Ready Player One

[cinemabon]

I wish I had your review talent. I lack the analytical temperament and fluidity of prose needed for most modern criticism when it comes to thematic material. Spielberg laced the film with all kinds of 1980's references. While I recognize them, I'm not capable of relaying their meaning in critique form. My reviews are rather pedestrian at best. I give my impression and apply what little film knowledge I've gained through the years - college, LA, you guys. Sometimes I long for our days of innocence when the rest of internet didn't have so many outlets and brilliant cinematic minds gathered in this forum to espouse. Ah, nostalgia; a dead end street.

I miss you, too.

[Chris Knipp]

Your personal knowledge of the film industry and many genres far exceeds mine and I don't see anything less pedestrian in what I write or anything flat in your prose. Also, I can't review everything, though it might look like I'm trying. If I get to see this new Spielberg movie I will come back and read your review with special care. I'd like to know what else you've been watching lately.

The San Francisco International Film Festival is gearing up (April 4-17, 2018). I've compiled a text list people can refer to of the offerings HERE. This is to replace the thumbnail images list that forces you to wade through pictures to get to the alphabetical list.

[Chris Knipp]

Crazy about the multiple 70's and 80's pop references, the French critics have showered Ready Player One with raves - AlloCiné press rating 4.2 - much higher than the US Metascore of 64%.

[Chris Knipp]

I've finally seen Ready Player One today, almost a month late. This isn't going to be a review, just a response and comment on your review. You reveal right away a much better knowledge of video/computer games and of pop culture (and memory of Tron) than I have, what is necessary to appreciate this movie. I was more interested in Tye Sheridan and how things looked. I bore in mind a comment by Anthony Lane at the end of his review: that he had precious little emotional response. This is a movie for fanboys. I gather that video encounters/dates/hookups/battles between real people in cyberworlds is a fixture of fanboy fantasies and forum posts. Today being Saturday, the noon show, though in a smaller auditorium of the cineplex, was well populated by fanboys and fangirls who chuckled appreciatively at various points. Appreciative chuckling may be the desired "emotion."

While you were no doubt shrewd to open with Tron, cinemabon, my mind was on another cyberworld romance I saw recently, Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. That was a French production and did well in France but tanked critically here, with Metascore in the 50's, while this one's in the 60's. Valerian has a lot of motion capture and tons of CGI adventure and is beautiful. The difference is that Dane DeHaan is a remarkable actor. Pretty much wasted, especially considering that few saw this movie.

Tye Sheridan started as a real actor as a youth. His first role was in Tree of Life, followed by two similar rustic, rural dramas, Jeff Nichols' Mudd with Matthew McConaughey and Joe with Nicolas Cage. Since then he has become a blockbuster journeyman, playing young roles in big bucks movies. Here he seems more like a narrator than an actor. He also plays a body, as himself and a motion-capture thinner fantasy version of himself, who falls in love, through his cyber adventures, with a girl whose avatar is called Art3mis.


Valerian and Dane DeHaan

As luck would have it Dane DeHaan has had one dog after another, and Tye, on call for blockbusters, msut be making good money. It doesn't seem fair. DeHaan got a role in a blockbuster too, the Green Goblin in The Amazin Spider Man. Got a Terrence Malick role too, but a more minor one, in Knight of Cups, a Metascore 53% Malick vs. his 85% Metascore Tree of Life. There are some great performances by DeHaan out there to be seen, in Chronicle, Kill Your Darlings, The Place Beyond the Pines, his terrific run as "Jesse" in "In Treatment."

The plot of Ready Player One is lame as well as - as you have pointed out - familiar. It exists as a prop to hang all the visual action on, ending with a feel-good finale. There is also tons of narration, because the visual action in itself makes very little sense, and requires constant explanation. The movie doesn't prove its claim that "everybody" lives in the cyberworld of "The Oasis," and a world where that was true is inconceivable. We can only believe that teenage boys, and some idle girls, do.

I am obliged to you for pointing out that Halliday is played by Mark Rylance - one of the best actors in England today, perhaps the greatest, who can play anything, and do a bang-up job of it. He was the pilot of the small boat featured in Chris Nolan's Dunkirk. His virtuoso performance in Jerusalem is one of the greatest of many notable theatrical roles. The talented Charlie Plummer (All the Money in the World, Lean on Pete) has said that seeing Rylance perform on stage in Jerusalem when he was twelve was what inspired him to become an actor.

Spielberg, I was thinking, made another film that had fun-fair artificiality of CGI in it, but a tremendous emotional core, which this quite lacks. I mean A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, of course. Generally it's obvious that films with an intensive use of CGI swamp actors and their performances, though good acting will still shine through, hopefully, but I thought that Haley Joel Osment's performance as "David" in A.I. is one of the most remarkable and powerful I've ever seen by a young actor in a motion picuture. It feels as though Tye Sheridan is just reciting his lines and narrating the picture, because that is what he is given to do. (He has said that working with Spielberg was a great experience; why wouldn't he and why wouldn't it be, if he signed on for this role?)

Spielberg's reproduction of The Shining I grant is a great idea, but I can't agree that the movie is "duplicated down to the smallest detail." That's a bit overgenerous. It's very elaborate, but still in places inaccurate - the blood from the elevator, for instance - and doesn't really capture the mood of The Shining very much at all (maybe it doesn't want to, out of respect). But your review is, as I said, informed and informative in multiple ways that I would not be capable of. I did enjoy and appreciated some of the period pop references, such as The Breakfast Club and the BeeGee's "Staying Alive." But I have never been a fan or player of video games.

[cinemabon]

I'm glad you took the time to see it, Chris. I know your schedule is very busy and this is a puff piece, not worthy even of Spielberg (and wonder why he took the time considering so many younger directors could have handled this chore). However, when you brought up Valerian, you also evoked a very strong emotional response from me about what I consider to be one of the most beautiful science fiction films ever made and one of the most ignored. Touted from its first trailers this way, I went thinking the theater would be packed with sci-fi fans only to find the theater mostly empty. I went twice, not because I adored the actors or even the plot but to see that lush opening in its most decorative form, a painting of pale beauty spread across a hundred foot screen with such delicacy that it took my breath away, and few films from this jaded 66 year old do that any more. I see CGI dripping out of computers as so much flash and so little soul. Valerian struck at the heart of this writer as having more depth than its shallow hero exhibited. I have my own copy and watch it now and then when I feel lackadaisical.

[Chris Knipp]

I have been saying Valerian is at least as good but maybe I should say it is much better than Ready Player One. This is a case where your review at the time would have been welcome. I did think it was beautiful CGI, and I thought it did better in France. At the box office maybe it did, but I see it has only a 3 on AlloCine, which is not a very good critical rating. Here its Metascore is 50-something, lousy. I also was sad for it because I think Dane DeHaan is a great actor. I know he is.

[Chris Knipp]

It troubles me that Dane DeHaan has been in movies nobody has seen, lately, namely A Cure for Wellness and then Valerian. The IDMB blurb on him starts off, "Dane DeHaan has made a formidable impression on film and television audiences and is one of the industry's most sought after actors of his generation." Who's seeking, then? Is it him, or the industry? Isn't he handsome or sexy enough? Or tall enough (5'8", it says)? Gee.

Tom Cruise is 5'7". . .