SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

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.

Eh, a box of kleenex is usually employed in the aftermath of the act this film most closely resembles.

This review by Vern is interesting, because Vern got his start on Ain't It Cool News and so has an interesting perspective on the rise of the culture this movie celebrates/encapsulates:

This movie could be the final chapter in the Nerdening of America, the last shot fired by the original generation of internet self-proclaimed geeks. I’m talking about the people and attitudes given voice (like me) by the since-disgraced Headgeek Harry Knowles, who encouraged and empowered our nostalgia and masturbatory enthusiasm for the totems and trivia of sci-fi and comic books and shit. From his laptop he told the world about Austin film and “geek” happenings like SIX STRING SAMURAI, the Alamo Drafthouse, Mondo posters, Fantastic Fest, and yes, Cline, some guy who did “slam poetry” about being a nerd, and wrote a script about STAR WARS fans trying to break into Skywalker Ranch so their friend with cancer could see EPISODE I early. Harry was a character in the script, and according to Wired it was his review on Ain’t It Cool that put it on the radar in Hollywood. Harry also read Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One early, and Cline said that “The character of Aech is partially based on my friend Harry Knowles (but not entirely).” Random House bought the book (there was a bidding war!) and Warner Brothers bought the movie rights the next day. Cline wrote the first drafts (later rewritten by Zak Penn [story credits on LAST ACTION HERO, X-MEN 2 and THE AVENGERS]).

In fairness I must say that I haven’t seen FANBOYS – I think I only got about ten minutes in before I had to call it. More importantly I haven’t read Ready Player One, and I know you can’t judge a book by wanting to jump off a bridge when you hear the premise, or by having someone chase you around reading excerpts out loud to torment you because there’s a part where he literally spends a page listing off all his favorite bands, TV shows, movies and directors like some unfortunate cross between a MySpace page and the journal of John Doe from SE7EN. (Tip: You didn’t have to tell us you liked They Might Be Giants and “Youtube videos of cute geeky girls playing ’80s cover tunes on ukuleles.” We pretty much figured that.)

It’s clear that the book was written to pander to a very specific audience, and I might be of the same generation, but I don’t really care about video games or see BACK TO THE FUTURE and GHOSTBUSTERS as the pinnacles of the era. Sure, I like ’em, but they’re not movies that strike the kind of chord in me where I get excited about combining the cars from them into one vehicle (as Wade does in the book and Cline does in real life). So I’m not the target audience.

Or maybe I am now. When Harry rose to power, his favorite things were thought of as kind of niche and looked down on, a secret handshake between misfits happy to find that rare person who understood what they were talking about. That era is reflected in READY PLAYER ONE by the sad detail that the hero knows he’s in love because a girl correctly identifies his fucking Buckaroo Banzai cosplay. But the movie was born into the world that Harry predicted and precipitated, the one with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and perpetual STAR WARS, where you’re more of a weirdo if you don’t know who Gollum is than if you do, where a book like this could be made into a $175 million summer blockbuster directed by Steven fucking Spielberg. The garage band went platinum. So now when you see all this stuff on screen it doesn’t feel like “Holy shit, they have a bunch of my favorite stuff!” It’s more of a “Yep, there’s all the stuff.”

First line:

Steven Spielberg’s shiny, digitally new movie READY PLAYER ONE is about a virtual reality treasure hunt for people who are obsessed with ’80s and ’90s pop culture references even though it’s the year 2045. Which is not as far-fetched as it sounds at first. The hero of the story drives the car from BACK TO THE FUTURE, the #1 hit movie of sixty years prior, so it’s just the same as the teens you see now who model their lives on SOUTH PACIFIC.

Last line:

What about Golden Girls?

He's still got it!

Quoting this part for references he next time a sleepingbag or other genius comes along to cleverly point out the hypocrisy inherent in people who profess a fondness for cakes, pizza and tacos, yet vote against the taco pizza cake plan.

I don’t love CLERKS, but back then nerd references were about digging deeper into a thing, pointing out something someone else might not have thought of, like the probability that many working class construction people were killed on the Death Star. Here if there was a Death Star it would just be a picture of the Death Star blowing up Cybertron. Wade could identify them but couldn’t offer any further insights.

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?
― Nhex, Monday, April 9, 2018 7:23 AM

I don't know, but is nice to hope this is the beginning of the end and people are just tired of it, maybe people who might have even liked the book at the time.
I am curious about kids who don't know the references but might use it as a guide. What will they like? Will they find Buckaroo Banzai as underwhelming as I did?

Did you see it for Olivia Cooke?

http://372pages.com/episode-17-well-do-it-live-or-will-we

A book review pod of movie guys reviews the movie of the book.

Film Comment weighs in: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/le-cinema-du-glut/

The recycling of proven formulas in popular cinema has been with us for as long as a pop cinema has existed—Spielberg’s Indiana Jones, to take one example, is the direct offspring of the kid’s adventure serials of the 1930s and ’40s—but Ready Player One’s hotchpotch accumulation of the detritus of recognizable pop iconography is something different. Like few feature films before it, Spielberg’s movie exemplifies an aesthetic of pop-culture decoupage that has developed, in recognizably kindred forms, across a wide range of media, one that has been increasingly prevalent through the early years of the 21st century. It is that of the junk-pile jumble of accumulated mass-manufactured character properties at the end of pop history—the aesthetic of glut.

i saw a cam of this. it was decent but exceedingly dumb and low aiming but now i feel kind of guilty for ragging on it, it's like picking on an episode of Muppet Babies.

the part where they are in the dance hall and he snaps his fingers and the Saturday Night Fever music comes on to prove he is a dance master was like a parody of a bad 90s cartoon and made me feel extremely embarrassed for all involved, most of all, myself.

Wrinkle in Time deserves a pass, not this deeply cynical "make america 80s again" exercise in ghoulishness

Watched this. No signs of emotion throughout - not even cliched Spielbergian emotional button-pushing. Probably his coldest ever film. It really felt like it was made by a computer.

utterly forgettable

just The Virtual Reality Goonies

wait, did you finally see it? how many people in the theater with you?

i never did go although "virtual reality goonies" is a more appealing sales pitch than most of the "imagine your favorite IP, all jammed in a blender!" ledes

I accept this being called the worst thing he directed that I saw since ... Jurassic Park 2?

It was the next-to-last night at the Lincoln Square, I think, there were at least a couple dozen there.

I liked some of the image juggling and the henchman with the sore neck, but ultimately, I don't give a shit in VR movies cuz -- I don't get it, it's not real! Who cares? It's not worse than the DiCaprio-Nolan thing.

or Her. :D

Oh, it's definitely worse than both of those ffs.

sez you

Oh now HERE we go.

Please tell us more movies that are worse than Saddo, Morbs. Please.

I cannot tell you how much I've been waiting for this day.

how is there still not a decent torrent of this movie out there yet, that's what i wanna know

Found one for u

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hz1UaEVyoo

meaningless w/out a big screen (and disposable there)

bye bye!

a spirited defence from ilx's premier spielbergologist

That better be a back-of-the-box pull quote.

I think I would literally die if a Blu-ray review blurb ended with 'bye bye!'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19TBzy81Mac

morbs, by my tally you posted to this thread 75 times before seeing the film, mostly chiding us for having opinions on it or its source material before seeing what it would be in the hands of spielberg, not saying that means you now owe us a longform review or a thoroughgoing engagement with the substance of the preceding discussion but perhaps keep this in mind for the next "anticipating" thread

Morbs gonna Morbs

tons of posts by everyone b4 the film was released

as usual the film itself did not dominate the discussion, but rather Spielberg is the Worst Ever (ilx gonna ilx)

Truth

Absolutely no one itt thread said Spielberg is the worst ever. As you well know.

But he totally is.

morbz if I promise to have low self esteem will you admit this movie eats ass?

Well, Spielberg is the second worst, after (barf) black and white.

love you morbs but have noooo idea how you got "spielberg is the worst ever" from this thread, p. sure "cline is the worst ever" followed by "fanboys are the worst ever" were the through-lines but maybe i missed some posts in there

Spielberg isn't interesting enough to be the worst ever.

as usual the film itself did not dominate the discussion, but rather Spielberg is the Worst Ever (ilx gonna ilx)

lol waht

iirc the tenor of the thread was more along the lines of 'why is spielberg lowering himself to adapting a truly execrable book'

i love you too Doc, and that's the important thing, as this film taught us.

did it though? did.. it?

we may never know

This movie (or at least the poster) taught me that the human leg is actually much longer than I realized.

i like spielberg :)

Me too. I was just joking upthread. Star Wars are two of my favorite movies ever.

Sorry, I meant Star Wars and More Star Wars.

sending King Kong and the Iron Giant after you

Ultraman gets shut out yet again

people don't like jaws????