Exactly,movie studios use pretty much the same lighting tricks as games - direct illumination with some ambient occlusion and color bleeding hacks here and there. Yet they do not look brown/gray. I think it might be because they have armies of artists (they call them "technical directors") that tweak the materials and lighting for thousands of man-hours until it looks good. Game companies probably invest much less in this kind of tweaking.
Nevertheless, I've gotten so bored by the sight of movie CGI. There's just too much texture or not enough light or something. Please, someone, make a physical model, shine some lights on it, and do some stop motion.
