(I'm thinking this could go in one of several of the forums, so feel free to move if necessary) Success of Ben X rests on gaming community Rich McGinnis for Metro News April 18, 2008 09:03 Computers are used more and more to give the illusion that a director filmed in some impossible location — a distant point in history, a place on the globe where bringing a movie crew would be either difficult or dangerous, or some place that's only existed in mythology or imagination. Nic Balthazar's film Ben X might be one of the first films that takes its cameras, so to speak, into landscapes meant only to exist in computers — the world created for a multi-player role-playing video game, with its strangely ethereal ground and plastic skies. It's the world where the film's protagonist, a teenage misfit suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, prefers to live, as a refuge from the bullying he suffers at school. Technology turns on him, however, when his classmates' camera phones capture his humiliation at the hands of his tormentors and the video ends up online in mere hours, denying him his last safe haven. The Internet, Balthazar says, "has taken bullying to another level, and has given birth to this phenomenon — the name itself is so sarcastic — of 'happy slapping.' For Christ's sake. It shows how premeditated this sort of evil can be, because we always associate bullying with 'Oh, well, it's just teasing, it's a joke and maybe it got out of hand.' We see how you have to hit or degrade someone in public, and then start filming it, and then upload it and download it and send links around, so maybe it never was the joke that people said it was." Read more...
