SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

Walter Chaw:

Ready Player One is about how reality is better than any darned video game and how we should take the time to get to know one another. Nerds should stop flexing their newfound cultural privilege to be as awful as the jocks they've supplanted and instead try to get to know a real girl in the flesh and maybe earn a kiss by being less awful. At the end of it all, Spielberg makes it crystal clear that he doesn't give one flying fuck about any of this Ready Player One bullshit--not one bit of it. He doesn't understand the fetishism it represents, the isolation such devotions require, the tragedy of lives lived less authentically that virtual reality, by its name, suggests. It's the worst script he's ever shot (and there are hot contenders for that crown); the most disjointed and impersonal of his films since 1941; the first of his movies, again, that feels contemptuous of its subject. Spielberg is a lot of things, but a cold cynic is not one of them. Thank Cline for this new side of him. He's Spielberg's own private Annie Wilkes. Spielberg is by the end washing his hands of the whole thing in an anti-climax that makes no sense and doesn't care to, while offering up one of those classic Spielberg endings where, apocalypse be damned, here's one white girl and one white boy snuggling together in a perfect shaft of sunlight filtering through the Bat-leth on the windowsill. It's Spielberg's North by Northwest: a composite of what the people want and simultaneously a critique of what the people want. It's not as scabrous, certainly not as good (seeing as how Hitchcock's was born of bile while this seems just born of surprised revulsion), but it's just as long and I have my doubts he'll ever do anything like it again.

ouch!

put it right in my fucking veins

Hi! What have I missed?

Two hours of someone jerking off with a Power Glove, afaict.

Power gloves are so old hat. Cognoscenti have moved on.

no power glove, no power love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8w8OrbBQ2I

Walter Chow review makes me kind of want to see it, like it's gonna be Temple of Doom pt 2.

there's another letterboxd review linked from the one that whiney and eric referenced that actually renders Chaw's review even more condemning (https://letterboxd.com/lumetian/film/ready-player-one/)

Part of Spielberg's magic is that in the "one for them, one for me" practices of Hollywood, you could never really tell which Spielberg movies were for "them" and which ones were for him. And, no, I'm not forgetting THE TERMINAL. This is a guy who released WAR OF THE WORLDS and MUNICH in the same year. The guy who put SCHINDLER'S LIST and JURASSIC PARK in theaters just months apart. His approach to liven the material he encounters (even when it was lackluster on the page), to work in its messiness and find something not only salvageable, but human, and his ability to wring out every damn scene as if it's the only way it *could* have been shot is what made him a household name.

Writing Spielberg reviews seems like an awful job. We know what to expect. Moral ambiguity will be banished, emotional strings will be pulled. Parents will be absent, youth will restore justice. We either resist the manipulation, or succumb. We'll leave with an experience, but no questions or debates. Perhaps we should be very very glad Spielberg supports good causes, and not the ones we hate. He would out Riefenstahl Riefenstahl, given the opportunity. Spielberg is the apotheosis of manipulative cinema, and hence necessarily a nadir for the Art.

In other words, if there was any director that could make this source material interesting, it's almost certainly not Spielberg.

I've been a contrarian on this thread. I thought the book was pleasant enough listening during dog walks, and I still think its popularity says something about our moment. I thought it inferior to similar past outings in the cyberpunk subgenre, like Jeff Noon's Vurt (1995).

We're primarily a music board, we know that many genres have stagnated for decades, with many fixating on some perfect past moment. Genres I care about have been rearranging 1979-81 for decades. When the cultural consensus fell apart, at first we all thought it was fantastic to find others shared our obsessions. In time I think most of us have hoped for escape routes out of this fishbowl.

That's what the book felt like to me. A tiny fishbowl. A whole culture looking at that last perfect moment, before corporate commodification, before web hiveminds. The last time we had a vibrant culture. But mirrors upon mirrors, xeroxing that moment into banality.

If we're going to live in a vibrant world, we need bookends of sorts. We need "year zeros" when the kids reject everything that's come before, so they can have a world to themselves. When I was 6 years old, punks rejected all the tiresome masturbatory competence of prog rockers. And that made all the music I care about possible. I regret I was about a decade too young to participate.

We're long overdue for a bookend to recycling of culture, 1977-now. Let this fucking film be it. Reject it. Hate it. Hate me because I'm still in the film's demographic. Not because its necessarily bad. But because its time for another year zero.

Ok grandpa.

"...his ability to wring out every damn scene as if it's the only way it *could* have been shot is what made him a household name."

I have never thought this, and even now, thinking about it, do not think it.

Spielberg's a household name because he arrived perfectly in sync with, but one crucial step ahead of, the oncoming cultural moment (AKA "Morning in America"), an ambitious master craftsman in love with his chosen medium's untapped ability to entertain and enthrall. Like Reagan, he understood that people waiting uncertain in the dark wish for nothing so dearly as to become children again, even if only for a moment in make-believe. The full expression of his art and ardor - a gorgeous, state-of-the-art pop cinema of ceaseless, seamlessly convincing marvels engineered to deliver maximum pleasure to the widest possible audience - took the world by storm.

Plus, yeah, he's a brilliant and deeply generous storyteller who can stack shots like nobody's business.

dystopian future where everyone talks like lefsetz

dystopian present where the most naturally gifted filmmaker of his generation makes a movie out of the worst popular book of the last 25 years

ffs there is no "year zero". it's a desire to kill the cultural past. it's either an impossibility or a fasist nightmare. it would require a new burning of the Library of Alexandria. or maybe we go back to burning books and unauthorized interpretations. no.

nostalgia is fine, people have done it for thousands of years. it is natural. people just need to be more creative about it. you hear a story as a kid, you grow up, you retell it when you are old enough or skilled enough to have the means of production. all oh human culture revolves around similar archetypes and story structures because we all go through life, we all have similar experiences, for all the difference we think we have between us. this is the history of culture. again, people just need to be more creative.

oh fwiw i watched Empire of the Sun. great movie! it was a very creative and beautiful way to tackle this very problem.

anyway that's all subject matter. i think most object to RPO the book because it's trash on a skill level. like if you had written any of these pages and handed it in to a high school creative writing class the teacher would give you a C- and tell you you use words too many times in sentences, you repeated yourself here, bad sentence structure, endless lists are not fun to read, etc. it is genuinely BAD WRITING. add on top of that the horrible nerd politics behind someone who dedicated their book to Harry Knowles, etc.

the book shouldn't get a free pass because it's in a genre. "oh you are hypocrites because you love other pop culture" is such a dumb and superficial argument. art doesn't work that way. as for the movie, Speilberg has actual talent and skill, there is a greater possibility it's a decent film (even if it's still pretty dumb once you give it any thought)

Walter Chow review makes me kind of want to see it, like it's gonna be Temple of Doom pt 2

i've seen it 4x now and it IS just that great!

Trollin' with the Morbsy

April Fools?

The full expression of his art and ardor - a gorgeous, state-of-the-art pop cinema of ceaseless, seamlessly convincing marvels engineered to deliver maximum pleasure to the widest possible audience - took the world by storm.

Spielberg did too.

We're long overdue for a bookend to recycling of culture, 1977-now. Let this fucking film be it. Reject it. Hate it. Hate me because I'm still in the film's demographic. Not because its necessarily bad. But because its time for another year zero.

I will take you up on this. I will hate this movie with every fiber of my being if it means an end to Star Wars and the Marvel Universe.

not if we have to do "punk" again tho

"this generation of consumers needs to make way for some new consumers consuming something different"

gang, art is still being made that doesn’t have to do with any of this.

ahh yes, the films and TV and videogames of the great 1980s, that time before the corporate commodification of culture

when is that Logan's Run remake coming out

Could be trenchant! Or nu Running Man.

what if it was, like, the kids getting hunted down by the olds, man? think about it.

Would watch. Or USA Battle Royale!

maria and the kids liked this. they thought it was cool. they didn't have a lot to say about it really. just that they liked it.

that was fine. super dumb as expected, a Spielberg park ride. that ONE scene is pretty great though, the one that was not in the book at all supposedly

i was entertained, but felt like my cynicism tainted my reaction, both as an obsessive video game nerd (this movie is both stuck in the '80s in its conception deliberately, but off in the way video games connect people for the last two decades since) and an older person who couldn't keep wondering why we there wasn't more about why this world was the way it was, what they're going to do with this world at the end of the movie, and so on

I was dealing with some rough news on Friday and in a kind of spasm fled my house for the cineplex, bought a ticket to "Game Night" having absolutely no idea what it was, walked out after 40 insufferable minutes, went into adjacent theater for last 30 minutes of this after-school special. Everybody applauded, I dropped my phone and the screen cracked, went back home for beer.

If we're going to live in a vibrant world, we need bookends of sorts. We need "year zeros" when the kids reject everything that's come before, so they can have a world to themselves. When I was 6 years old, punks rejected all the tiresome masturbatory competence of prog rockers. And that made all the music I care about possible. I regret I was about a decade too young to participate.

― #DeleteFacebook (Sanpaku), Sunday, April 1, 2018 5:44 AM

I like lot of punk but NO to everything in this paragraph. The idea of having to destroy what came before is a HUGE mistake and it takes too long to recover from and the myth of year zero is incredibly inaccurate and not helpful at all.

There's so many things you could say about a way forward but and I'd like a prioritization of creators doing their own their own things and resisting liscensed characters, adaptations and biopics.

no punk is going to keep me from getting yessed out, I’ll make goddamn sure of that.

no punk is going to keep me from getting yessed out, I’ll make goddamn sure of that.

I like lot of punk but NO to everything in this paragraph. The idea of having to destroy what came before is a HUGE mistake and it takes too long to recover from and the myth of year zero is incredibly inaccurate and not helpful at all.

There's so many things you could say about a way forward but and I'd like a prioritization of creators doing their own their own things and resisting liscensed characters, adaptations and biopics.

Punks didn't really destroy prog, and there was no fascist suppression of prior culture. But wouldn't it be nice to have a few years where numbers appended to a title were the kiss of death, commercially. Just think of how much potentially interesting work "licenced IP" has squeezed out of the mass culture market over the past few decades.

But the stigma on certain genres and incredible narrow-mindedness was bad enough that it even hampered music punks were making. Decades of unfair dismissal cannot be a good thing.

I'm sick of franchise stuff as anyone but directly attacking it would probably backfire. Promoting alternatives without shitting on people's beloved stuff (which I do sometimes) is probably the way.

Sanpaku isn't wrong, he just phrased his points inelegantly, imo

I would be extremely surprised if a major / applauded take on this film doesn't echo Sanpaku's sentiments tbf

tonight I went out by myself to get dinner because I needed a break from everything after the in-laws' visit for passover, and I found myself in a room full of people born in the 90s who are old enough to drink now - they were playing mario kart and tame impala in the bar because MARIO KART and TAME IMPALA are their milestones for growing up

i guess mario kart is forever m/l

yeah mario kart is actually a version milestone. like, did your MK have (other franchise character) in it?

which mario kart? I’ve seen the arcade bars have the n64 version rolling but the snes one is forever the touchstone imo

i don't see a lot of value in comparing rp1's spray-and-pray approach to 15 years of cultural products of all stripes with something as utilitarian and narrow as punk rock.

Mario Kart, in all of its iterations, is really just an evolving videogame tribute to "Magnificent Seven" by The Clash

Punk, you mean like thise brewdog beer guys

I saw it, it wasn’t very good.

Mainly I thought the cgi was pretty rooey at times. The changes from the book are mostly good, particularly that they give the female protagonist a lot more to do in the real world

Basically any hope I had that Spielberg’s would use this as a reflection on nostalgia is pretty mich shot to hell. I can’t figure out why he made this movie. It’s quite ugly to look at and it’s message is rather muddled. I forgot about seeing it an hour after it was over

Has anyone polled stupid VR movies? Lawnmower Man, Thirteenth Floor (friends and I used to rip on the poster tagline: "you can go there ... even though it doesn't exist!"), Freejack (iirc this is sort of one), Johnny Mnemonic (is this one, too?), Gamer, The Matrix (rewatched recently with kids, was mostly a chore), Strange Days (sort of), The Cell (sort of), Virtuosity ... It's possible "eXisteNz" is the only one in this vein that holds up. Not long ago I gave "Strange Days" (one of the few films I walked out of) another shot, and nope, still not good.