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MIGHT ''The Game'' suggest a special gift? It's for the man who has enough of everything except nightmares. This thriller's surprise scheme for Nicholas Van Orton, a joyless investment banker whose first name is effectively Mister, is a string of tricks to disrupt his privileged tranquillity. Those tricks mean an expensive and mostly unrelated string of shocks, illusions and chase scenes, so the audience should have no trouble sharing Van Orton's brush with flashy artificiality. After all, at the movies we've been doing that all summer.
''The Game'' is the work of David Fincher, the director whose ''Seven'' gave grisly new cachet to cat-and-mouse manipulation and whose sleeker new film amounts to gambits 8 through 20. And Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times. Forget political conspiracy, invading aliens or danger from the insect world: ''The Game'' puts its yuppie potentate through worse terrors.
These include rejection, powerlessness, invasion of privacy, temporary poverty and ruining very expensive clothes. Mr. Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller. He mirrors its commanding chilliness and creates an impression of sensible consistency, something that the story itself often lacks. As written with much surface ingenuity by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote ''The Net,'' the film has the steady momentum and flat trajectory of a video game. Excitement is churned out, chases run through ever-changing settings and sinister elements emerge from surprising places. The viewer can enjoy a series of vicarious jolts without counting on a payoff of clarity at the film's end.
Mr. Fincher, who has also had considerable experience making videos and commercials, has made ''The Game'' with impressive craftsmanship and a very high gloss. As photographed by Harris Savides (another stylish veteran of videos and commercials), this film sustains visual allure on several levels. The yuppie porn of Van Orton's lavish existence exerts its lure, but so does the prospect of seeing this antiseptic world shattered. And all it takes to change Van Orton's life is one little birthday visit from his brother.
Sean Penn, uncharacteristically bland as the black sheep of the Van Orton family, turns up in San Francisco to offer ''a profound life experience'' as Nicholas turns 48. The dissolute younger brother, Conrad, recommends a mysterious outfit called Consumer Recreation Services and gives Nicholas a gift certificate. Though it doesn't seem likely that the Scrooge-like Nicholas would be seduced by this, the film certainly offers him a sly temptation. Soon Nicholas has been lured to the C.R.S. corporate offices and subjected to a battery of psychological tests. (''I sometimes hurt small animals: true or false?'')
''Initials . . . initials . . . and sign here,'' says a jaunty C.R.S. exective (James Rebhorn), whose faintly jarring presence is the kind of question mark that the film gets just right. ''In blood. Just kidding!''
After he signs on with C.R.S., strange things start to befall Nicholas, not least of which is his becoming so credulous. When a life-size clown doll turns up in the driveway at his grand home (one of the film's burnished, imposing settings), for instance, he brings it inside. Next thing he knows, Daniel Schorr on CNN is taunting Nicholas bizarrely from the television set, and the clown's surveillance camera is spying on him. (The latter effect was achieved much more disturbingly in David Lynch's ''Lost Highway,'' a spookier paranoid fantasy than ''The Game.'')
Mr. Fincher's film has its expertly sneaky moments (like when Nicholas is telephoned in a board room and told that C.R.S. has rejected him) but just as many senseless ones. Beyond Nicholas's Master of the Universe status (a la Tom Wolfe) and his memories of his father's suicide, the film doesn't give him much heft. It also grows less gripping as its arbitrariness becomes clear. While it might not have suited Mr. Fincher's genuinely sophisticated style to explain everything about Nicholas's trip to the Twilight Zone, tying up a few loose ends would not have been amiss. Isolated moments in ''The Game'' do touch contemporary raw nerves, from the possibility that Nicholas has been entrapped by computer hackers to the wicked desecration of his mansion. (The film required the special services of a graffiti artist and lavish use of black light, two reasons the Jefferson Airplane's trippy ''White Rabbit'' becomes its ideal musical frisson.) A disaster in an elegant restaurant also sounds the right note of discreet calamity. Deborah Kara Unger, who played opposite James Spader in the even icier ''Crash,'' is a waitress in that scene, or perhaps she's a fraud.
Other prominent and possibly duplicitous figures in the story include Peter Donat as Nicholas's lawyer and Armin Mueller-Stahl as one of his business victims. Carroll Baker plays the motherly housekeeper who offers him a sandwich and milk when life starts going desperately wrong.
A pen leaks, a toilet overflows, a cabbie becomes a crazed kidnapper and a drugged beverage leaves Nicholas hijacked south of the border. But the film's most diabolical moment involves the simple malfunctioning of the lock on a briefcase. This little glitch, occurring at just the most maddening moment, is enough to bring on a fit of frustration, and suddenly Mr. Fincher provides a leafy backdrop outside a window to contrast with the film's fashionably unnatural atmosphere. Suddenly the formerly suave Nicholas is on the rampage, trying to smash the briefcase as if he were an orangutan stomping on luggage. His civilized veneer is gone in an instant and that is the point.
''The Game'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity, mild violence and hastily glimpsed suggestive photographs. It's still a Girl Scout picnic by ''Seven'' standards.
took about 2 minutes (my ski resort isnt open yet even tho it has been like 5 -20 degrees the last 4 days)
http://extremesportsvideos.com/ski.html 3rd movie from bottom
The Game
$22.95 was $29.95
The Poor Boyz delivered with 13 and Degenerates skiing videos, and the Game is a strong follow up, taking the limits higher. Featuring Phil Porier, J.P. Auclair, Shane Szocs, Candide Thovex, Julien Reigner Lafforgue, Vincent Dorion, J.F. Cusson, and the rest of the crew are pitted against each other to see who is truly king . 40 Minutes.
