Plus: looks at nostalgia in 'The Nice Guys' and Adam Eaton's incredible season. View in your browser Share | Subscribe In the May 25 newsletter, Victor Luckerson debuts with an assessment of video-game-movie hits and misfires, K. Austin Collins looks at nostalgia in The Nice Guys for his first Ringer piece, and Michael Baumann says not to call the White Sox’s Adam Eaton scrappy. Ringer illustration Hollywood’s in Love With Video Games (Again) By Victor Luckerson A movie studio just spent $80 million to answer the burning cultural question of our times: Why are the Angry Birds so angry? The fowl made famous by a chart-topping iPhone game have now conquered the box office as well, with The Angry Birds Movie leading the weekend with a $38.2 million take. In the film, the bird you slingshotted at pigs on your morning commute back in 2011 has been given a name (Red), a famous voice actor (Jason Sudeikis), and a backstory (his anger issues make him an outcast among calmer birds). Middling reviews indicate that Red and his friends are about as funny as most animals spit out by the DreamWorks Anthropomorphic Character Generator. (A fun sidenote: The film has spawned a conspiracy theory that it’s actually an elaborate anti-immigration allegory inspired by Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis. Deep stuff.) Whatever The Angry Birds Movie is trying to accomplish, it’s certainly another sign that the overload of games across all of our devices and platforms is fertile ground for feature-length reimaginings. Angry Birds (the app) has been downloaded more than 3 billion times — just getting a fraction of the people who’ve played it into the theater will make the film a hit. And it’s not alone: Big console franchises such as Ratchet & Clank and Assassin's Creed are also gracing the silver screen this year. And World of Warcraft, a PC behemoth that had more than 12 million active subscribers at its peak, gets its movie debut in June, the first film in a planned trilogy. Hollywood is also growing increasingly desperate to bet on well-established IP, be it from comics, television, or games (or, occasionally, books). Of the 29 movies that grossed more than $100 million in 2015 in the United States, just six were based on original concepts, and one of those was San Andreas. As gaming continues to grow in popularity, movie studios will get more aggressive about adapting (read: shoehorning) beloved gaming franchises into popcorn fare. So which of these attempts past, present, and future are fun, big-screen retellings … and which are an obvious, depressing cash grab? Plausible

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) — There’s really no assembly required in transforming a game about an archaeologist who scours tombs for treasure into a movie about an archaeologist who scours tombs for treasure. Plus, this movie brought us one of the many dope OutKast songs hidden away on a film soundtrack. Resident Evil (2002) — With its detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, the original Resident Evil on PlayStation helped bring a cinematic flair to early 3D gaming. It’s no surprise that the horror series eventually spawned a line of films, though they generally don’t live up to the game’s pedigree. Minecraft (TBD) — It’s hard to imagine a film could capture the infinite possibilities offered by Minecraft’s simple but powerful world-building tools. Then again, a movie about LEGOs seemed like a silly idea, too. Precarious

Mortal Kombat (1995) — The first Mortal Kombat movie is just outlandish and low-budget enough to be endearing — it tried its hardest to be cool! The game’s flamboyant characters and dramatic finishing moves made this a slightly more reasonable game-to-film adaptation than other fighters like Street Fighter and Dead or Alive. Super Mario Bros. (1993) — What was originally scripted as a cartoony fairy tale in the style of the series’ iconic games mutated into a dark satire in which goombas with grotesque, shrunken lizard heads roam the streets of a dystopian New York and perform with George Clinton. There are actual people in the world who believed this would be the dinosaur movie of 1993, not Jurassic Park. Need for Speed (2014) — This 22-year-old racing franchise is all about the cars, not the theoretical humans who drive them. But the movie centers on Aaron Paul as a troubled street racer who didn’t love family or Corona enough to make it into Furious 7. At least it’s fun to imagine Jesse driving directly into the reality of this film after his final scene in Breaking Bad. Preposterous

Fruit Ninja (TBD) — Can slicing through melons of varying sizes and colors really be the driving premise of a 90-minute film? Feels like no. Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command (TBD) — Hollywood is hellbent on turning a relic from the primordial days of Atari 2600 into a summer blockbuster, so all three of these movies are reportedly in the works. The only question is whether the first to make it to screen will be the game with no plot where you shoot asteroids, the game with no plot where you shoot centipedes, or the game with no plot where you shoot missiles. Tetris (TBD) — Recall the last time you played Tetris on your computer. As you frantically slid a line block down the right-most column and cleared four rows at once, did you think, “This would make a great sci-fi thriller!”? So did Larry Kasanoff, a former producer of the Mortal Kombat films who is now developing the Tetris movie. The celebration of blocks will be a long one, as Kasanoff hopes to turn the game into — wait for it — a trilogy. Wait, a Thunder-Raptors Finals Might Actually Happen? Check our Facebook page for Matt Borcas on the weirdness of a potential OKC-TOR Finals and a staff reaction to the Thunder's unlikely heroes. Ringer illustration When We Were Young: Nice Guys and Nostalgia’s Limitations By K. Austin Collins The first nice guy we meet in The Nice Guys isn’t played by Ryan Gosling or Russell Crowe. Rather, it’s a kid who opens the movie by sneaking out of his bedroom to look at porn. This isn’t the nice part, by the way — that comes later, after a car tumbles off a cliff into the kid’s living room. The driver, a very beautiful, very naked, very injured brunette, says, “How do you like my car, big boy?” and immediately dies. The kicker: she’s Misty Mountains, the porn star splayed across the stickiest pages of the kid’s nudie magazines. He knows this woman, sorta, which might explain why he stops just a half-second to get a pretty good look at her naked, dead body before getting help. To his credit, when he snaps to, his first act is to cover her up. Like a gentleman. Grade: vaguely nice. Also pretty nice: a teenage girl who accepts rides home from a talkative older creep and suffers his flirtation in exchange for getting to smoke his fantastic weed. Points for relatability and personal sacrifice. Even nicer: the 13-ish boy who tries to impress a porn producer by showing off his junk (don’t worry, doesn’t happen) because, he says, “I got a big dick.” Points for sharing — and for injecting some humorous nonsense into this relatively lifeless movie. The Nice Guys is ostensibly a movie about two down-and-out private investigators, played by Crowe and Gosling, who get tangled up in a conspiracy involving porn, filicide, the Detroit auto industry, dead birds, and the Department of Justice. It’s That ‘70s Movie. But what’s memorable about it isn’t the usual bells and whistles, the staches, the perfectly rounded Afro wigs, the pool-party waifs dressed like mermaids, or any of its half-committed nods to L.A. noir. We’re far too far into Hollywood’s ‘70s revival for the elements of style — sets, costumes, winking music choices — to be a point of distinction. No, what’s memorable about The Nice Guys is the crew of not-so-nice kids: the 12- through 18-year-olds who, even by the sexual revolution’s standards, seem remarkably #unbothered when bumping heads with coke-addled pornographers. The movie is set in 1977, when its director and co-writer Shane Black might, at 16, have been one such precocious kid. At least it's fun to think of him that way, along with other recent nostalgics like David O. Russell and J.J. Abrams. They’ve all made films which sometimes felt too attached — in ambition and style, if not content — to the Hollywood era of their childhoods. It’s gotten stale. The Nice Guys is a lesser movie than either of those men has made — than even Shane Black has made — but it at least playfully raises the possibility that the year of Close Encounters of the Third Kind might also have been fit for a Kids prequel. Picture that: picture The Nice Guys without adults. Same premise, same crimes, but with the dirty-minded, precocious teens and pre-teens stuck on the margins of the current movie moved front and center, fated to think they know it all and to realize, sometimes fatally, that they don’t. That’s what happens anyway — on the bench. It’s not a better or more responsible nostalgic fantasy, but of what’s here, it’s the better story. Can’t we make it the story?

Episode 41

Chris and Andy discuss Game of Thrones and Preacher. Then Chris talks about The Nice Guys with Robert Mays.

The Press Box

Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis explores the history and uncertain future of the TV sports highlight package.

Getty Images Don't Call Him Scrappy: Adam Eaton Has Been One of the Best Outfielders in Baseball By Michael Baumann In this era of initials-based, corporate nicknames like OBJ and A-Rod, you know who’s got a great nickname? Adam “Spanky” Eaton. It’s a little racy, and chock-full of strong consonant sounds. Plus it’s short, fun, energetic — not unlike Eaton himself. After popping onto the scene as a decent prospect in Arizona in 2012-13, Eaton has been an afterthought for most of his career. First, he became the third- or fourth-biggest name in the Mark Trumbo trade (three Mark Trumbo trades ago). Since then, he’s been stuck on a team that (1) hasn’t been very good and (2) plays in the shadow of the Cubs. Even within the White Sox bubble, he’s been overshadowed by José Abreu and Chris Sale. He’s never made an All-Star team or received a single MVP vote. Hell, if he’s the most famous Adam Eaton of the past 10 years, that happened only recently. Now, in the early months of this season, the 27-year-old Eaton has found himself at or near the top of the FanGraphs WAR leaderboard, serving as the position-player avatar among position players for a White Sox team that is itself atop another notable leaderboard: the AL Central. So, what’s changed from 2015 to 2016? Not much, actually. He’s striking out a little less often, which is good, but his 2016 wRC+ (118) is the same as last year and only a point higher than in 2014. In fact, the fWAR jump has a lot to do with his defense: After grading out as an average-ish defensive center fielder over the past few seasons, ultimate zone rating has him as a plus-11-run defender in right over two months. While it makes intuitive sense that an average center fielder would be an above-average right fielder, such an extreme number over a small sample probably exaggerates his impact so far. Rather, he’s likely been this good all along. FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Baseball-Reference all rate him as being, at minimum, a three-win player in each of the past two seasons and at least a two-win player so far this season. That might not get you into the Hall of Fame, but it’s enough to make you a first-division regular. Eaton’s relative obscurity, then, might have something to do with that nickname, which connotes an undersized, scrappy player who gets by on force of will instead of talent. In the days of sites like Fire Joe Morgan and the early sabermetric revolution, players like these were lauded by traditional sportswriters and reviled by the newcomers who have since gone on to become some of baseball media’s biggest voices. Here’s to you, David Eckstein. There’s likely been a little bit of an overcorrection since. Players like Eaton, who look like grinders, get labeled as such even when they bring more to the table. He gets his jersey dirty, sure, but he’s really an above-average on-base bat who hit 14 home runs last year and can play center field. Not bad for a guy named Spanky. Top Ten QBs

Robert and Kevin rank the top signal callers in the NFL heading into the 2016 season. Charity: Water's Scott Harrison

Scott Harrison tells Bill about his quest to solve the global water crisis. The Players Recap

Geoff and House discuss Jason Day's wire-to-wire win at TPC Sawgrass, the "big three," and more.

Share | Subscribe