SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

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!

just throw all the character models into a computer game engine and have people walk around in game

tbh there have been actual series made that way, although not a feature film from a notable director

I know my initial post was a gross oversimplification, but that's why I phrased it in the form of a question. I was having difficulty conceptualizing "direction" in the context of animation, where it seemed to me that the person doing the drawings (or whatever) was the one in control. bg's post answered my question.

I have no idea how long it takes these days to re-render - or re-shoot - a CGI action sequence. Let's say you have a fight between a giant robot, Picachu, Godzilla and Rocky. You have to have that totally storyboarded out, right, to the millisecond? Then let's say you get it mostly done, decide it's not working, and you'd rather it be King Kong, Mario, Abraham Lincoln and the Ark from Raiders, and that you want it on the seaside, not on the top of the Golden Gate bridge. Is that extremely slow to "reshoot," or is it relatively simple these days? I mean, Pixar movies are apparently absolutely locked down when they start "shooting," so wouldn't a "live" action film work the same way? And I've often wondered, with huge FX extravaganzas, there are dozens of scenes being worked on at the same time, right? Like, a whole team is maybe working on one scene, or one character, or one effect - the lighting, the setting, the editing - which leaves the director sort of floating around from station to station and computer bank to computer bank, checking on progress?

In any case, for a conventional director, it just has to be totally different, right? It's not as simple as telling an actor to do lines 50 different ways, or approach a scene from a different angle.

I haven't seen this, btw, but playing devil's advocate for myself, I thought Tintin was very Spielberg, so at least in that case the director's presence was apparent. But I think back to the end of of Iron Man 3. I remember that movie having something like a record number of FX people, maybe 1000, and that the credits just kept rolling name after name after name. But the final battle is just absolute chaos of dozens of robots and Iron Mans and bad guys flying around a building and shooting. Of course it had to have been storyboarded, but there's very little essential stuff going on. It might as well have been Shane Black just saying "Iron Man fights a bad guy this way, but in the background all sorts of other shit is going to happening. Work on that and let me know what you come up with."

Hey, look at this!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/iron-man-3-special-fx/

“This was a tricky one,” said Williams of the frantic Iron Man 3 finale in a May 2013 interview with Art of VFX. Describing one element of the scene – in which various suits of Iron Man armor under the control of Tony’s robotic assistant J.A.R.V.I.S. do battle with super-powered mercenaries while Tony pursues Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) across the collapsing oil rig – Williams revealed that it was the background action that gave his team some initial trouble.

“The foreground fighting and choreography is pretty straightforward. It was the background action that took a while to get right,” he said. “Animators are trained to make action as impressive as possible and bring it to the forefront. We found that early on, we were having too many interesting things happening in the background action, (and) the viewer’s eye was being drawn away from the storytelling and into the background.”

Weta addressed this problem with a mix of framing and timing adjustments that kept flying armor out of the center of the screen and randomized key moments in these background battles. The result was a series of intentionally “messy” skirmishes between Iron Man’s army and the film’s villains.

cgi action sequences aren't all-or-nothing propositions, afaict - they're storyboarded and then they're turned into a low-res pre-vis, which is why you'll often see dvd extras featuring deleted scenes with only partially finished effects, like the ones i just watched last night on the thor: ragnarok disc with a pretty shonky-looking ps3-era hulk taking the place of a full render

doing it that way pretty much ensures that you're not gonna have to reshoot or rethink things totally at the last minute

like, the kind of director who's that unfocused or uncertain is probably not the kind of director who's gonna be handed a $150m tentpole movie in the first place

in fact i think you and i actually had this exact conversation, probably on the iron man 3 thread, years ago now that i think about it

randomised action isn't the same as 'undirected' action fwiw - i suspect weta may well have developed those techniques for the giant battle scenes in lotr, where it would be insane to hand-animate hundreds of cg creatures in a crowd scene just as much as it would be to personally coach every extra's every move in a live-action scene

xp obv

in fact i think you and i actually had this exact conversation, probably on the iron man 3 thread, years ago now that i think about it

I think we did! Didn't I learn or you tell me that inexperienced big budget directors go through an FX bootcamp or something, that brings them up to speed on CGI and other FX stuff?

And yeah, I do remember it being a big deal that Weta developed a way to randomize background action in LotR.

yeah, possibly? sounds about right

Obv. Spielberg is a set piece master, so I doubt he struggles very much with this stuff. He knows exactly what he wants and how it should play, even with a shitty movie. He's been let down by material in the past (as recently as the Posszzzzzzzzzt) but his movies are never badly directed, or at least his direction is never the weak link. Probably not even in Hook, which is ugly as hell, iirc, but I blame the set-looking sets. I didn't see The BFG, but I don't like that book, either, and can't imagine a movie being good.

He's been let down by material in the past

i suspect probably never more so than in this case