Ben Fritz has an interesting column up over on Variety that points out that comparing a movie to a video game is quickly becoming a shorthand way of saying it sucks.

For today's movie critics, videogames are the new MTV musicvideo, a shorthand insult for any movie deemed too heavy on effects and visual panache at the expense of plot and coherence.

Anyone who has spent much time playing videogames — a category in which, it seems safe to assume, few established film critics fall — knows the comparison is both artistically demeaning and substantively wrong.

Fritz than launches into a defense of video games, pointing out that not all games are mindless gore-fests, sure some are, but it's absurd to bunch them all under one umbrella and about as fair as "dismissing the art of moviemaking based on "Wild Hogs.""

I think this increasingly wide-spread insult in movie reviews is mostly a product of pop culture ignorance and a sign that some movie critics are becoming increasingly detached from the mass culture they should be so versed in. Brian Crecente

300 Critics Cling to Consoles [Variety]

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