SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

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.

Lawnmower Man scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I watched it recently and was pretty amused by the godawful CGI. It looks like a Sega Genesis game. Which I think it actually was.

Those movies are all pretty awesome

it's been a while but IIRC Johnny Mnemonic doesn't really spend time in any virtual world - in fact the entire premise is that in the cyberpunk future, you need physical couriers to carry email around in their heads because apparently there is NOT a global internet or virtual space for these things.

saw Thirteenth Floor in the theater, it was very bad though for whatever reason the idea of trying to drive to Tucson and just hitting the land of green wireframes has kinda stuck with me, probably because Tucson is such an odd choice to test out whether you're in the real world or a phony virtual construct. really it was just doomed by coming out a couple months after The Matrix. i wonder if it was intended to come out sooner, like Columbia had heard about this big WB sci-fi VR world movie and rushed a cheap knock-off into production, but then fumbled the release...? it was such a who-cares movie by the time it was actually in the theater, we only went because we'd already seen the matrix and nobody involved could stomach going to the phantom menace again.

basically though you want The 1990s science fiction movie poll

Strange Days had good post-LA riots world building, two remarkable in their day extended steady cam shots, a uniquely grotesque/unsettling take on a serial killer, but a completely unlikable protagonist. Its a mixed bag. eXisteNz proved that Jennifer Jason Leigh could make the world appreciate Cronenberg's jokes. I recall 13th Floor also being better than I expected. I love the eye of Tarsim Singh, but The Cell is a chore compared to the (non VR) The Fall. The others here are all pretty terrible. I'm kinda glad Neuromancer was never adapted in this era.

whoever came up with the idea to do this is a genius

http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/gamemaster-anthony-reviews-ready-player-one.html

What was your favorite scene?

It definitely had to be the final battle. It was pretty epic the way that was all laid out, just every character that you could think of coming in at once.

As I alluded to somewhere upthread, I'd kinda love to see an adaptation of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (depicting drug-induced VR of a sort) except I'd also kinda hate it because there's no way Hollywood wouldn't fuck it up.

Gamemaster Anthony is uniquely qualified to review this film much in the same way the dude who had sex with a dolphin was qualified to review The Shape of Water. I'm glad he's still around and kicking. Bring it in, guys!!!

really it was just doomed by coming out a couple months after The Matrix.

Iirc The Matrix was something of a sleeper. I mean, it did well, but I don't recall it being a juggernaut. It was the number 5 grossing film of the year, but behind the others by some margin. The Sixth Sense, for example - and this was a true sleeper - made over $100 million more. Thirteenth Floor was probably just not good/marketed well enough to compete with its novelty, though I don't remember it being absolutely terrible.

yeah at the time there was a lot of derisive johnny mnemonic 2 commentary in the press iirc

I want to say I saw The Matrix opening night in ... Denver, and it was not packed. Or possibly I saw it a couple of weeks later (c. Columbine, iirc) after it had caught on, because it looked stupid enough that I did not see it earlier.

I saw The Matrix when it came out, the spring of my senior year of high school, and I'm pretty sure a couple of the nerdos I was with were wearing black trenchcoats at the time

I kind of forgot how much scrutiny that brought on the movie, it really was released three weeks before the Columbine school massacre

In the US, the Matrix came out March 31st; The Thirteenth Floor was released May 28, by which time the former was passing https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Matrix-The#tab=box-office50 million of its https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Matrix-The#tab=box-office70 million domestic box office. The Thirteenth Floor cashed out at... $11.8 million.

ew sorry about that

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Matrix-The#tab=box-office has the numbers, anyway

150 million and 170 million are the numbers that should have displayed there.

the matrix was responsible for selling a zillion dvd players, I think

I was about to say it was the free DVD that came with my first DVD player, but in fact I believe that was Lost in Space. I feel ripped off.

the first dvd I ever bought was an import copy of the matrix cuz it had a bunch of extras the first uk release didn’t

what a dork

correct

Matrix was like the killer DVD player seller, ppl lining up round the block etc. In theaters I don't remember it being super huge, but on video...

That's a bit of a myth, I think - it was the fifth-highest-grossing movie of its year, won all four of the technical Oscars for which it was nominated, and made $463 million worldwide on a budget of $63 million. It just was also massive on DVD.

you're probably right, $170mil is pretty excellent for 1999, just not compared to today's numbers

I mean, just looking at the numbers - domestic here , international here it is very very excellent.

Have I stumbled into the writing sesh for Ready Player Two?

a VR journey through the virtual reality movies of the late 90s/early 00s

you're on to something

what a dork

― someone’s burgling my miscellanea (bizarro gazzara), Monday, 2 April 2018 18:20 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

correct

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 2 April 2018 18:35 (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://favoritememes.com/_nw/95/39422987.jpg

The Matrix was also responsible for like 75% of the linux nerd screensavers in the IT department where I started working in 2000
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--jvB33oWv--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ixprvsu4fkdlbnlxenmz.gif