SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

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

I mean you could take this "material" and turn it into all kinds of things, some of them really interesting and relevant and provocative, but most of those are probably not going to play well to the fans of the book because they would involve addressing how fucked up the book's worldview really is, and this is the kind of movie that needs great fan buzz and repeat viewings from fans to really clean up, right?

It seems like it could make a pretty clever PoMo satire, esp. with Spielberg involved. He could have even played himself as some evil executive or something. Or manipulative "director" of the VR world.

yeah, that didn't happen lol

Should’ve been given to Verhoeven imo

nah, the Oasis doesn't need grisly rape

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

got this far before I guessed the poster

was flipping quickly through the thread and caught "like watching someone play Streets of Rage 2" and also immediately knew who it was

https://68.media.tumblr.com/9362ebb7eb5121a773a5eed0f0486f91/tumblr_p6le3aE5OO1u56vsco1_1280.png

Abhay Khosla:

Ready Player One got this vitriol thrown at it before it came out that struck me as really odd because the stuff the internet seemed angry about was stuff that I’ve seen the same exact internet do for my entire adult life. And defend! Tumblr just spent years shouting “Teenage girls writing fan fiction where Picard and Master Chief from the Halo games have sex is the greatest liberation movement of our times” at me, and then they make a movie of that and it’s like “how darez you.” Cultural product has been devalued– almost none of it has any meaning any more– if people are angry about it, they’re too late…? I just look at what’s happened with comics alone– the idea of there being a big hit comic everyone reads and that people debate and still talk about years later (or even pretends to respect– can’t even pretend that much after you start making Watchmen sequels)… That’s all done. Those times are gone. It’s just … a nightmarish mass of stuff, and there’s no common culture around any of it. Same with movies– same with TV. Go look at a supply and demand curve– demand hasn’t changed; supply on everything’s skyrocketed– basic economics means that everything’s worth less. (And maybe it’s better this way– the olden times were exclusionary). So, yeah, you can put Iron Giant in a movie fellating King Kong and it doesn’t mean shit anymore because this all matters less every day– it’s just stuff on the stuff pile. I don’t know.

...

At the same time, it’s a Spielberg movie– if the idea is Steven Spielberg should interrogate the thing he’s making a popcorn movie about… I mean, that’s not what he does. That’s never been what he does. Would that other movie have been better? Absolutely yes– this movie desperately needed a screenwriter who was smarter than Ernest Cline and it may have actually gotten one that was dumber… Just in the stuff they chose to keep (e.g., I was like “there’s no way they’ll be fucking dumb enough to keep the birthmark thing” and they kept the birthmark thing).

Or what was fascinating is that movie is actually thematically more problematic than the book in a key way, which is they took out the book’s minimal attempt at being about class. In the book, the main character is poor and fat, and he lives in a nasty place– and because he has no money, most of the Oasis is locked away from him because he can’t afford to go to the good parts of it. And the book takes it as a given that having money means having access to a better life. They took out that entire element so it was like “yeah we’re in the ghetto but everyone who lives in the ghetto is white, and in my free time I’m riding around on the Millennial Falcon, crushing poverty’s not so bad, I guess.” Hollywood somehow made Ready Player One MORE problematic…??? How is that possible??? The movie’s like Peak Rich Democrat where it doesn’t care at all about class while like lecturing the audience about how “anti-net neutrality people are the worst.” Or at the end of the movie, the heroes don’t defeat the bad guys– slight adjustments in corporate governance create market conditions that make the bad guys unable to compete and the bad guys go out of business, despite having an obviously lucrative industry operating built around oppressing the poor…? What the fuck??

Like, if the question is “is there fucked up shit dripping off of every edge of that movie” the answer is absolutely yes. But that wasn’t really the question I went to see get answered, so much as just basic “Does Spielberg still got moves when it comes time for a set piece” and I think the answer there is still pretty much yes though there were parts that I think didn’t land as much as they could’ve (I thought he could have done more with the girl’s story in the third act…).

lol Peak Rich Democrat. Kind of agree about it being more problematic re:class though, that whole aspect barely seems to matter past the first 20 minutes

I’m kind of annoyed with sic for making me read that, the first paragraph especially (“this is dumb... but sic reposted it so it probably has a point somewhere”)

use of multiple question marks = suspect

I have a friend on facebook who was angry that the underlying capitalist struggle in the plot was never acknowledged

doesn't the lead character get a bunch of money at the end? see just like in the real world money solves all problems.

An opinion from a guy I only know from Facebook:

I really can’t say enough about how much I loved Ready Player One, both as a film and an adaptation. Simply, it was superb. Ernest Cline’s book is such a rare, singular work of genius, it literally restored my faith in popular fiction. So many other directors would’ve ruined the film, but here, Spielberg shows us why he’s one of the greats. In the places where the film strayed from the original source material and its creators actually had to come up with their own ideas, these alternatives were inspired in their own right, instead of a cheap disappointment, as we’ve seen all too frequently before. Thank you, Steven!

http://cdn.guff.com/site_9/media/17000/16278/thumbnails/fb1_4eaf73e600d6967d8d87571f.jpg

Literally, thank you!

It's not hard to believe at all that there are people who will love this movie for what it is and tries to be. The book itself was a smashing success, right?

4.5 stars on amazon!

officially better than Ulysses

a week has now passed since I saw this and I keep forgetting I saw it, so unmemorable and dull it is

at last something you can hate more than A.I.

Seriously, people who have gone to see this: you do know that every ticket bought for this piece of shit is effectively a vote for Hollywood to make more shit like this? Why encourage them?

am morbidly curious what a PG-13 3D IMAX recreation of eyes wide shut would be.

haven't seen the movie but it's cool that it was such a hot topic of conversation for months, and now it's out, and i don't hear shit.

best possible outcome

It's not hard to believe at all that there are people who will love this movie for what it is and tries to be

yeah kind of amazing, who would think if you market a product there are people that will buy that product.

see this movie: it clears the same bar a box of kleenex does.