Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance. Dir. Steven Spielberg, Warner Bros., 2018
A couple years ago, when bots started authoring news stories, I harrumphed quite a bit that "no bot can do what I do," and as I come across clickbait stories which I suspect must be bot-written I feel somewhat reassured but, at heart, my reaction is probably about the same as Paul Bunyan's bluster upon seeing the first chainsaw. I imagine any honest writer must feel a little like the cashier whose register stands beside the self-checkout at Wallyworld, eye to eye with her own obsolescence every day.This is pretty much how it feels to be a middle aged white dude, an analog champion in a digital world. New tech, new values, new standards, new ideas and here I stand, still convinced music videos and Swatches qualify as cutting edge. Shit, I still like compact discs. Whether or not there's value in being a dinosaur in a mammalian paradigm is another day's masturbation, however.
I harrumphed my way through the first 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg's 2018 adaptation of Ernest Cline's 2010 novel Ready Player One. It's hard to take all the breathless fascination with the movie's virtual world, The Oasis, having been a fan of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy in the '80s. Gibson, who more or less created the cyberpunk genre and esthetic, dealt with characters who spent most of their lives "jacked in" to a VR/web hybrid called "the matrix." For various reasons, Hollywood never really did Gibson's three seminal novels, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive justice, but his influence shaped scifi novels and movies going forward. Obviously, The Wachowski sisters' The Matrix grappled with similar ideas, as did the less-seen The 13th Floor, released the same year. Brett Leonard's Virtuosity, from 1996, trod the same ground, as did Jonathan Mostow's '09 Bruce Willis vehicle, Surrogates, and these are just the first titles to pop into my head. Point being, I started into Ready Player One muttering, "What do Spielberg and Cline have to say about virtual life that a dozen other writers and filmmakers haven't already?"
I pretty much missed the first 20 minutes of Ready Player One with all that mental posturing and harrumphing, but, if I'm not sure they do say anything new, I am quite sure it doesn't matter. It isn't always what we say, but how we say it. Somewhere around the 20-minute mark I started to get over myself and succumb to the world Spielberg builds. In fact, it occurred at the moment Kong shows up to interfere with the race. Digital or practical, I'm oldschool enough to appreciate a monster truck out of Inspector Gadget destroying the competition, and throwing King Kong in as a spoiler made me start chuckling. At that point, I said to myself, "Unclench. Stop worrying about what it all means and watch the freakin' movie."
And thank Gibson I did, because RP1 is big loud crazy fun which my oh-so-insightful mind almost kept me from seeing. Once surrendered, I had as much fun as I suppose others did in spotting the myriad '80s pop culture references, many of which (but not all) are pretty obvious, but effective regardless, thanks to the way Cline and Spielberg recontextualize them.
I suck at plot synopsis. It bores me. Sometimes that's a problem. This is one of those times. Imagine a an amalgam of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and one of Disney's first PG-rated movies, Midnight Madness, a clone of all-star race/quest movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Scavenger Hunt, in which ninjas and hackerbois and gurls and towering cyborg berserkers compete to find the three keys which will unlock the Golden Egg and gain themselves ownership of the OASIS, the online VR world where pretty much everyone in the US spends all their time rather than deal with the real world, in which millions have died due to civil strife and upheaval.
Gahhhhh. I hate this. Let's pretend anyone reading has already read the book or seen the movie. (If not, Wikipedia does a reasonably good job of boiling the plot down to its essentials.)
RP1 almost lost me at the outset. In fact, I delayed watching it for a week because the first five minutes set my teeth on edge. Not long ago, a meme popped up in my Fb timeline asking me to pick the two places on earth I'd never want to live. I immediately thought, "Columbus, Oh., and Indianapolis, In.," the two most boring cities I've ever visited. I grew up in Cincinnati and visited Columbus, 110 miles north, often as a younger man. It always struck me as a flat version of my hometown, with which I was less than enamored.
In the first few minutes of RP1, we learn the story is set in 2045 Columbus as Van Halen's "Jump" plays. Eyeroll. Not only do I dislike Columbus, I'm less than an avid fan of Van Halen. Movies trading on '80s nostalgia often assert the false narrative that it was a monoculture decade of neon colors, big hair, tacky fashions, and a soundtrack resembling Mtv's playlist over its first four years on-air. Personally, I spent the '80s using Lisa Birnbaum's satirical Preppy Handbook as a style guide while listening to post-punk and what would come to be called alt-rock but was known, then, as everything from New Wave to New Music to College Rock. Most mainstream '80s nostalgia yearns for a time I don't particularly recognize. The guys who liked Van Halen and Motley Crue called me and Our Man in the Valley "faggot" for dancing to Frankie Goes to Hollywood at high school mixers. The Van Halen dudes stuffed friends of mine into lockers and garbage cans at school and beat the crap out of them after the last bell rang.
Those first five minutes provoked a visceral negative reaction last week. Not again, I thought, not again with this nonsensical idea we all went to see Top Gun and Back to the Future and The Goonies whilst gettin' down to Huey Lewis & the News and Twisted Sister. I certainly saw those movies, and enjoyed most of them - though not The Goonies, which is 90 minutes of Gen Y kids previewing how annoying they'd be as young adults - but I went out of my way to see films like Diva, a slick French thriller about opera bootlegs and motorcycle thugs, The Quiet Earth, a Kiwi scifi picture, and Gillian Armstrong's 1982 Aussie New Wave musical, Starstruck.
As long as I'm off on this rant, I never see Chariots of Fire, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Sophie's Choice, All That Jazz, Ordinary People, The Verdict, Starman, or any Clint Eastwood movie referenced in these '80s lovefests, yet those were the movies my friends and I loved. I spent the '80s wanting to direct movies like Sidneys Lumet and Pollack and Bob Fosse and Ken Russell directed. I never see any of that '80s memorialized on film. The Milennials didn't see that stuff, or listen to Bauhaus and The Cure and Love&Rockets and The Cult and The Damned, therefore it does not exist in their mythology.
The '80s I see fetishized comes from the white suburban world I decried in my recent writeup of Beetlejuice. I spent senior year of high school listening to New Order and Talking Heads, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and LL Cool J and Doug E. Fresh and Run-DMC. I fucking loathed Motley Crue. Still, every '80s-referencing movie I see glosses over most of what composed my pop culture. I get at least a little tired of it. When RP1 appeared to be yet still more of same I bailed until I exhausted my stack of unseen movies.
We allow people who turned 10 in 1990 to dictate what the actual teenagers and young adults of the '80s experienced. I understand the reasons this is true, but they do little to blunt my resentment at seeing my youth reduced to a series of lowest common denominator stereotypes. And what has any of this to do with RP1?
I think too much. I miss movies, or parts of them, because I get lost in these sorts of reflections. I miss parts of movies because their recapitulations of the 1980s don't hold my attention as my own memories. RP1 looked like another such snoozer on the way in, and to be sure Spielberg's recollection of the '80s is heavily weighted toward his own ouvre and the popcorn movies his friends made in those years. To be more sure, the music cues tend toward the same Mtv fare I'm beyond sick of (though to his credit he includes a dizzying dance club sequence where our young heroes, or their avatars, fall in love while New Order's immortal "Blue Monday" plays.) When "We're Not Gonna Take It" cues the battle for Fortress Anorak, the location of the Golden Egg, I groaned aloud.
For a second. To me, Ready Player One succeeds in spite of the '80s cliches, in spite of the digital effects and animation. The story makes RP1 work, and the story is about as oldfashioned as it gets. It's a knight-errant's quest. It's a story of unconditional love and the power of friendship. It's a story of individuals versus corporate hegemony.
It's a story powered by sympathetic human characters and the indelible truth that, even in this brave new world of tech and STEM, movies still get over on fundamentals over a century old. For all its futuristic look and Gibsonian atmosphere, Ready Player One is a traditional Hollywood motion picture at its warm, beating human heart. A movie which reaffirms, both in its structure and theme, that human connection and being in the moment matter most. It's not the newfangled gimcracks which make RP1 a sneakily subversive film, it's the oldschool idealism.
I hear that fans of Ernest Cline's novel were extremely displeased by disparities between the book and Steven Spielberg's film. Good. In fact, great. Hell, it's fucking awesome. I could not be more pleased. Maybe, if films keep this up, we can finally free ourselves of the yoke of literalism which has plagued Hollywood for 20 years.
You "waaaah the movie changed the book" people are why movies turned into a hellscape of tedium, of adaptations so faithful they were rendered inert. Because of you, Zack Snyder's version of The Watchmen put me to sleep. Because of you, The Hunger Games movies act better as a soporific than cinema. Because of you, every filmmaker and film presuming to tell their own story using the book as guide are pilloried and denounced as some kind of heretics in online forums. Because of you, Hollywood stopped being interesting and turned into a combined Xerox/ATM.
It's very simple. Books and movies are different media. Movies which do no more than replicate their source material never surprise us, never offer us food for thought, never inspire any real wonder. They're like holy relics for their individual cults, objects so coveted and contested believers turn fanatics, disagreements become wars, and the meaning, the inspiration from which that faith originally sprang gets crushed under the tank-treads of orthodoxy. Great movies cannot only replicate. They must innovate. To do that, they must also deviate.
Generation X is tired of your bullshit. We're tired of people who think their little culty fascination belongs to them and no one else. We're tired of your fandoms and their endless rules. We're tired of having entertainments turned into private fiefdoms. We're tired of going to movies only to discover we needed to see 14 other films, read four other novels, and have a working knowledge of the animated Transformers movie to make any sense of one motion picture. We're tired of your entitlement, your whining when you don't get your way, and tired of seeing the movies, one of the great democratizers of pop culture, turned into more tribal-elite crap.
So if you can't see what a joyous triumph Mr. Spielberg's Ready Player One represents, what an eye-popping, mind-blowing affirmation it is of oldschool, realworld verities, I am so pleased, so utterly thrilled. I'm GenX and I and Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Cline are beyond weary of your bullshit.
Be patient, children. As soon as the pandemic ends the MCU will return to spoonfeed you more pablum. For the rest of us, there's Ready Player One. As long as movies like it exist, there's hope for Hollywood.
I harrumphed my way through the first 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg's 2018 adaptation of Ernest Cline's 2010 novel Ready Player One. It's hard to take all the breathless fascination with the movie's virtual world, The Oasis, having been a fan of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy in the '80s. Gibson, who more or less created the cyberpunk genre and esthetic, dealt with characters who spent most of their lives "jacked in" to a VR/web hybrid called "the matrix." For various reasons, Hollywood never really did Gibson's three seminal novels, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive justice, but his influence shaped scifi novels and movies going forward. Obviously, The Wachowski sisters' The Matrix grappled with similar ideas, as did the less-seen The 13th Floor, released the same year. Brett Leonard's Virtuosity, from 1996, trod the same ground, as did Jonathan Mostow's '09 Bruce Willis vehicle, Surrogates, and these are just the first titles to pop into my head. Point being, I started into Ready Player One muttering, "What do Spielberg and Cline have to say about virtual life that a dozen other writers and filmmakers haven't already?"
I pretty much missed the first 20 minutes of Ready Player One with all that mental posturing and harrumphing, but, if I'm not sure they do say anything new, I am quite sure it doesn't matter. It isn't always what we say, but how we say it. Somewhere around the 20-minute mark I started to get over myself and succumb to the world Spielberg builds. In fact, it occurred at the moment Kong shows up to interfere with the race. Digital or practical, I'm oldschool enough to appreciate a monster truck out of Inspector Gadget destroying the competition, and throwing King Kong in as a spoiler made me start chuckling. At that point, I said to myself, "Unclench. Stop worrying about what it all means and watch the freakin' movie."
And thank Gibson I did, because RP1 is big loud crazy fun which my oh-so-insightful mind almost kept me from seeing. Once surrendered, I had as much fun as I suppose others did in spotting the myriad '80s pop culture references, many of which (but not all) are pretty obvious, but effective regardless, thanks to the way Cline and Spielberg recontextualize them.
I suck at plot synopsis. It bores me. Sometimes that's a problem. This is one of those times. Imagine a an amalgam of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and one of Disney's first PG-rated movies, Midnight Madness, a clone of all-star race/quest movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Scavenger Hunt, in which ninjas and hackerbois and gurls and towering cyborg berserkers compete to find the three keys which will unlock the Golden Egg and gain themselves ownership of the OASIS, the online VR world where pretty much everyone in the US spends all their time rather than deal with the real world, in which millions have died due to civil strife and upheaval.
Gahhhhh. I hate this. Let's pretend anyone reading has already read the book or seen the movie. (If not, Wikipedia does a reasonably good job of boiling the plot down to its essentials.)
RP1 almost lost me at the outset. In fact, I delayed watching it for a week because the first five minutes set my teeth on edge. Not long ago, a meme popped up in my Fb timeline asking me to pick the two places on earth I'd never want to live. I immediately thought, "Columbus, Oh., and Indianapolis, In.," the two most boring cities I've ever visited. I grew up in Cincinnati and visited Columbus, 110 miles north, often as a younger man. It always struck me as a flat version of my hometown, with which I was less than enamored.
In the first few minutes of RP1, we learn the story is set in 2045 Columbus as Van Halen's "Jump" plays. Eyeroll. Not only do I dislike Columbus, I'm less than an avid fan of Van Halen. Movies trading on '80s nostalgia often assert the false narrative that it was a monoculture decade of neon colors, big hair, tacky fashions, and a soundtrack resembling Mtv's playlist over its first four years on-air. Personally, I spent the '80s using Lisa Birnbaum's satirical Preppy Handbook as a style guide while listening to post-punk and what would come to be called alt-rock but was known, then, as everything from New Wave to New Music to College Rock. Most mainstream '80s nostalgia yearns for a time I don't particularly recognize. The guys who liked Van Halen and Motley Crue called me and Our Man in the Valley "faggot" for dancing to Frankie Goes to Hollywood at high school mixers. The Van Halen dudes stuffed friends of mine into lockers and garbage cans at school and beat the crap out of them after the last bell rang.
Those first five minutes provoked a visceral negative reaction last week. Not again, I thought, not again with this nonsensical idea we all went to see Top Gun and Back to the Future and The Goonies whilst gettin' down to Huey Lewis & the News and Twisted Sister. I certainly saw those movies, and enjoyed most of them - though not The Goonies, which is 90 minutes of Gen Y kids previewing how annoying they'd be as young adults - but I went out of my way to see films like Diva, a slick French thriller about opera bootlegs and motorcycle thugs, The Quiet Earth, a Kiwi scifi picture, and Gillian Armstrong's 1982 Aussie New Wave musical, Starstruck.
As long as I'm off on this rant, I never see Chariots of Fire, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Sophie's Choice, All That Jazz, Ordinary People, The Verdict, Starman, or any Clint Eastwood movie referenced in these '80s lovefests, yet those were the movies my friends and I loved. I spent the '80s wanting to direct movies like Sidneys Lumet and Pollack and Bob Fosse and Ken Russell directed. I never see any of that '80s memorialized on film. The Milennials didn't see that stuff, or listen to Bauhaus and The Cure and Love&Rockets and The Cult and The Damned, therefore it does not exist in their mythology.
The '80s I see fetishized comes from the white suburban world I decried in my recent writeup of Beetlejuice. I spent senior year of high school listening to New Order and Talking Heads, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and LL Cool J and Doug E. Fresh and Run-DMC. I fucking loathed Motley Crue. Still, every '80s-referencing movie I see glosses over most of what composed my pop culture. I get at least a little tired of it. When RP1 appeared to be yet still more of same I bailed until I exhausted my stack of unseen movies.
We allow people who turned 10 in 1990 to dictate what the actual teenagers and young adults of the '80s experienced. I understand the reasons this is true, but they do little to blunt my resentment at seeing my youth reduced to a series of lowest common denominator stereotypes. And what has any of this to do with RP1?
I think too much. I miss movies, or parts of them, because I get lost in these sorts of reflections. I miss parts of movies because their recapitulations of the 1980s don't hold my attention as my own memories. RP1 looked like another such snoozer on the way in, and to be sure Spielberg's recollection of the '80s is heavily weighted toward his own ouvre and the popcorn movies his friends made in those years. To be more sure, the music cues tend toward the same Mtv fare I'm beyond sick of (though to his credit he includes a dizzying dance club sequence where our young heroes, or their avatars, fall in love while New Order's immortal "Blue Monday" plays.) When "We're Not Gonna Take It" cues the battle for Fortress Anorak, the location of the Golden Egg, I groaned aloud.
For a second. To me, Ready Player One succeeds in spite of the '80s cliches, in spite of the digital effects and animation. The story makes RP1 work, and the story is about as oldfashioned as it gets. It's a knight-errant's quest. It's a story of unconditional love and the power of friendship. It's a story of individuals versus corporate hegemony.
It's a story powered by sympathetic human characters and the indelible truth that, even in this brave new world of tech and STEM, movies still get over on fundamentals over a century old. For all its futuristic look and Gibsonian atmosphere, Ready Player One is a traditional Hollywood motion picture at its warm, beating human heart. A movie which reaffirms, both in its structure and theme, that human connection and being in the moment matter most. It's not the newfangled gimcracks which make RP1 a sneakily subversive film, it's the oldschool idealism.
I hear that fans of Ernest Cline's novel were extremely displeased by disparities between the book and Steven Spielberg's film. Good. In fact, great. Hell, it's fucking awesome. I could not be more pleased. Maybe, if films keep this up, we can finally free ourselves of the yoke of literalism which has plagued Hollywood for 20 years.
You "waaaah the movie changed the book" people are why movies turned into a hellscape of tedium, of adaptations so faithful they were rendered inert. Because of you, Zack Snyder's version of The Watchmen put me to sleep. Because of you, The Hunger Games movies act better as a soporific than cinema. Because of you, every filmmaker and film presuming to tell their own story using the book as guide are pilloried and denounced as some kind of heretics in online forums. Because of you, Hollywood stopped being interesting and turned into a combined Xerox/ATM.
It's very simple. Books and movies are different media. Movies which do no more than replicate their source material never surprise us, never offer us food for thought, never inspire any real wonder. They're like holy relics for their individual cults, objects so coveted and contested believers turn fanatics, disagreements become wars, and the meaning, the inspiration from which that faith originally sprang gets crushed under the tank-treads of orthodoxy. Great movies cannot only replicate. They must innovate. To do that, they must also deviate.
Generation X is tired of your bullshit. We're tired of people who think their little culty fascination belongs to them and no one else. We're tired of your fandoms and their endless rules. We're tired of having entertainments turned into private fiefdoms. We're tired of going to movies only to discover we needed to see 14 other films, read four other novels, and have a working knowledge of the animated Transformers movie to make any sense of one motion picture. We're tired of your entitlement, your whining when you don't get your way, and tired of seeing the movies, one of the great democratizers of pop culture, turned into more tribal-elite crap.
So if you can't see what a joyous triumph Mr. Spielberg's Ready Player One represents, what an eye-popping, mind-blowing affirmation it is of oldschool, realworld verities, I am so pleased, so utterly thrilled. I'm GenX and I and Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Cline are beyond weary of your bullshit.
Be patient, children. As soon as the pandemic ends the MCU will return to spoonfeed you more pablum. For the rest of us, there's Ready Player One. As long as movies like it exist, there's hope for Hollywood.
I used that exact dinosaur in a mammalian world analogy the other day. Interestingly, or perhaps not interestingly, my idea of the eighties (and I was born in 1978, so I'm only barely GenX) was very much what you describe as your lived experience. Maybe it's regional? In the Seattle area there wasn't much of the culture that feeds a thing like Van Halen (if I never hear "Jump" again I will die happy; "Blue Monday" is on regular rotation). But then, my friends and I were among the locker-stuffee cohort. Whether or not you were a sensitive nerd may be the key factor in your concept of what the eighties were.
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