DVD movie commentary/review

Eddie (Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage playing a teenager) wants to be a winner at arcade games, so plays at the local arcade, as well as entering the 1982 video game championships.

1970s-80s classic video games are present at ‘the games’ of video games, notably Pac Man and Donkey Kong (games I must admit I played rarely and badly).

Remember those 1980s games? Maybe not, or you may.

You may have been a player. If that was the case, Pixels (2015, USA) is a nostalgic trip for you.

Eddie turns out to be one of the best players and beats Brenner, a talented gamer who could have won if it weren’t for Eddie’s sledging. Alas, Brenner loses.

Pixels is about, as they say, ‘who’s the man’, or who’s the woman for that matter. It is about winners and losers, but also about what it takes to be a man or a woman.

As talented at games as he was, Brenner is now installing televisions and play stations at flash houses, a natural enough progression actually, but according to some people in his life, not up to his potential.

Brenner (Adam Sandler) acknowledges himself that he is a ‘loser’ though many hard working installers in real life would probably say that installing products is not a loser’s job. I would agree.

So much for reality in Pixels, but Adam Sandler produced comedies have a penchant for ‘underdogs’ who think they are from the lowest of the low of human kind—in other words, do Adam Sandler made-up characters have any merits at all?

For Brenner, his talent at gaming has come and gone. However, Brenner does have another talent. He likes hanging out. He has time for his friends and clients who may be having a problem and he listens.

Brenner engages in problem solving for Violet (Michelle Monaghan) whose husband dumped her for the ‘latest model’.

Brenner, this self-described loser, is actually a decent human being, who says he cannot stand snobbery in Violet, but he won’t hold that against her.

Those character traits, on the one hand thinking he is a loser, and on the other hand being a decent person, is pretty much an Adam Sandler trademark in the movies he produces and stars in. It is like Woody Allen produced movies that have a typical character, namely the Woody Allen persona. Sandler has carved out his very own.

Brenner, the good-gut loser, is, by the way, about to save the world from an invasion of Pac-Man video game characters, life-sized. This is when a decent person brings his talent to bear on a figurative catastrophe or a calamity of sorts, ‘transferring’ the skills that have laid dormant to the big sky invasion.

He need not worry about where he is on the pecking order. Brenner is useful. He tells an admiring young boy who asks him how he obliterated a Pac Man: “I’m a loser who was good at arcade games.” The boy, who has just been saved by Brenner, replies, “Thank God for that.”