SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

Morbs, I think our intolerance of the next cave over is directly proportionate to the frequency with which we are visited by their most obstreperous resident

I don't watch trailers, including this one. It's photographed by Janusz Kaminski and edited by Michael Kahn, so possibly good.

I might skip it if SS made this for his teenage kids, but the last film of his I missed was The Lost World.

I meant the next geek cave, dude.

(btw scratch that, all his kids are over 20)

Spielberg quote above suggests he understands the audience for this very, very well. But I'll be surprised if it does any better with the wider market than Scott Pilgrim or Pixels, or for that matter Tintin or The BFG.

The main thing that mystifies me is why he would find this an interesting story to work on... it's just a nostalgia rush for stuff that came out when he was in his late 30s, some of which he was involved in creating, and he's not normally even that particular kind of nostalgic. Melange of rerun serials made before he was born, yes, affection for childhood and family, sure, but the only things he's made that are really set during his youthful years are Crystal Skull, Catch Me If You Can and Tintin, and none of those strike me as "you know what really makes me happy is just seeing tons of movies I've never stopped rewatching since I was 11 get *mentioned* in something else."

I learned today that Ernest Cline has "spoken word" poetry posted on his website. The first one is an ode to the tv show Airwolf.

😭🔫

so this thread is really about a YA book huh

Itt ppl who make lists of things they like mad at someone else's list of things they mostly like

lol my 'evil cicierega' comment has borne actual fruit :D

call me when ilxors start getting book deals for novels that are just straight republications of their EOY ballots. i don't see anything shameful in calling out embarrassingly awful prose as being unworthy of millions of dollars and screen adaptation by a good filmmaker who should know better.

Ready Play One Pt 2: The Baconing

I wonder how Randall Munroe feels about this

how much do you want to be punched in the dark?

hawt

"game changer" is an awful phrase

ive heard about the book before. i agree w all it seems like a bottom of the barrel superficially pomo circle jerk. maybe not the end of culture but definitely a giving up of intellectually engaging with culture.

the idea of consumption as a virtue. not even deep consumption, just surface level ticking-off-the-correct-boxes consumption. you can "absorb the filmographies" of the important directors but without a working knowledge of film history and theory you have no accurate historical context to place it in no understanding of the development of the form itself, the socio-cultural situations that gave it form, nothing outside of yeah some references they can make on Family Guy. lol the thought that you consumed all of Kubrick's films you must be a film genius.

i would much rather watch Pixels, which sounds like the exact same premise as this book.

fwiw i am in my 30s and love video games and still have not seen Pixels even though it came out 2 years ago.

It's a book for people who collect mp3s (or ROMs) instead of listening to them.

lol the thought that you consumed all of Kubrick's films you must be a film genius.

You're giving it too much credit -- you don't even get to be a film genius, you just get to decipher clues to win another game!

I've listened to the audiobook a couple years ago. Yes, it treads the Denis Leary/Seth MacFarlane path of "I know that pop culture reference, ha ha." But its not as incoherently Transformers like as the trailer, really aiming for more Joss Whedon wordplay territory (and not always making it). I'd expect a more Guardians of the Galaxy type critical response ("On principle, I hate this genre, but this isn't terrible").

GotG is every bit as repellent to me tbh

For those curious about why a sane middle-aged person would read RPO, its a post-climate catastrophe world, mentioned in the eco-fiction.com database, and I'd been methodically making my way through this from Ballard to Atwood to Bacigalupi to more recent titles.

Here's the official trailer for READY PLAYER ONE: pic.twitter.com/0rQnUE5LdK
— Neil Cicierega (@neilcic) July 22, 2017

loooooooooooooooool

You're right about the book not being as action-based as the film seems to be. It's more stuff like this

https://i.imgur.com/nfBSqiP_d.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/wNDDtCM_d.jpg

"Joss Whedon wordplay territory" is being pretty generous though

Oh I guess that didn't work. Anyway it's a scene where he literally plays out the plot of WarGames word for word

for pages

Wow, fascinating.

There's something about the film(moreso than the book) that indicates the absolute barest distillation of mindless franchise consumption as the core aspect of modern geek identity. When describing why this kinda thing makes money, Rich Evans of all people said it best, "People like their logos."

It's not just using long-standing genre elements to tell stories, it's using signposts to long-standing stories. It's the feature-length version of that Big Bang Theory clip where they just barf up a list of names in place of a joke. Or we have a movie version of LootCrate, a regularly shipment of dollarstore gimcracks & gewgaws that just gave brand names stamped on them.

My thoughts are still sorta jumbled on this, naturally, but there's a certain ne plus ultra twinning of both postmodern entertainment and hyper capitalistic blockbuster franchise production. Media megacorps realized like 10+ years ago that people really into consuming nerdshit had the most predictably monetizable consumption habits possible, and re-tools their business to start squirting out everything they can at that audience segment.

Yeah, churning out product for a market has been the standard forever, but it's next-level when you primarily target the segment who form their identity thru genre consumption(rather than previous identifiers of nationality/trade/creed/ethnicity/locale/etc)

And what's worst is that they're just so fucking lazy about it.

I burned through the entire They Might Be Giants discography in under two weeks. Devo took a little longer.

this bothers me, the TMBG discography is like 3x the size of Devo's, how do this guy not know that

It's 2044, maybe Devo will have had a late comeback.

I would have been on board had this been the nerd pastiche novel that took off and got optioned for a film:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_I_Will_Be_Invincible

by 2044 TMBG will have 20 more albums

I've been all 'yeah, yeah, it's probably bad based on how many people I've heard say it's bad' about the book without actually looking into the book at all, so I was not really prepared for how bad that passage upthread was. 'Meritless' is the first word that springs to mind.

I have the read the book. There really a chapter(or most of one, I think) were the dude goes on and on about having to play Rush songs flawlessly in order to unlock some dungeon

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFfA8o3UAAAMg7l.jpg

The one non-80s ref he throws in is talking about how one of the other players rides around in a Firefly-type ship named "Kaylee"

Since this thread has turned into this discussion I'll say I don't have much issue with any specific cultural artefact and I broadly agree with Morbs about Spielberg's merits as a director, my revulsion is about something else, a gross, incurious spirit of the age or something I'm not able to articulate right now that this shit rolls itself in, a glorification of infantilism maybe

call it Tarantinoism

the song Spirit Of The Age would make for a better sci-fi movie adaptation than this amirite

As always the critique of this collection of references regurgitated as art isn't that this is a shit idea it's that it's the wrong references for the wrong people

Which is lol

pretty sure most people think its a shit idea and not that this would be a great movie if you swapped The Beatles for Neu or something

the critique is that it's a shitty idea, shittily done, with no seeming purpose beyond exactly what the idea would suggest. since this has not stopped it from being really popular with some people, then yeah, I wonder wtf is wrong with those people.

It's possible to do something interesting with a slew of pop culture references and it's also possible to just list them and ask 'remember that? how about that? and what about this?' and watch your audience's souls evaporate.

guys, it's deems, he just likes to pounce on whatever post he half-understood

nah he just can't see a button without pushing it :D

It can be both and if I know myself which it is I'm not letting on

Not saying this would necessarily be a good film with a better list (but c'mon, it would be at least interesting if it was an a-z of Caribbean culture) but I think the choices (some of which are good, I wouldn't expect your average 80s-90s geek to be into some of those writers) and the way he's bragging about it do smack of a particularly annoying identity a lot of people have bought into that seems to put limits on itself and prioritizes familiarity and large fan communities.

as much as i hated the book and silently judged everyone who had insisted I read it, i hate the trailer even more, for inserting an Iron Giant visualization that i would have thought would be safe by virtue of not having existed until 1999. PHUCKING PHILISTINES.

this property is a honeytrap for idiots

pixels was very enjoyable for a braindead movie.

i have now watched the promo for this film a few times and yet to figure out what the story is.

"story"

i've read the book and have yet to figure out what the story is

afaik it's about a guy consumed with regret for the 3.5 hours of his life that he'll never get back