SADDO: THE MOVIE (aka READY PLAYER ONE)

The AO Scott review is good. It saves its most pointed skewering for those who would call this SADDO: THE MOVIE.

It's a weirdly conflicted review. Scott seems loath to simply call RPO a bad movie, but his dissatisfaction is nonetheless evident. In conveying it, he repeats familiar complaints about the source material while sneering haughtily down at the "the toy guns of social media and pop-up kulturkritik" who made them first.

Coupled with the closing paragraphs, the early line about Spielberg being "the only person who could have made this movie and the last person who should have been allowed near the material" seems to contain the germ of a more substantial and interesting critique. I get the impression that Scott's admiration prevented him from fleshing it out, which seems a shame.

otm. I thought something similar reading that.

Like I said about an earlier review, major critics (the few that are left) are either forbidden or afraid to shit on this thing in the way it clearly deserves. Because it's Spielberg. Because it's likely one of the biggest-budget movies of the year. Because if they do the Comments Section will come for them.

i'm no S.S. worshipper

Dude, your first post on this thread calls him "the best American filmmaker of the last 40 years" and you haven't gotten any less worshipful since.

yeah always kinda figured u weren't into the S.S.

he does want ppl to watch a WWII movie this weekend though

Dude, your first post on this thread calls him "the best American filmmaker of the last 40 years" and you haven't gotten any less worshipful since.

Which puts him behind at least 4 or 5 Iranian filmmakers from the same time period. Get with it.

I also gave The BFG, like, 6/10, so my correct evaluation of his status does not preclude critical thinking.

There were certain points that felt so close to satire that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Everything I've read about this indicates that satire is part of the recipe, or do you think this beyond him?

I hope it flops like Ishtar

― El Tomboto, Saturday, July 22, 2017 10:55 PM

you gonna lose, sirrah

You,the Academy,and Dawson off of Dawson's Creek

Lol phone's not displaying text well. Anyway those're the ppl I've read/seen calling SS "great".

Spielberg honestly is pretty great for someone who semi-frequently serves up a helping of hot trash. The hits hit hard enough that I'm willing to forgive his occasional severe lapses in judgment.

Like I'm sure his version of RPO is among the best that could've existed. It just shouldn't exist.

Everything I've read about this indicates that satire is part of the recipe, or do you think this beyond him?

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Saturday, March 31, 2018 12:14 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

could you stop trying to argue with people who’ve seen the movie

hey there's an ilx CALLBACK

im gonna follow doctor's orders and watch Empire of the Sun for the first time today!

hey albvivertine, there are enuf ppl calling him great to get him to 26

http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_top250directors.htm

Empire of the Sun has a UK ilxor in it, looking nauseous in the back of a truck.

Only Cronenberg has really nailed Ballard's voice.

Speaking of LITERALLY a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, can anyone vouch for Ruby Sparks, Zoe Kazan's deconstruction?

from an autistic viewer i follow on letterboxd

Ready Player One: I don’t want to feel inhuman anymore. a movie that represents the worst of masculinity, of nerd culture, of filmmaking and writing and ended up dehumanising me entirely, leaving my chest on fire and tears streaming down my face. irredeemable.

— Logan (@LoganKenny1) March 31, 2018

https://t.co/LXMhSIcL6d

It’s def interesting that for years, message boards kind of fostered a culture where pop culture obsessives were derided as “autists” and “spergs”; and now (if this guy’s reading is correct), a big budget movie is doing the reverse, coding autism through the lens of pop culture.

Not sure if I should continue with the book, I’m about 1/4 way in and it’s some trite shit

Walter Chaw:

Ready Player One is about how reality is better than any darned video game and how we should take the time to get to know one another. Nerds should stop flexing their newfound cultural privilege to be as awful as the jocks they've supplanted and instead try to get to know a real girl in the flesh and maybe earn a kiss by being less awful. At the end of it all, Spielberg makes it crystal clear that he doesn't give one flying fuck about any of this Ready Player One bullshit--not one bit of it. He doesn't understand the fetishism it represents, the isolation such devotions require, the tragedy of lives lived less authentically that virtual reality, by its name, suggests. It's the worst script he's ever shot (and there are hot contenders for that crown); the most disjointed and impersonal of his films since 1941; the first of his movies, again, that feels contemptuous of its subject. Spielberg is a lot of things, but a cold cynic is not one of them. Thank Cline for this new side of him. He's Spielberg's own private Annie Wilkes. Spielberg is by the end washing his hands of the whole thing in an anti-climax that makes no sense and doesn't care to, while offering up one of those classic Spielberg endings where, apocalypse be damned, here's one white girl and one white boy snuggling together in a perfect shaft of sunlight filtering through the Bat-leth on the windowsill. It's Spielberg's North by Northwest: a composite of what the people want and simultaneously a critique of what the people want. It's not as scabrous, certainly not as good (seeing as how Hitchcock's was born of bile while this seems just born of surprised revulsion), but it's just as long and I have my doubts he'll ever do anything like it again.

ouch!

put it right in my fucking veins

Hi! What have I missed?

Two hours of someone jerking off with a Power Glove, afaict.

Power gloves are so old hat. Cognoscenti have moved on.

no power glove, no power love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8w8OrbBQ2I

Walter Chow review makes me kind of want to see it, like it's gonna be Temple of Doom pt 2.

there's another letterboxd review linked from the one that whiney and eric referenced that actually renders Chaw's review even more condemning (https://letterboxd.com/lumetian/film/ready-player-one/)

Part of Spielberg's magic is that in the "one for them, one for me" practices of Hollywood, you could never really tell which Spielberg movies were for "them" and which ones were for him. And, no, I'm not forgetting THE TERMINAL. This is a guy who released WAR OF THE WORLDS and MUNICH in the same year. The guy who put SCHINDLER'S LIST and JURASSIC PARK in theaters just months apart. His approach to liven the material he encounters (even when it was lackluster on the page), to work in its messiness and find something not only salvageable, but human, and his ability to wring out every damn scene as if it's the only way it *could* have been shot is what made him a household name.

Writing Spielberg reviews seems like an awful job. We know what to expect. Moral ambiguity will be banished, emotional strings will be pulled. Parents will be absent, youth will restore justice. We either resist the manipulation, or succumb. We'll leave with an experience, but no questions or debates. Perhaps we should be very very glad Spielberg supports good causes, and not the ones we hate. He would out Riefenstahl Riefenstahl, given the opportunity. Spielberg is the apotheosis of manipulative cinema, and hence necessarily a nadir for the Art.

In other words, if there was any director that could make this source material interesting, it's almost certainly not Spielberg.

I've been a contrarian on this thread. I thought the book was pleasant enough listening during dog walks, and I still think its popularity says something about our moment. I thought it inferior to similar past outings in the cyberpunk subgenre, like Jeff Noon's Vurt (1995).

We're primarily a music board, we know that many genres have stagnated for decades, with many fixating on some perfect past moment. Genres I care about have been rearranging 1979-81 for decades. When the cultural consensus fell apart, at first we all thought it was fantastic to find others shared our obsessions. In time I think most of us have hoped for escape routes out of this fishbowl.

That's what the book felt like to me. A tiny fishbowl. A whole culture looking at that last perfect moment, before corporate commodification, before web hiveminds. The last time we had a vibrant culture. But mirrors upon mirrors, xeroxing that moment into banality.

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.

We're long overdue for a bookend to recycling of culture, 1977-now. Let this fucking film be it. Reject it. Hate it. Hate me because I'm still in the film's demographic. Not because its necessarily bad. But because its time for another year zero.

Ok grandpa.

"...his ability to wring out every damn scene as if it's the only way it *could* have been shot is what made him a household name."

I have never thought this, and even now, thinking about it, do not think it.

Spielberg's a household name because he arrived perfectly in sync with, but one crucial step ahead of, the oncoming cultural moment (AKA "Morning in America"), an ambitious master craftsman in love with his chosen medium's untapped ability to entertain and enthrall. Like Reagan, he understood that people waiting uncertain in the dark wish for nothing so dearly as to become children again, even if only for a moment in make-believe. The full expression of his art and ardor - a gorgeous, state-of-the-art pop cinema of ceaseless, seamlessly convincing marvels engineered to deliver maximum pleasure to the widest possible audience - took the world by storm.

Plus, yeah, he's a brilliant and deeply generous storyteller who can stack shots like nobody's business.

dystopian future where everyone talks like lefsetz

dystopian present where the most naturally gifted filmmaker of his generation makes a movie out of the worst popular book of the last 25 years

ffs there is no "year zero". it's a desire to kill the cultural past. it's either an impossibility or a fasist nightmare. it would require a new burning of the Library of Alexandria. or maybe we go back to burning books and unauthorized interpretations. no.

nostalgia is fine, people have done it for thousands of years. it is natural. people just need to be more creative about it. you hear a story as a kid, you grow up, you retell it when you are old enough or skilled enough to have the means of production. all oh human culture revolves around similar archetypes and story structures because we all go through life, we all have similar experiences, for all the difference we think we have between us. this is the history of culture. again, people just need to be more creative.

oh fwiw i watched Empire of the Sun. great movie! it was a very creative and beautiful way to tackle this very problem.

anyway that's all subject matter. i think most object to RPO the book because it's trash on a skill level. like if you had written any of these pages and handed it in to a high school creative writing class the teacher would give you a C- and tell you you use words too many times in sentences, you repeated yourself here, bad sentence structure, endless lists are not fun to read, etc. it is genuinely BAD WRITING. add on top of that the horrible nerd politics behind someone who dedicated their book to Harry Knowles, etc.

the book shouldn't get a free pass because it's in a genre. "oh you are hypocrites because you love other pop culture" is such a dumb and superficial argument. art doesn't work that way. as for the movie, Speilberg has actual talent and skill, there is a greater possibility it's a decent film (even if it's still pretty dumb once you give it any thought)

Walter Chow review makes me kind of want to see it, like it's gonna be Temple of Doom pt 2

i've seen it 4x now and it IS just that great!

Trollin' with the Morbsy

April Fools?

The full expression of his art and ardor - a gorgeous, state-of-the-art pop cinema of ceaseless, seamlessly convincing marvels engineered to deliver maximum pleasure to the widest possible audience - took the world by storm.

Spielberg did too.

We're long overdue for a bookend to recycling of culture, 1977-now. Let this fucking film be it. Reject it. Hate it. Hate me because I'm still in the film's demographic. Not because its necessarily bad. But because its time for another year zero.

I will take you up on this. I will hate this movie with every fiber of my being if it means an end to Star Wars and the Marvel Universe.

not if we have to do "punk" again tho

"this generation of consumers needs to make way for some new consumers consuming something different"

gang, art is still being made that doesn’t have to do with any of this.

ahh yes, the films and TV and videogames of the great 1980s, that time before the corporate commodification of culture

when is that Logan's Run remake coming out

Could be trenchant! Or nu Running Man.

what if it was, like, the kids getting hunted down by the olds, man? think about it.