Harmony Korine: ‘Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III’ “Looks Better Than Anything That Spielberg’s Ever Done” [Updated]

Harmony Korine has full-on lost his mind for video games. In fact, he believes that the recent advances in gaming technology now look visually better than any movie (via EW):

it’s almost gone 360. You could look at the Call of Duty trailer now, and it looks better than anything that Spielberg’s ever done.”

Korine’s upcoming “Aggro Dr1ft” was inspired by his gaming obsessions, saying that “It has the repetitive cadence of a video game cutscene.” Korine’s term for the movie’s look is “Gamecore.” He also added that he’s probably done making movies.

Korine seems to be challenging the late Roger Ebert’s assertion that “video games can never be art.” Ebert got some major pushback from the gamer community for those comments and reasserted this belief a few years later:

I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

Ebert went on to add that no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game “worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.”

Luca Guadagnino doesn’t agree. He named Hideo Kojima’s “Death Stranding” as the best “film” of 2019. He even listed it above Scorsese, Tarantino and Almodovar. Elle Fanning and Nicolas Winding Refn have also praised Kojima’s game.

Guillermo del Toro, who appears in “Death Stranding,” has also been known to defend the art of video games, saying that “it’s a medium that gains no respect amongst the intelligentsia. Most people who complain about videogames have never fucking played them."

Meanwhile, as we speak, and instead of working on his next movie, John Carpenter is probably playing Fallout 76 in his basement.