I loved the part where they were mocking Uwe.

I don't know.. for me it looked desperate. Like "I know I'm a shitty director, so if I make a joke about how shitty I am I may look slightly better in audience's eyes" ;-)

Let's face it Boll was interested in one thing and one thing only - funnelling money from the film into his own pet companies and running off with it.

It's no secret. I remember an interview on German TV channel DMAX. There he actually stated that he's not interested in games at all, the idea has been to "use" the franchises to make money all along (which obviously was just a euphemism for "exploiting fans of franchises he doesn't care about").

To be fair "Using franchises to make money" is what all the movie makers do.
Boll just went the extra mile by fiddling the accounts and by also making very substandard films -- the fact that he also targeted a very specific market with eager and green rights holders was all that really brought him to the fore-front.

You know, the important part was him not being a gamer (and choosing this road despite that). And sure, unless a film is created for non-commercial purposes making money is always the or one of the main goals but Boll admitted that he's actually exploiting the fans whereas some movie makers actually choose certain franchises because they are fans themselves. Christophe Gans for example chose to create an adaptation of Silent Hill because he was a hardcore fan of the game, he actually fought for the rights for years and Konami only agreed after receiving a video message from him where he described how he feels about the franchise (which made me honestly believe that creating the film was more important to him than making money from it) - and unsurprisingly it became one of the best adaptations of a video game ever. More examples can be found in case of adaptations of comics - usually there's a clear analogy between the quality of the movie and how much the director and writer care about the source material. Boll openly admits that he does not care about the source material at all - I think this is an essential difference.

Edit: Btw, this is the clip containing the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=716Dzdqs7IM
The part I'm referring to can be heard at 1:43 (or rather "read", assuming that you don't speak German ^^).

I've seen interviews where he comes off as a intelligent, enthusiastic person. And I've also seen other things that make him look like a complete toolbag. This one goes in the "toolbag" category.

I've never seen it myself, but I heard of an original movie (I forgot the name) Boll made after he stopped making ones based on video games. Apparently, it wasn't as bad as one would expect. Not remarkable, but watchable. If this is true, then it really shows that his "adaptations" were nothing but a Springtime For Hitler-like scheme. And since the law he exploited was changed (as far as I know), he can't really do that anymore.

Of course, the thing with Uwe Boll is that he is a businessman first and a filmmaker second (at best).

Actually, I don't even like the kind of humor that the game mostly has. But I guess I have some resistance to it, that allows me to enjoy the game regardless of that. Seriously, I'm surprised myself how I got used to casually pissing around. And just by writing this, I have the feeling that something is seriously wrong with me.

But yeah, it's not really all that offensive. I was actually surprised by it's "tameness", as I was expecting something much worse. Partly it's because of it's humor, actually. I think it would be more offensive if it would take itself seriously. But I think it's for the best that it doesn't do that.

I need to see more of his films before I have a particular opinion. But from what I can tell, he's not a bad film maker. And his earlier films were better received than his later films. He mostly has the poor judgment to use popular franchises of video games as source material for films. And the fact is that video games are not typically suitable material to base a movie on.

Books have the opposite issue, there's too much material in a book to make a movie, so the writers have to cut down on the material and reorganize the plot so that it works as a film. Typically cutting sub plots and trimming entire scenes from the film.

Games though, are just too short and shallow typically for a film to work without adding a ton of stuff. Sure, there are games like FO and Prototype where there probably is enough of a plot there to be able to make a workable plot out of. But, games like Doom could hardly be any more shallow and at best you end up with a film which is set in the universe of Doom.

Postal itself is effectively a cult comedy, either you get it and it suits you or it doesn't. I'm sure there are a small number of people that feel kind of meh about it, but I'm guessing that most people feel very strongly about it. Assuming that they've heard about it at all.

Well "offensiveness" is pretty relative. I look at it from the point of view of "how hard does this game try to offend people" rather than "how offended am I personally by the game."

Hey, why don't they include the first Postal? It's delightfully fucked up. The poems, the nightmare-ish music, the moans and screaming of people dying...

Makes a great coffee break game :D

As far as I can tell everything suggests that he's an awful director but a great businessman. I mean, even his own arguments support this. When he underlines that everything about his movies - the budget, the cast, the crew etc. - is on a solid American blockbuster level but it's obvious to everyone that his movies aren't quite as good as most other directors' movies with a lower budget, then the only difference left is the director. And I have seen quite a lot of his movies including one of his less famous early German ones and really - it's obvious that he treats movie making like a craft, not artistic work. And as far as I can tell it's something he's simply uncapable of learning.

I can't fully agree on this one. IMHO this assumption that games don't have enough content is the big mistake that directors and screenwriters make. They just look at the obvious plot delivered through the cutscenes and but they fail to see the content delivered through subtle storytelling techniques limited to video games. I believe that deep analysis of a whole (good) game provides much more content than can be stuffed even into a 120 minute movie. The fact alone that the average game is taking place in more locations than your average movie is a problem and additionally (this is not only my opinion) the surroundings themselves have a stronger meaning in games than movies. Of course directors and screenwriters have to replace some stuff and introduce their own ideas but they lack the understanding of the medium that video games are to do it properly. A typical mistake is also assuming that video games have a closer relationship to movies than literature has just because they are also using images and audio. In fact the translation from the video game medium to the movie medium is much more complex and we have yet to see that generation of directors and screenwriters that both respects and understands video games this deeply to do it right.

Frankly I know many people who have seen Postal and only very few of them like it. Personally I also maybe enjoyed two scenes but I can't honestly say that it's a good entertainment - it has a lot of black humor but it failed to use it in an intelligent manner. Even Southpark is a zillion times more sophisticated than Postal is.

RWS guy said in steam group that they'll probably make a HD remake of P1 if P2 succeeds in greenlight/steam

Everything has to have a remake nowadays... :P