Ready Player One (2018)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. In the theater. In 3d and IMAX. I’m not sure why I did that.

Did I Like It: Sure… Let’s go with that.

First bit of business when discussing this film. Yes, I read the book. It was shortly after its release. I thought it was fine, if slightly forgettable. Others have been very down on the work of the book. I neither fully agree or disagree with them. I also read author’s Ernest Cline’s second novel, Armada, which I really hated. I hated Armada so much that after listening to the audio book, I disliked narrator Wil Wheaton a little bit. The stink was that bad.

Early in the development of Ready Player One, there appeared to be a very real possibility that Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)) appeared to be a lock for the director’s chair. This seemed like the right choice. With Roger Rabbit, he proved ages ago he could juggle an army of cameos from a disparate array of intellectual properties. That should have sealed the deal right there. With attempts like Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009) he proved that—if by trail-and-error alone—he had more experience than Peter Jackson or James Cameron with the motion capture the film would require. Even if he would be forced to work with the DeLorean Time Machine again, that would only a small drop of self-referential-itis, a word I’ve just made up.

Instead, and with some degree of surprise, Steven Spielberg agreed to direct. Considering the film is steeped in 80s pop culture, this is sort of like hiring Pope Pius XII to make The Ten Commandments (1956)*. Too much self-referentialism—another word I apparently just made up—can be a bad thing. 

Thankfully, Spielberg is indisputably more of a master of the cinema than Cline is of the novel, so the movie flies above the source material. Wherein the book makes extensive references to WarGames (1983), the reality that Spielberg trying to do an extensive homage to John Badham fell by the wayside in favor of a scene borrowing from Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Spielberg reaching for Kubrick makes a lot more sense.

Ultimately, Spielberg made the best version of this story possible. He’s made far better movies in recent year, most frequently when he eschews the pop sensibilities of his earlier career, and he’ll probably make better movies still. Ultimately? Give Lincoln (2012) or even The Post (2017) a look, and also give a look to all the other properties that prop this one up.

*Any person possessing a problem with that analogy should email complaints@partyapocalypse.com, an email address that—to date—does not exist.

Sneakers (1992)

Director: Phil Alden Robinson

Cast: Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell

Have I Seen It Before: No (sort of)

Did I Like It? Not really.

The movie comes from a very high pedigree. The cast sells itself. Honestly, if Redford is in a movie, isn't there a certain benefit of the doubt written into the picture? Phil Alden Robinson had just come off Field of Dreams (1989), the one movie featuring Kevin Costner that everybody seems to like. It's only now that we no longer have James Horner around that every time one of his scores echo forth, does it seem like discovering a lost treasure. Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker had already brought their skills to similar subject matter in WarGames (1982).

And that's where things don't quite work out. Where WarGames had a sense of fun to it, even when flirting with the end of Western Civilization and the fundamental futility therein. This movie plays dour and aloof. I'm not even an automatic naysayer of dour and aloof, but this one failed to bring me in. I'm even vaguely certain that I had tried to watch this movie at some point in the past, but neglected to get through the process. Had I not happened to be tempted to start these writings with this viewing, I may not have made it through here. The cast is fine, but not great. It is only a desire not to speak ill of the dead that keeps me from wondering what the big deal was about some people in the 80s and 90s. I'll leave you to contemplate that. Even that much feels pretty catty.

Also, and this may be just a nitpick, but I just don't understand how a movie post-1985 can get away with shooting so obviously in the Universal backlot. I know that's the Hill Valley Clock Tower. Everyone knows it is the Hill Valley Clock Tower. You're not fooling anyone.

What This Is

Hello, if you're puttering around this site, you're already aware that it has two blogs with current posts (three, if you count the RSS podcast feed for The Fourth Wall).

The first, Bloggy B. Bloggington, DDS, received weekly updates of the "anything goes" format. After writing in that space for two years, I had done nearly 80,000 words of writing. Sadly, none of it really goes together. It can't make a book that I put out there in the world. At least, it wouldn't make a very good one.

The second has ambitions to be something else. In If A Story In This Blog Goes Over 1000 Words, This Whole Website Will Explode, I've endeavored to write a new flash fiction story every week (taking a break every 9 weeks, because a human being can only do so much, or so my therapist keeps telling me). I hope to get a book of flash out of the prospect (tentatively titled If A Story In This Book Goes Over 1000 Words, This Whole Book Will Explode). I'm six months in and only kind of regret the whole prospect, although in a definite plus it has forced me into a much more disciplined approach to short fiction.

Now, here a third official blog. As of late, I've watched a lot of old Siskel and Ebert clips. It's slowly become an obsession. I've even read Ebert's first book of hated films, appropriately titled I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. I'm a little shocked Siskel never wrote a book before he passed. I've watched Life Itself, and thought it was equal parts haunting and effecting.

So, I decided to try my own hand at the criticism game. I also want to document the movies I see, as the list keeps growing and parts of it become less memorable with time. So here you'll see brief entries about movies as I watch them. Some of them might be new movies I watched, others might be old favorites. The entries themselves won't be long, as I can't rationally have this take time away from other writing. Maybe it could make a book at some time, maybe not. For now, I'm not even going to actually list the blog on the site. This might change with time, but for now, if you've found this, you're unusually gifted at searching site directories, and have given almost as much, if not more thought to my work than I have. Good job?