I love playing games. From a young age I was taught to play and gamble on Mahjong by my Chinese grandparents. In my college days I made money playing poker, bluffing naive suckers out of their money. Nowadays I pass the time playing Trivial Pursuit variants which have been redesigned for gambling purposes, Jenga with shots of vodka as penance for tumbling the tower, and board games with ominous names like Pandemic. Sports movies are a well-treaded and beloved film genre. Some of these films merely provide us with ample 90 minute segments of entertainment, like Major League. Others go down in our hearts as the inspiring or heart-breaking works of Rudy or Field of Dreams. And if you make a boxing movie, there's a good chance you're getting Oscar nods like Ali and Cinderella man; and if you're lucky, y0u'll win Best Picture like Rocky and Million Dollar Baby. But for the less athletically inclined, we're stuck with our board games and card games, not rooting for Roy Hobbs to knock out the lights of the stadium but for Matt Damon to bluff Johnny Chan. Here are 10 great scenes from movies and the 10 games that accompany them...
10. Klondike (The Manchurian Candidate)
In its broadest definitions, solitaire is any game played by oneself. But like the way Kleenex and Jello have become synonymous with tissues and gelatin snacks, so has the term solitaire been re-purposed to simply mean Klondike. Klondike is a simple game, available on most computers, in which cards are laid out and columns are moved based on the card colors. In the movie The Manchurian Candidate, Raymond Shaw's mind has been re-wired, an unknowing walking time bomb planted by the Communists in order to gain political power in America. His trigger is the queen of diamonds. Throughout the film he is repeatedly told to go play solitaire just prior to receiving orders from his nefarious American handlers as to what his next mission should be. In these moments, Klondike, a game with no moments of actual drama, becomes exciting and dangerous.