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Movies

Ready Player One

April 2, 2018 By Mark Chatham Leave a Comment

Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring:

Tye Sheridan Tye Sheridan …
Parzival / Wade
Olivia Cooke Olivia Cooke …
Art3mis / Samantha
Ben Mendelsohn Ben Mendelsohn …
Sorrento
Lena Waithe Lena Waithe …
Aech / Helen
T.J. Miller T.J. Miller …
I-R0k
Simon Pegg Simon Pegg …
Ogden Morrow

Screenplay: Zak Penn, Ernest Cline

Spielberg had me at “vertical trailer park,” which is where we meet our hero Wade Watts. At least he’s Wade in the real world, or IRL as it’s known in the virtual world. I think. In the virtual world of Ready Player One he is Parzival. The year is 2045 and we’re in Columbus, Ohio and it’s been a while since a film maker has offered up a future that feels this plausible in the broad strokes.  You might think modular homes  stacked vertically in black, iron girder framework would be ugly, and you’re right, but there’s an odd warmth to seeing these classic mobile homes offering familiarity even arranged as a community. This feeling which is enhanced as we get voyeuristic views in a variety of windows as we closely follow Wade five or so stories of staircase to the ground. We get a look at people doing strange things in their kitchens and living rooms, decked out in goggles and gloves and clearly, everyone is plugged into a virtual world in some way. It’s jarring to see a woman wearing VR goggles and gloves blindly following a recipe in VR helmet and gloves or to see a man in an armchair waving his gloved arms crazily in the air.

As it turns out, in the year 2045 life in the real world is so stark that everyone now lives the vast bulk of their lives online. Being a gamer myself, this is not news and I’d argue we’re mostly there in a lot of ways, but I’ll roll with the idea. The difference in Spielberg’s future is a visionary genius named James Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his business partner Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg) come along in the 2020’s and change everything by integrating everything virtual into one global virtual platform called Oasis, where everyone has an avatar and every need is met.

You earn coins in the virtual world that can be used to purchase goods in both real and virtual worlds, but if you die in the virtual world, you lose everything you’ve gained to that point. There’s no blood spilled in this movie, but rather when someone dies in the virtual world they explode into coins. Pegg plays it straight and it’s strange to see him speaking with a North American accent and he does a good if not outstanding job as the “Steve Jobs” in this metaphorical alternate Apple reality. The one where the genius tech nerd has all the power and eventually ousts the  business minded partner, something he eventually regrets. It’s as though Wozniak prevails over Jobs in the  Steve battle for dominance at Apple, which makes sense given Spielberg considers himself a nerd. This is the subtle pop culture reference.

This being said, this movie conceivably may have every possible character from every 80’s and 90’s game platforms somewhere in the film as well as film and music references. Buckaroo Banzai anyone? No? Parzival’s ride in the virtual world is the Delorean from Back to the Future. The references I caught were fun for me but I’m in this weird target group of indolent video gaming old guys who have watched a lot of movies over the decades. In the end there’s so much demanding your attention on the screen that it doesn’t matter if you get the cultural references or not. With subliminal onslaughts like this, we’ll never be rid of the 80’s. However, even a viewer who has never heard of “The Shining” will appreciate the emotional ride the homage scene provides with imagery from that film, despite the humorous tone. So why do pop culture references end mid-90’s?

The device to justify this deep dive into 20th century pop culture is the cult like worship of Halliday’s character who had died years earlier. Before Halliday dies, he plants three keys with exceptionally difficult clues in the game. These clues lead to an Easter egg of incredible value, ownership of the Oasis itself. The clues are so difficult that the first key has yet to been won and a daily race is held and those who seek the prize enter. The winner will gain the first key. More on the race in a moment.

Parzival has four friends in his virtual social circle who band together in an attempt to win the clues. They’ve never met in the real world so their virtual character are the reality for each other and they like it that way. In the real, real world that exists outside the realm of Ready Player One these virtual friends would be from hither and yon. Scattered across North America with at least one on another continent entirely. In this world, it just so happens they all live in Columbus.

That being said, it worked for me. When the reveal of the real people behind the avatar comes, I felt a sincere warmth at meeting these people we’d been accompanying in The Oasis in their non-animated form. The quirkiness of the characters made for some fun moments. The villain in all of this is the stock evil corporation, in this iteration called Innovative Online Industries (I.O.I.) headed up by CEO Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendolhson) who has the resources to commit to finding the Easter egg and taking over the Oasis. For economic reasons, you understand.

This is, as Spielberg has said, a “movie” and not a “film” so it’s supposed to be a light ride. The performances are all solid despite the fact the characters as written have no depth. The eccentric, hippy dippy nerdiness of Rylance’s Halliday felt a little forced at times, but outside the nerd moments he hits the proper tone and brings the underlying quality of assured calm he brought as Rudolf Abel to Bridge of Spies. Ben Mendelsohn is certainly believable as the villain Sorrento and has the best line of the movie, but it almost plays as though his Krennic from Rogue One had a change of heart and went into business school rather than the military. The performances of the cast for the most part while perhaps not outstanding, certainly did not fall flat and kept me emotionally invested and Silicon Valley’s T.J. Miller brought a nice slice of humor to the flick.

This may sound peculiar, but I found the real life scenes more compelling than those which played out in the virtual world. Once th characters donned VR goggles it became an insane ride. Fun, but insane. There’s a problem when my organs can’t keep up with the action on the screen. There’s only so much overstimulation one can take.

Watching an animated action movie today feels like sending your senses to college, just for the hazing, with all the events of rush week compressed into two hours. You’re having fun at the time, or so you tell yourself. At  one point in the movie the corporate villain, Sorrento makes an enthusiastic pitch with this line:

“Research has shown that we can fill 80% of the screen with advertisements prior to inducing seizures.”

I think they came close to discovering the limits of human neurological tolerance with this flick. Which brings me to the race I mentioned earlier. It was a beautiful, fun, spectacular, seizure inducing ride to the best of my memory. I’m not sure what I can recall but I’ll try. I have flashes of a race involving hundreds of CGI vehicles, video game characters, a humungous T-rex, King Kong, speed racer, Dwight David Eisenhower riding a light cycle from Tron… I might be mistaken about the Eisenhower part but that bike was there… somewhere. I don’t know, it’s like trying to decipher a strobe light. The sequences are beautiful and compelling. There’s a set piece battle at the end of the film which includes The Iron Giant  and Mecha-Godzilla which proved to be fascinating and worth the price of admission alone.

I’d highly recommend seeing this movie in 3D if you want to have a glimpse of the future. I don’t think it will be the world of this movie, but it might be close.

IMDB Parent’s Guide lists 4 F-bombs but I only heard one. There’s a lot going on.

Filed Under: Movies

Cinematic Survivor

February 17, 2018 By Mark Chatham Leave a Comment

Movies and Me

I’m a cineaste. This differs from a cinephile in that in addition to just a pure love of movies, there’s a fascination for the process of film-making. I love films and movies and I use those terms as a personal shorthand to distinguish the tension between artistic/aesthetic and commercial/entertainment considerations of a production. Some are trying to be films, others just want to be movies but there’s always cross-contamination to some degree. Okay, maybe not always, there are films that are so terrible they’ve failed miserably on all counts of artistic and entertainment merit.

Looking at that list and given the above mentioned criteria, Ed Wood has to be disqualified because he has cult status and all cult films have by definition, entertainment value. There is one film that meets the criteria for certain and that is “The Creeping Terror.” You’ll have to trust me on this one. While there is nothing in this film to offend anyone’s sensibilities, there’s everything there to insult everyone’s intelligence. The effects alone make Robot Monster feel like Alien.

Ripley looks for a dustbuster so she can do her hair before battle in Alien3

 

On the other end, you have movies that are commercially successful, entertaining and have high cerebral massage value on all counts. Jaws (a baffling 56 on the AFI top 100 list) would definitely fall into this category, at least for me. All this being said, the website has to have a section on movies because I’ve had a close relationship with movies over the years.

Moving forward, the vast majority of posts will be movie reviews but I’m hoping to start a public forum so we can discussions on film related topics and vote. I should probably explain the latter.

The Multiplex

In the early ‘oughts I had a film forum called The Multiplex where a good sized community had discussions on just about everything you could imagine that had to do with movies. The server space was free but eventually the company that owned the servers folded and that was that. A co-host revived it as a facebook page called The New (but not improved) Multiplex and members adapted to the new platform. However, I find facebook too ephemeral. It’s just not as conducive to dynamic conversation as threaded forums, so I’ve participated in discussions in a limited manner.

Cinema Survivor

When I started The Multiplex, CBS’ Survivor was probably into its third season and I thought it might be interesting to play Cinematic Survivor in our forum using the AFI Top 100 list and so I ran the game until its conclusion. It was popular, so I ran subsequent Survivor games in a number of categories, sometimes based on Oscar nominations, such as Best Actor, Actress, Director, etc., other lists I’d make up myself. Best Cinema Heroes, Best Villains, etc.

Sadly, when World Crossing went under and The Multiplex died, so did all those lists. These were comprehensive categories. The best actor/actress survivor had a couple of hundred nominees. Early on we’d vote em off in blocks of 10 or fifteen and would pare that down as the list dwindled until it was one at a time when it came to the top ten.

DeNiro and Streep upon receiving the news that they won the Best Actor/Actress categories of The Multiplex Cinematic Survivor game.

We had some very interesting and insightful discussions. I’d like to run Cinema Survivor again here, with whomever would like to participate. I’ll run the game and I’ll have a sub-page with the lists when the game is done. If anyone is interested, let me know and hopefully this will be viable.

I guess sometimes I just find lists… interesting.

Grapefruit

As I mentioned, the discussions that would result both prior to the votes and after the results were knows were dynamic and for me, fascinating. I miss those discussions. However, there is one aspect I do not miss that would occasionally rear it’s head.

People can  tend to be very sensitive about their taste in movies and this can lead to caustic exchanges. I don’t particularly like to be party to caustic exchanges because they’re counter-productive, generally lack substance and stop an otherwise stimulating conversation dead in its tracks.

James Cagney uses grapefruit as a weapon in Public Enemy, validation of my loathing of grapefruit

I understand the underlying dynamic. When I love a movie, I want to share that with people. However, when I hate a movie, I also want to share that with people. Who knows? Maybe The Creeping Terror changed your life for the better. The creature helped you get over your intense fear of shag carpeting. Now as I’ve just made abundantly clear, I think it’s a waste of time. But please remember this at all times. My opinion isn’t a judgement on your taste level, or reflect an opinion of your intellect. There are plenty of other movies I’m sure we love together. Just not this one.

I’m calling the movie category Grapefruit as that’s what opinions are, just grapefruit. Maybe you love grapefruit, it’s the best fruit ever. Maybe once you lost your fear of shag carpeting, you went on a grapefruit diet to lose weight and it saved your life. I get that, but personally, I still feel that grapefruit is a vile, sour tasting, poor excuse for a fruit. It’s Satan’s produce, pure and simple. That being said, would you take my personal verbal loathing personally? Of course not. It’s just grapefruit for Pete’s sake. So for me, movies and opinions are grapefruit, hence the name in connection with a movie forum.

 

 

Filed Under: Movies

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