Yeah, it's not coming out til next March and yeah it's only a teaser trailer, but...wow...

Ready Player One

The book was unrelentingly awful.

The movie might work better just because it can present us with ridiculous visual spectacle that the book couldn't, but I don't really have my hopes up for it overall.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>The book was unrelentingly awesome.

FTFY. :)

>>The book was unrelentingly awesome shit that hoped to use the power of nostalgia alone to sell a terrrrrible book to people without actually wanting to understand why we liked those properties in the first place.

FTFY, Rat.

--
-Pasha (We'll ignore the casual racism and insulting levels of deus ex machina to get what's his face out of every problem he encounters.)
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

>>>The book was unrelentingly awesome shit that hoped to use the power of nostalgia alone to sell a terrrrrible book to people without actually wanting to understand why we liked those properties in the first place.
>
>FTFY, Rat.

Really? Are we really gonna do this, y'all?

--G.
don't look at me, I haven't read it
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Really? Are we really gonna do this, y'all?

I like to feel that the denizens of this board have STANDARDS when it comes to our blatant 80s nerd nostalgia self insert massive crossover fanfic.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

You would be incorrect. The only thing comparable to my devouring and enjoyment of the book would be a quarter of beef dropped into the cage where they keep the starving tigers.

The author totally declines to talk about hip-hop in Ready Player One. There is not even the slightest mention. In this book that seeks to be the ultimate deep dive into '80s nostalgia.

To me, that speaks volumes. I don't know whether or not it will to you.

---

"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

>To me, that speaks volumes. I don't know whether or not it will to
>you.

Glam metal got no mention either and it was without question the biggest thing in popular music in the 1980s. So what? An author not writing what you want to read implies nothing. The volumes you hear is entirely on you.

>The book was unrelentingly awful.
>

Merc, I'd like your opinion: How much of this review is accurate, and how much of it is just savaging the New Hotness because it's the New Hotness?

https://www.heypoorplayer.com/2017/07/28/second-opinion-ready-player-one-worst-thing-nerd-culture-ever-produced/

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

Makes sense to me. One of the revelations (less so to some people, probably) of the last few years is that a lot of "nerd culture" is actually fucking awful.
(I don't mean the source media, I mean the collective fandom itself.)

Ok, I'd watch that just because Iron Giant. The rest? Icing on the cake(sure, trailer, so probably wouldn't be BORING, but...). And with no previous knowledge of the book, I can go into the thing with a clean slate and just enjoy, or not, a movie.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

>Ok, I'd watch that just because Iron Giant. The rest? Icing on the
>cake(sure, trailer, so probably wouldn't be BORING, but...). And with
>no previous knowledge of the book, I can go into the thing with a
>clean slate and just enjoy, or not, a movie.

Same, haven't read the book, so I'm going into this semi-blind (looked up the book after seeing the trailer). I have faith in Speilberg to produce something that is entertaining, even if that means deviating from the source material.

I'm not especially impressed with it so far.

The story might be solid (haven't read the book), but the action scenes are virtually impossible to follow. In my experience, the story has to be nearly perfect if the action scenes are that choppy.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

> In my experience, the
>story has to be nearly perfect if the action scenes are that choppy.

It sounds like someone here isn't a fan of the cinematic genius of Michael Bay's Transformers movies.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>> In my experience, the
>>story has to be nearly perfect if the action scenes are that choppy.
>
>It sounds like someone here isn't a fan of the cinematic genius of
>Michael Bay's Transformers movies.

My personal benchmark for fight scenes jump-cut to within an inch of their lives to cover up the extent to which the choreography a/o vfx might have been lacking is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>
>It sounds like someone here isn't a fan of the cinematic genius of
>Michael Bay's Transformers movies.
>

Well, I saw one of them.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>Well, I saw one of them.
>

Then you've seen them all.

As for the book, Cor keeps trying to get me to read it (he's a fan) but every time I try, I get bored about a quarter of the way through and go do something else.

We'll probably see the movie, tho, if I can get a pizza out of it. :)

I did end up seeing the movie (wth Cor and his kid... yes, there's a 2nd generation to the Otaku Group ;) ). No pizza, tho. :D

The movie was decent. Not great, just decent. For all the hype, the cameos & easter eggs aren't really that big a deal. "Blink and you'll miss it" is about right.

For me, the most annoying part of the film is how inconsistent the treatment of the VR motion tracking was. It only seemed to be an issue when the plot needed it to be.

I also found myself thinking of this line from "Arena":

        For his part, Corwin was trying not to laugh at his opponent.
He knew that the Mobile Fighters' units were all equipped with the
Mobile Trace control system, which Corwin regarded as the stupidest
way of controlling a giant robot yet invented, for both practical and
aesthetic reasons.  The practical reason was that he regarded any
control system which left the pilot unsecured, to rattle around in the
cockpit like a hex nut in a coffee can, as stupid.
        The aesthetic reason was that MT-equipped machines went
through the -goofiest- poses as the data film was forcibly stretched
over the pilot's body by the control ring.

>It sounds like someone here isn't a fan of the cinematic genius of
>Michael Bay's Transformers movies.

I'm sorry, but that sentence fails it's grammatical checksum. It's not possible to use those words together the way you have used them.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

>>It sounds like someone here isn't a fan of the cinematic genius of
>>Michael Bay's Transformers movies.
>
>I'm sorry, but that sentence fails it's grammatical checksum. It's
>not possible to use those words together the way you have used them.
>

*mop* *mop* *mop*

Watch where you step, Michael; somebody dripped sarcasm all over the place.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

To be fair here, this is a teaser trailer, and those are usually cut to bits.

LAST EDITED ON Jul-26-17 AT 02:41 PM (EDT) by pjmoyer (moderator)
 
There's something of a dark art to constructing teaser trailers and getting the reaction you want from them. It's a weird combination of cinematography, social engineering, and marketing.

What I always like is when you can tell a marketing team decides at some point "oh dang, this isn't doing what we want it to do, we'd better change that" midstream. The best current example of this is Geostorm, what looks like a thoroughly average in the "global disaster" genre of B-movies coming out this fall. The first set of teasers were these weirdly elegiac things of massive weather disasters befalling an increasingly messed-up planet set to very slow music.

And then someone clearly decided "fuck, people have no idea what our movie is about except that it involves crazy weather. Shit. Maybe we should cut a trailer that actually explains the plot." So they cut trailers that were a lot more conventional.

-Merc
Keep Rat

>There's something of a dark art to constructing teaser trailers and
>getting the reaction you want from them. It's a weird combination of
>cinematography, social engineering, and marketing.

And in this case I think they are aiming for "frame by frame analysis to find every reference and allusion we can pack into a few minutes of footage". That's the impression I got from watching it. It fits the general theme of the story.

>To be fair here, this is a teaser trailer, and those are usually cut
>to bits.

True enough - but there's a few action scenes that appear to be a single slice rather than bits and pieces of the scene, and they're still not sufficiently together.

I don't think much of most action scenes these days - it's like they haven't bothered studying the masters of fighting scenes to see what works and why - but there's bad and worse out there, and this is, in my opinion, leaning towards worse.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

It's funny. Sometimes, with fanservice (of which I should be, in theory, the target audience), I hit a certain point (sometimes pretty early on) when I'm not actually enjoying it, not being serviced... where it just feels like I'm being pandered to, by someone trying too hard (to sell me something, maybe?). It feels fake.

And for some reason, RP1 has always struck me that way. *shrug*

I can swear that I have read somewhere, and I could have sworn that it was here, that the main character in the BOOK is rather notably different from the one in the FILM...in that he is, well, obese and not caucasian. Did my brain invent that, or...? Asking those that have read it, which I still haven't.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

I don't know about the nonwhite, but he's overweight and has acne and stuff.

They changed a lot of stuff about the book. Like, a LOT. From what I can tell, for the MASSIVE better.

>I don't know about the nonwhite, but he's overweight and has acne and
>stuff.
>
>They changed a lot of stuff about the book. Like, a LOT. From what I
>can tell, for the MASSIVE better.

I saw it Monday, and I won't agree that the changes are necessarily "better," they do fit a film better than the original book would have. A lot of the pop culture references are "blink and you miss them"

Without spoiling, my favorite bits had to be the fight at Castle Doom and the Second Challenge.

I'd say it's worth a look.