Watching Rachel Getting Married is a lot like being forced to watch an overlong wedding video in the living room of a couple you hardly even know. When Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns from Rehab to be at her sister older Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) multicultural wedding, her unresolved issues make the journey home with her, exposing the dysfunctional side of her family at a time meant for celebration. Kym desperately seeks to redeem herself in the eyes of her relatives, unable to forgive herself for a tragic accident that happened 10 years earlier as a result of her drug addiction.

2009 must be the year of the prequel. Not only does Wolverine’s back story get fleshed out in X-men Origins, but humanity’s war against the machines will begin in Terminator: Salvation and the Star Trek franchise will be getting its much anticipated reboot. Before all that though, the cult 2003 film Underworld is given its own origin story in Rise of the Lycans. But didn’t somebody tell director Patrick Tatopoulos that prequels are seldom any good? The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, Alien and Star Wars: all film franchises that have had their name somewhat tarnished because of a prequel. To make matters worse, Rise of the Lycans does itself no favours in attempting to break this trend by taking away the one good thing about the previous Underworld instalments; a leather clad, dual-pistol wielding Kate Beckinsale. As a result, it wouldn’t surprise me if the franchise’s predominantly male audience has gone with her.

I blame History for spoiling Hollywood’s latest Nazi World War II thriller Valkyrie. Had I not previously known that the attempt made by German’s to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime had obviously failed, it might have made for a more engaging movie. It’s common knowledge that the Nazi leader topped himself; clearly a completely miscast Tom Cruise had nothing to do with it.

It’s no secret that videogame to movie adaptations are rarely any good. As an avid gamer myself, it’s almost painful to helplessly look on as Hollywood continually manages to strip out everything that made the game fun and produce a movie that is best suited to a bargain bin at a petrol station. Considering that novels and comics have been successfully adapted for years, it’s about time that Hollywood gave videogames the care and attention they deserve.

Yet one would have thought that Max Payne, a game which is heavily influenced by the film medium, would almost adapt itself to the big screen. The 2001 game took the best elements of the film noir genre and blended it with visual excitement of films like The Matrix to make for a fantastic gaming experience. When the film was first announced, gamers everywhere grew excited by the possibility that this could very well be the first game to film adaptation to finally break the curse. It could be the first film to finally represent the gaming industry fairly to the masses, cementing the fact that games are in fact the most exciting and diverse storytelling medium of the 21st century.

It could be, but it’s not. Not by a long shot.