SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

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

I'm not embarrassed to say that I thought the Matrix screensaver was awesome.

Okay, maybe a little embarrassed.

I was about to ask if there are flying toasters in Ready Player One, but then that made me think of Dunkey's Ultimate Skyrim riff, which is funny and chock full of absurd cultural references and probably better (and definitely shorter) than Ready Player One:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6yHoSvrTss

Gonna go out on a limb and assume that the future gamers of RPO would never show such irreverent disrespect for the revered IP of old.

so let me get this straight - the stakes in this movie, if the good guys lose, is that there will be ads in the vr video game world?

I'm pretty sure there already are ads. In the book the Oasis is a free service, which of course means the users are the product. IIRC, the main stake for anyone but the protagonist is whether the Facebook of the future is run by evil overlords who might abuse user data.

Wow, Cline has quite an expansive imagination.

pretty funny that so far it sounds like the highlight of the movie is a rip off of a 24 year old Treehouse of Horror episode

xp the naivete of 2010

Has anyone polled stupid VR movies?

the Matrix was probably the first movie i ever saw a pirated friend-a-downloaded-it-from-Kazaa movie. that was a magical moment, for years you had to struggle w crappy codecs and lo res/fps video like RealMedia, etc. it's a great movie in so many ways and it smack in the lineage of classic sci fi imo. what makes it sci fi is both the techno future and the social/societal commentary. it is pure experience, the peak of stylistic 90s cyperunk with a trans-human holographic paradigm that has become part of the modern fabric of reality in everything from videogame memes to lizard people conspiracy theories. a massively influential film, deservedly so. the second movie was classic as well (maybe not so much w the story but visually i find its more experimental & dynamic) but the third was a turd.

Free Jack was fucking awesome. made in 1992 (CRT heaven) with post-Repo Man Emilio Estevez facing off against Mick Jagger who is kind of a VR world and is using him as a weapon or something. i think the story is kind of confusing, but a VR world is a big part of it. i love that aesthetic.

there is a lot of cyberpunk in Cyborg 2 with Angelina Jolie as a killer machiner Terminator in a post apocalyptic future where Jack Palance is on random CRTs scattered on the ground speaking cyberpunk (genre invented by Mary Shelley in 1818) post apocalyptic beat style poetry.

Interface (1984) is another b-movie. a friend of mine found it on VHS years ago and we watched it and i have been unable to locate a copy since then.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/76/Interface_FilmPoster.jpeg

Interface is a 1984 American science fiction comedy-horror film starring John Davies, Lauren Lane and Mathew Sacks. It is notable for providing Lou Diamond Phillips his first film role, as Punk #1. Primarily directed by Andy Anderson, Interface was a production of Anderson's film program at the University of Texas at Arlington. The film was scripted, acted, and initially directed entirely by UTA students.

The movie takes place on a fictional college campus. Davies, starring as a professor, discovers a secret society of masked hackers on campus; they seemingly kill his star pupil. Hobson attempts to uncover and neutralize the society, even as he himself becomes a suspect in his student's death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_(film)

Hackers is a must see of course. i remember going to school the next day and wanting to have a bunch of raver friends who dressed all crazy cool and could hack phones and stuff. (though sadly i have to admit it didn't hold up as much as I had hoped on my last rewatch.) around this time i also saw SLC Punk and Kids and skate videos and started getting into the Ramones and stuff, and Hackers was for me very much a part of that experimenting with identity thing you do as a teenager. at the time it seemed to have very futuristic-cyberpunk identity politics.

Johnny Mnemonic is actually pretty cool (i am a Gibson fan so im biased) and very hilarious and also a sort of early version of the Matrix (Reeves starts of playing basically the same character in both movies) plus there is a talking dolphin who kills Dolph Lundgren. its like watching someone play Streets of Rage 2.

This discussion reminds me I still haven't seen Welt am Draht (1973), the ur-VR movie/miniseries, and its on YT with English subs.

The Red Letter Media guys just tackled this, and it's kind of telling how little enthusiasm they can drum up to even criticize it. I do like their theory that Spielberg signed on when he realized he would only have to direct like 11 minutes of live action and could probably just pass the remainder of CGI stuff to the tech wizards. They also make an astute observation that Jurassic Park is considered a CGI breakthrough even though it's got maybe 8 minutes of CGI, and that this movie is its complete converse.

i had some inkling of that idea when the movie started too - that so much of this movie is in CGI - but there's enough Spielberg in this (esp. in that showstopper scene in the middle) that I think he genuinely put his heart into this, if not so much examination (but this is Spielberg, so...)

he realized he would only have to direct like 11 minutes of live action and could probably just pass the remainder of CGI stuff to the tech wizards.

god help me i'm gonna defend spielberg on the ready player one thread but the idea that cgi sequences are any less 'directed' than live-action sequences is... incorrect

And he's already directed an entirely CGI effort. I imagine he enjoys it

I've always been curious about what counts as "directing" when it comes to animation or CGI. I mean, do they just storyboard it, then pass it on to the technical department, then review the footage that comes back and say "Nope, move him more to the left and her one inch down" or whatever?

I doubt they did motion capture for each individual character in montage scenes, but motion capture is less bulky these days so you can have a couple people acting in the rigs

my understanding is that it's not really any different to directing live-action - the director works with the production designer, costume department, director of photography and everyone else they would normally work with to decide the look of a scene, then oversees the action the same way they would with actors, either through motion capture of real-life actors or working with animators to decide the movements they want characters to take

in some ways the amount of control the director has over the frame is greater than live action, so in a sense it's potentially a more involved process from their perspective

Huh. I thought you just like told a robot 'do some CGI' and bam. And that it would occasionally glitch and spit out a 'Johnny Johnny, Yes Papa' video but otherwise make whatever robots and future buildings you wanted.

i mean i could be wrong, maybe spielberg just asked alexa to whip up a stain on his filmography and voila

Just press the CGI button and it makes dinosaurs or spaceships or splosions or sassy animals like magic!