 hours straight on a single coin. With help from his buddies at the bar, a community of heroic outsiders who support one another no matter what, Kim attempts to obliterate his previous record and play for 100 consecutive hours (four days!).
Detention (2019)

103 min | NC16 (Violence and Coarse Language)
Dir. John Hsu
Mandarin with English subtitles

Based on best-selling game. Detention obtained 12 nominations for the Golden Horse Awards, including Best Narrative Feature, Best New Director, Best Leading Actress and Best New Performer.

In 1962, a sense of desolation and tension permeate the society. Fang, a twelfth grader at Tsuihua Senior High School, falls in love with Zhang, a counselling teacher. Troubled by the problems at school and home, Fang feels that Zhang is the only person who understands her. Longing for freedom, Zhang forms a study group with his colleagues and students, including Yin and Wei. Reading the banned books allows them to be liberated for a brief moment but at the same time, they put their lives in great danger.

One day, Zhang vanishes into thin air, and only Fang and Wei, an eleventh grader, remember him.

Together, Fang and Wei start looking for the disappeared teacher but ﬁnd the school gradually slipping out of the world they are familiar with.
TRON (1982)

96 minutes | PG
Dir. Steven Lisberger

A computer hacker is abducted into the digital world and forced to participate in gladiatorial games where his only chance of escape is with the help of a heroic security program.
Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

108 minutes | PG
Dir. Richard Moore

From Walt Disney Animation Studios comes a hilarious, arcade-game-hopping journey in Disney's Wreck-It Ralph. For decades, Ralph has played the bad guy in his popular video game. In a bold move, he embarks on an action-packed adventure and sets out to prove to everyone that he is a true hero with a big heart. As he explores exciting new worlds, he teams up with some unlikely new friends including feisty misfit Vanellope von Schweetz. Then, when an evil enemy threatens their world, Ralph realizes he holds the fate of the entire arcade in his massive hands.
READY PLAYER ONE (2018)

140 minutes | PG13 (Some Violence and Coarse Language)
Dir. Steven Spielberg

From filmmaker Steven Spielberg comes the science fiction action adventure “Ready Player One,” based on Ernest Cline’s bestseller of the same name, which has become a worldwide phenomenon. The film is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger.