Ready Player One

Features, Shorts, Live-Action and Direct-To-Video
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Ben » June 15th, 2018, 4:03 am

Always is one of my underrated favorites, and 1941 is a big, fat, glorious mess of a movie that’s still huge fun. Of the more recent stuff, Tintin is amazing, Minority Report is awesome, and Bridge Of Spies, ahem, bridges both aspects of Spielberg’s career (making films for himself vs the audience) perfectly.

The BFG was a crushing bore with surprisingly awful CG and interactive effects, whichever way you look at it.

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » June 15th, 2018, 5:58 am

Yeah, I can’t even come up with the words to adequately describe my feelings during my first theater viewing of Minority Report. Just...wow. :shock: (Yeah, really eloquent, right? Lol.) It combined different genres (sci-fi, crime thriller, intimate drama, audience crowd-pleaser) so effortlessly and not, as you might surmise, watering down each one’s impact from the combination, but rather greatly enhancing it. (And that JW score! It stayed with me for days afterwards.).

Still need to see Always and 1941. I’m thinking of possibly watching A Guy Named Joe before seeing Always, just to widen my perspective. I read about it (Always) years ago and it sounded somewhat sappy then, but it’s probably better to see it first! Lol. ;) Plus it’s already been established twice over that Spielberg + Dreyfuss= good movie, so I’ll at least give it a try.

1941 looks fun. It’s really hard for me to have any kind of impression of it right now since I’ve barely seen any clip of it and the stills left me kind of “confused”, since there always seemed to be too much going on at once. But I will definitely see it before offering any opinion on it of course. (Plus I kind of have this feeling that had the critics not known that Spielberg had directed the film before they viewed it, it probably would have been hailed as a “fun romp” or a “wildly irreverent comedy”. Of course no way to be sure until I see the film! ;) It’s just a feeling I have. Lol.)


The trailers for The BFG just left me puzzled. It was like a bundle of contradictions: sweet yet cold/detached, with the feel of having old-fashioned real sets while at the same time dominated by inferior CGI that doesn’t give any of the live-action scenes time to breathe. But like I said, that was just my impression. I still want to see it, but not expecting anything great. :|


Oh, amazing review of MR by Roger Ebert! :)


https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/minority-report-2002
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by EricJ » June 15th, 2018, 2:30 pm

ShyViolet wrote:The trailers for The BFG just left me puzzled. It was like a bundle of contradictions: sweet yet cold/detached, with the feel of having old-fashioned real sets while at the same time dominated by inferior CGI that doesn’t give any of the live-action scenes time to breathe. But like I said, that was just my impression. I still want to see it, but not expecting anything great. :|
BFG's...okay for most of the movie--Mark Rylance's CGI design puzzled most of the audience, since they hadn't read the book (as generations of Dahl-worshipping UK-ers had...Seriously, is it mandatory law over there? :lol: ), and didn't realize the CGI was trying to reproduce Quentin Blake's iconic sketch illustrations, which are homaged in one shot.
It's not as "all-out" a Roald Dahl adaptation as Matilda or Willy Wonka (or even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), but Spielberg seems to have gone in knowing that JK Rowling originally wanted him to do a Harry Potter movie, and this's as "close" to Whimsical London Fantasy as he'll ever get. The last half hour particularly has fun with that.
(It's the "classic fantasy" vibe he wanted to do in "Hook", but couldn't quite manage.)

Lincoln, War Horse, and Empire of the Sun WANT to be more epic than they are, since they can't quite figure out a second larger reason why they were made, but if you're going completist, they're not bad to sit through, and Catch Me If You Can was his attempt at a fun Mad-Men 60's vibe.

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » June 16th, 2018, 8:21 am

Although it’s indisputably well-made, Catch Me if You Can is hands-down my least favorite Spielberg movie (unless you count Crystal Skull, which I really don’t since you can barely even recognize it as a Spielberg film. It’s maybe about one tenth of a percent as good as an “autopilot” film like The Lost Word.)


OK, I do feel bad for Frank when he eventually finds out about what happened to his dad, but that’s the only time. I don’t even care when his wife of one day turns him in or when Hanks’ character finally arrests him. I basically despise the Abagnale character all the way through, especially when he tries to impersonate an ER Doctor (!) and doesn’t even come clean when a severely injured child is brought in screaming. :(
I mean I know he’s supposed to be like 17 or whatever but that’s old enough to know that lying, stealing millions of dollars and and impersonating people is wrong! :roll: Maybe if the character of Frank had been portrayed differently, and the movie’s style hadn’t been such an uncomfortable mess of soppy sentimentalism coupled with that zippy, stylized early 60s feel I would see it differently. I realize that there are definitely darker scenes but the “angst” just never felt real to me...the film/Spielberg is way too concerned with making Frank likable and not with really plumbing the depths of a person who would commit felonies like this.

What if someone made a movie about one of the scammers who sends you fake bogus emails/attachments so they can steal your financial information? To be successful a movie like that would have to focus squarely on how troubled someone who does that is. It would definitely need to be a darker kind of tale.

*I do realize that Abagnale was young at the time, and a human being of course. Here’s what he writes on his business’ website about his past actions:


http://www.abagnale.com/comments.htm


**************************************

I’m actually a gigantic Empire of the Sun fan...I can watch that film a million times. It’s so unbelievably underrated. I know some people feel that the emotional moments with the swelling music and Williams chorus were “too much” emotionally, but in my opinion those moments are actually bittersweet ones (more bitter than sweet). It’s not just the story of Jim’s lost innocence (and the false, idealized plane fantasies he clings to when he’s imprisoned, not unlike AI’s David who clings to fairy tales) but that of the upper-class British civilians in the interment camp who lose everything when WWII breaks out. The scene where they’re marching, starving and dying of disease in the wilderness, and come upon their old abandoned furniture, record players and cars is unbelievably haunting and far darker than the film’s reputation by some critics as a “sentimentalizing” of wartime devastation. :|

It’s also my favorite Christian Bale film. I realize he’s always going to be known as The Dark Knight but to me he’ll always be Jamie Graham. :)

*************************************

I also used to dislike Terminal quite a lot. But it’s sort of grown on me over the years. (Some of my antipathy was because it seemed to making light of homelessness. I still think it does but not out of any malicious intent, just bad jokes meant to lighten the whole “refugee” theme. :?) Victor really isn’t all that interesting as a hero, but I love all his different friends in the airport. I don’t know why. Their characters/backstories are ridiculously “colorful” and really shouldn’t work, but for some reason do anyway.

Also Stanley Tucci is amazing. He is completely believable as the unemotional, almost inhumanly pragmatic Dixon and his subtle performance never misses a beat. Despite the awful things he does, he never once verges into over-the-top evil territory. A very good, quite solid performance that really should have gotten more attention than it did. :?
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Dacey » June 19th, 2018, 1:53 am

I still have yet to see BFG (even though I gave it to my mom for Christmas), but from what some of my friends have told me I have a hunch I'll like it whenever I finally do.

Ready Player One, which I realize I've never made a post about here until now, is by far the most "Spielberg" Spielberg film the man has made in ages. I was beaming when I walked out of the theater, and it's easily the most "fun" movie he's made since at least Tintin (though, again, I haven't seen BFG).

(However, I don't think there were any Avengers in the movie, and Batman was featured extremely briefly, so maybe time to change the header on this? ;) )
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Ben » June 19th, 2018, 5:49 am

I don’t think you’ll change your mind once you see BFG... ;)

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » January 12th, 2020, 7:14 pm

https://youtu.be/adHq0plTjd0


Wow, a Universal Studios Tour with STEVEN SPIELBERG as your guide????

80ABF4F5-0AD6-45E2-B1D6-0DFDF99E2205.gif
80ABF4F5-0AD6-45E2-B1D6-0DFDF99E2205.gif (258.29 KiB) Viewed 7382 times

;)


(I sort of think of this as the “Spielberg thread”, that’s why I posted the vid here. Lol.)
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Randall » January 12th, 2020, 8:05 pm

I thought I saw Spielberg in a Disney World restaurant (Chef Mickey's) over 20 years ago, but my wife thought I was crazy. I still regret not approaching that bearded man in the ball cap and sunglasses!

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » January 12th, 2020, 9:55 pm

It might have been him, you never know! :).

I never met Spielberg but a former Holocaust lit professor was actually an advisor to him on Schindler’s List. (She was a survivor herself.)

She told all of us how amazingly brilliant he is. (Big surprise lol ;))
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Ben » January 13th, 2020, 6:05 am

Of course, there’s also this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN7CZZryUNU

"Woah...that is one big scary shark!" ;)

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » January 13th, 2020, 8:31 am

Oh no way!!!! That came up in my mind too! ;)

“Oh the humanity!”

:lol:
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Daniel » January 16th, 2020, 2:19 pm

I love Ready Player One. The story, visuals, cameos. What an experience.

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » January 16th, 2020, 4:35 pm

Yeah...I think my favorite aspect of the film is that it wasn’t anywhere NEAR what I was expecting. :). (I mean...CEREBRAL in many ways???). Especially from those trailers, ugh.

Actually the film’s negative reviews were a PERFECT description of the actual trailers (“pop culture obsessed...paper-thin plot...CGI wears you down...”) Makes you wonder if those who hated the movie even watched it in the first place... :roll:
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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by Daniel » January 17th, 2020, 11:59 am

An aspect one trailer did right was play "Take on Me". That's so 80s! 8)

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Re: Avengers, Justice League and more in READY PLAYER ONE!

Post by ShyViolet » July 10th, 2020, 11:12 am

Ending of Ready Player One with Percival and “Halliday” talking in Halliday’s childhood bedroom. Probably my favorite scene in the film (next to maybe The Shining sequence. God, that was brilliant. :shock: Ditto Stayin’ Alive...just so beautiful.)


https://youtu.be/Dairyx94oKA


So what’s your interpretation of this scene? Was that really Halliday, even though his facsimile claims that Halliday is dead? Was it a computer representation of him? Or maybe an avatar anyway?


My interpretation is that on the one hand, yes, Halliday IS dead, but neither is his form an avatar. In my opinion, Halliday became so in synch with the technology he created that his consciousness somehow melded with the Oasis and thus became a permanent fixture within it. Since Percival finally found the magical egg by following Halliday’s rules, he can now take over the Oasis, BUT Halliday is careful to warn him NOT to become enmeshed in it as he himself had: “Because as terrifying and painful as reality can be, reality... is REAL.” Halliday’s child-self represents his own regrets over withdrawing from other people.

It’s also quite fitting that Percival (Wayde Watts) is in Avatar form and Halliday (whatever he is) is in human being form; despite winning the game and inheriting the Oasis, Percival has ALREADY begun to “merge” with it, just as Halliday had. Halliday knows it’s too late to save his own existence, but Percival still has a chance.

Halliday says: “Thanks, Percival. Thanks for playing my game.” This might be a hint that now that the Oasis’ ostensible purpose/game has been “solved,” what’s left of Halliday’s consciousness can finally fade from the Oasis’ interface, and he can die “for real.”
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