Ready Player One: Unpacking the weird 80s obsessions of the Oasis

In READY PLAYER ONE, a weird thing about the Oasis is the preponderance of 80s-era pop culture. I can accept that apparently at some point, culture stagnated and so everyone's left with reheated reminders of the past, but it's weird that things are so heavily 80s and so heavily geek culture on top of that. Where are the musical theater nerds? The Shakespeare buffs? The Ren fair weirdos for that matter? I know we get a couple cameos that scrape the 90s and a bit before the 80s but it stands out that everything is all the "acceptably cool" (and as someone pointed out to me, "Male-coded") culture of the 80s.

Growing up, I got pretty into oldies, but because everything I learned came from oldies radio, not only was I mostly exposed to the hits - I didn't have any window into which hits came from "lame" bands back then. From my father's reaction when I put "Build Me Up Buttercup" on an oldies mix CD, I intuited this was NOT a cool song back in the day. The same thing also divorced The Monkees from their stigma as a novelty band ("Daydream Believer is a great song, shut up) and someone rescues The Dave Clark 5 from being seen as also-rans to the Beatles.

My point is, in 2045, people who didn't live through 80s culture should have an entirely different relationship with it. What if Wade rocked out to Tiffany because he liked the beat of "I Think We're Alone Now?" Maybe he thinks ISHTAR is an incredible comedy, or that ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS represents Mel Brooks at his best. Or hell, what if he thinks THE GOONIES is a fucking annoying movie to watch because of all the screaming kids? The best material will always endure, but other stuff is bound to slip through the cracks and be reevaluated too. I might have found it easier to see so much geek culture thrive in this future if it had been portrayed in a way that felt distinctly different from the nostalgic eyes of someone who grew up in the 80s.

I brought this point up on Twitter and a dozen or so people explained to me that Halliday was obsessed with the 80s and so people became obsessed with 80s culture because they were convinced that was the key to winning the hunt in the Oasis, with the result being that 80s culture became the dominant culture. I think that's a really simplistic way to present a culture, the sort of thing that would only fly in the original STAR TREK, where cultural contamination would lead to an entire planet of 1930s mobsters. More relevantly, this is not how the movie presents things at all.

In fact, 80s culture turns out to not be the main way to thrive on the quest. Wade solves the first challenge by decoding a bit of Riddler-like wordplay from Halliday. Then Art3mis figures out the first step of the second riddle in a similar way, with the solution to the second task being accomplished more through a knowledge of Halliday's past than 80s film simulation they find themselves in.

The third task absolutely rests on 80s geek trivia, I'll give you that.

But in the world of the challenge, no one's beaten the first challenge after five years, so there's not a compelling pointer that would make people assume that engaging the 80s would provide any better solution than studying Halliday. There's some effort made to have the puzzle be about learning from Halliday's regrets and that's kind of neat even if only one (don't be too shy to kiss the girl) seems directly relevant to Wade's life.

Also, if I conceded the point of those who I cite the book, I'd retort by pointing out that the Oasis was already an obsession even before Halliday's scavenger hunt. People were addicted to it before 80s culture became the thing to study, and presumably that's because there were no limits to what one could do there. Given that, is it credible that people would cast aside those obsessions to take on a new one, especially if their goal is just to preserve the thing that fed their original obsessions?

I think the movie dodges a lot of this by showing us little of the real world and by focusing mostly on characters who might have adopted some 80s geekdom along the way. Still, I would have loved to have seen a slightly broader diversity within the oasis. Turns out that limitless imagination looks a lot like the Exhibit Hall of Comic-Con.

Just because the making of a film was unique or difficult, it doesn't make it great

I'm trying to imagine a conversation of this kind taking place in 1975:

"Oh man, Spielberg has GOT to get Best Director for Jaws! It's just amazing what he accomplished!"

-"Really? The movie is that good?"

"You have no idea how hard it was to make this movie. Ended up costing them TWICE their original budget. The mechanical shark barely worked. There were days where they only got a few usuable shots, if any. I read it was supposed to be 55 days of shooting. They went like a hundred days over that. At one point, an entire boat sank and everyone almost drowned! Shooting on water, man.... it's a bitch."

-"...but how's the movie?"

Jaws is a fantastic movie. It's one of my favorite movies and it's also one of the most rewatchable films I've ever seen. If I run across it on cable, I will stop and watch the rest of it from that point forward. After 30-some viewings, Robert Shaw's tale of the U.S.S. Indianapolis is just as spell-binding as the first. Some of the dialogue still makes me laugh no matter how many times I hear it, and the performances and Spielberg's staging of them usually yields new appreciations with each viewing.

This is a movie that would be impressive on its own merits even if it had wrapped on schedule and on budget. (Yes, I'm aware that one bit of serendipity provided by the production troubles was that it forced Spielberg to be more "Hitchcockian" in how he featured the shark. Let's not go on that tangent.) If I was going to tell someone to watch Jaws, the production issues probably would not even factor into my sales pitch.

As of this writing, I have not seen THE REVENANT. From the time I saw the first trailer, it simply didn't look like a film that would appeal to me. From that point forward, anything I heard about the film was focused solely on how difficult the film was to make and how the director ran roughshod over his crew, subjecting them and his actors to extreme conditions.  This Yahoo News article is a good example of that press. It's an interview with star Leonardo DiCaprio and it's focused SOLELY on the behind-the-scenes factors. He's not asked one question about his character or the story. Instead, Leo tells us about the freezing cold and the constant risk of hypothermia.

I've held off on seeing the film because I wanted to wait for a point when watching it didn't feel like homework, when it wasn't an "eat your vegetables" experience. And yet, it remains a story I have no itch to see because all I know about the narrative is what was shown in the trailer. The fact I've heard nothing about narrative or the characters makes me wonder if the film has anything to offer me. (Two examples where such endorsement DID land a film on my radar were Brooklyn and The Stanford Prison Experiment, and to a lesser extant, The Gift.)

With buzz around the films that debuted at the latest Sundance Film Festival, I couldn't help but think back to three years ago when all the chatter out of Park City was about Escape From Tomorrow. The film became a must-see as word spread of its unique production - shot covertly at the Disney Parks, with the actors and film crew posing as tourists. The combination of the sheer balls involved to mount that production and the likely legal apocalypse that awaited the filmmakers made this a daring film that cinephiles felt they had to see.

And then they did.

EOT was no Jaws, I can tell you that. The performances were... inconsistent. I don't think the script ever quite finds its groove and there's an uncomfortable subplot about the family patriarch lusting after some 14 year-old tourists. I can't bring myself to call it a "bad" film, but man is it one you're not likely to feel the urge to revisit. The story it tells cannot prevail over the story of its making.

I recall the disappointment of another then-daring film, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was one of the first films shot entirely on blue and green screen soundstages, with the sets and backgrounds added via CGI later. With a structure influenced by the old serials of the 40s, and production design descended from sci-fi of that era (and to my eye, the Fleischer Superman cartoons). It was a first-time director who got a shot at making a film in a revolutionary way.

Try watching it now, over a decade later. Stripped of the novelty it achieved by being the first of its kind, the CGI looks less impressive, the pacing drags and... well, there's no way around it... Jude Law just doesn't have the kind of presence needed for what should be an adventurer. I'll concede that 40 years shows a few seams in the mechanical shark, but the entire film is so well-built that you don't care. Sky Captain, by contrast, simply evaporates from your mind soon after you've seen it.

No matter how much new ground you break technologically, no matter how much an ordeal your production was, there will eventually come a time when your film will stand on nothing more than its story. 3D novelties become common place, visual effects developments go from eye-popping money shots to appearing in every third soda commercial, and all of these trappings eventually mean nothing.

Keep that in mind when you write. No matter how you or the director think you will blow mind by shooting a film entirely in one take, or by doing everything motion capture, in the final analysis, none of that shit matters beyond how it informs the story.

I'd aim this especially at anyone directing their own script or short film - don't fall in love with all your bells and whistles. Eventually no one's gonna give a shit HOW you did it and they're just going to want to be entertained. Do you want a participation trophy, or do you want to make a film that will touch people 40 years later?

JURASSIC WORLD: After careful consideration, I've decided NOT to endorse your park.

Jurassic World made $204.6 million at the domestic box office this weekend and $511.8 million worldwide, which means that anything I have to say in a review is mostly meaningless. It appears that if you had any interest in the film, you saw it this weekend.

My expectations were all over the place with this film. The first trailer didn't inspire much confidence with its in-progress CGI and the promise of a relatively simple story about a genetically-engineered dinosaur on the loose. That seemed to set the tone for the first several months of anticipation, so much that when early reviews came back, it was a surprise so many people were enthusiastic about it. That stoked my hope that this could actually be pretty good.

Jurassic Park is probably one of my most-rewatched films. It's certainly a favorite from my childhood and one that still holds up strong for me even after some 20 or 30 viewings. It's also one that - like Jaws - I've always believed didn't lend itself well to franchising. Could there really be a second story with those characters that was as compelling as the first? The Lost World and Jurassic Park III seemed to answer "no" to that question, even if you grade on the curve of "there's no way this can match the original, but can we at least have fun here?"

No movie is flawless, but there's always a distinction between weak elements that detract from a film, and weak elements that end up neutral in the final analysis. I can overlook a few pimples if other parts of the picture are stellar. For that matter, if something is totally out there, but still WORKS, we don't need to hold the film accountable.

I'm thinking here of how the ending of Jaws - with Brody blowing up the shark - is completely implausible, but it somehow feels both earned and RIGHT. When Jaws author Peter Benchley complained about the climax, Spielberg supposedly told him, "If I've got them in the palm of my hand for two hours, I can do anything in the last five minutes."  He's totally right, but that formula requires a flawless build-up.

Jurassic World does not have a flawless build-up. There are some moments early on that I really liked that end up juxtaposed with some moments that really didn't work for me. I'm glad that this is the first movie to return to the original island. I never liked the Lost World retcon of "Site B." It's an addition to the backstory that mostly came about because in Michael Crichton's original novel, the island is bombed to all hell at the end. Thus, when it came time for him to write a sequel novel, he had to invent this backstory, despite the fact that Spielberg left the island intact in the first film.

And then weirdly, Jurassic Park III returns to the island from the second film. Right from the start, Jurassic World has me on board just by going to the real island and showing us Hammond's vision fulfilled. Had this story been done as the first sequel, it probably would have felt cheap to go back to the park just three years later as chaos breaks out. 22 years later, and after two less engaging voyages, we can finally see an operational Jurassic World. As a core concept, this isn't bad.

There are also a few "subtle" plot points about how twenty years ago, audiences were impressed by the mere achievement of bringing dinosaurs back, but now they're so jaded by those achievements that it requires bigger and bigger thrills to keep attendance up. It's a pretty unsubtle comment on the state of blockbuster filmmaking, particularly how the CGI of Jurassic Park led us down a path where it's really hard to impress audiences with any kind of VFX since the once-impossible is now routine. The subtext is a little too on-the-nose to be as clever as it seems to think it is, but I'm glad it's included.

The plot ends up being pretty straight-forward. To up the "wow" factor, the park owners have commissioned a genetically-spliced hybrid - a new species of dinosaur. Naturally it's part T-Rex and part... other dinosaurs which the scientists refuse to disclose. Turns out this "Indominus Rex" can camouflage, control its body temperature (so it can evade heat detection) and is smart enough to mastermind a trap that lets it break out of containment.

The human characters this time include Chris Pratt as a raptor trainer who's managed to be seen as the alpha of that pack; the park operations manager, played by Bryce Dallas Howard; and Howard's two teenage nephews. You can imagine how this goes: the stiff corporate priss played by Howard clashes with Pratt's more rugged manliness, in what feels like an homage to whatever Romancing the Stone was homaging. There's probably a version of this that could work, but due to some weak writing (and possibly acting) with regard to Howard's character, it doesn't work. That's not a dealbreaker, though.

The best I can say about the two teen boys is that they aren't the worst kids in the franchise. Ian Malcolm's gymnast daughter from The Lost World and Plot Device Eric from the third film. The older kid's a pretty unsympathetic jerk, but maybe the attitude comes from him realizing he's stuck in a pretty pointless subplot about his parents getting divorced.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the divorce subplot is supposed to add to anything at all. I suppose we're missing some scenes that gave it some resonance, but it feels like it'd be pretty easy to cut out all the references to divorce entirely. To put it another way, if they cut out other scenes to minimize that plot, why not go all the way and take it out entirely? But again, this isn't a dealbreaker, as awkwardly handled as it is.

Less inoffensive is the subplot about InGen scheming to turn dinosaurs into soldiers. You're never gonna have the military treated with any subtlety in a sci-fi movie like this (see: AVATAR), but the depection here barely tries to give nuance to the position. It doesn't help that the two advocates are Vincent D'Onofrio as InGen security head and B.D. Wong returning as Dr. Henry Wu. Neither one is cast in a light that seems anything other than shady and slimy. There's probably a better version of this film where they seem to have a legitimate stance, but Jurassic World makes sure we know from the get-go, these are the Bad Guys, capital B, capital G.

But still, we're not in dealbreaker territory. Even as we entered into the final act, I remember thinking, "It's no Spielberg, but I'm having fun despite the bumps."

There's one scene about midway through the film that really gave me hope. The I-Rex has been tearing through other habitats. Pratt and Howard's characters come upon a dying brachiosaur. It's one of the rare moments of the film that treats these creatures as empathetic animals rather than monsters or predators. This beast wasn't hurting anyone. It subsists entirely on plants, and now it lies wounded and dying in terror, unable to understand the inhumanity of it all. Pratt's character gently touches it, doing what he can to stave off the beast's terror in its final seconds.

For a moment, Howard's character is forced to see her exhibitions as something more than some science project that's there to draw crowds. An innocent creature dies in pain because of something she's responsible for. It's a death more affecting than any of the human deaths in this film.

Regrettably, that moment proved to be more the execption than the rule. The problem is the climax, which has the characters throw out all common sense just to get to a crowd-pleasing twist cribbed from the original. Spoilers ahead.

Security decides to unleash the raptors on the I-Rex. It's a spectacularly bad idea because the I-Rex turns out to be part-raptor. That makes him the new alpha, and within seconds, the raptors turn on the humans to do their new leader's bidding. It's all very How to Train Your Dragon 2.

Pratt, Howard and the two kids are chased into the visitor's center, where the raptors and the I-Rex both seem poised to close in on them. Howard gets an idea and orders the park to open up a specific paddock. She's there to greet the dinosaur inside when it's released.

It's a T-Rex, and not just any T-Rex, but the same T-Rex from the first one. Much like Ian Malcolm, she uses a flare to lead it back to the others, somehow running faster (in heels, I believe) than a beast once clocked at 32 miles per hour. It's brilliant, right? Use the T-Rex to stop the I-Rex.

Uh, wait. Didn't we just go through a whole scene about how dinosaurs yield to the alphas of their species? And now we're sending a T-Rex after an alpha that's part T-Rex? That seems risky, right?

Also, once you have the massive Dino-Battle 2015, why aren't you getting the hell out of there? These guys stick around to watch the fight like they have money on it!

I like dinosaurs fighting as much as the next guy. I just wish the film found a better way to get there.

Also, having watched Jurassic Park the night before, I gained a new appreciation for how deftly Spielberg shifted tone from comedy to tension. He gets laughs right before a scare that avoid stepping on the scare and somehow enhance it. Seconds before the lawyer is eaten on the toilet, there's a tension-releasing joke about how, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta go."

Jurassic World has a really nasty prolonged kill where Howard's assistant is snatched up by pterodactyls, taken high, dropped, snatched by another one, tossed back and forth before being dropped in the water, where at least two or three dinos make a meal of her at once. It's an ugly death, particularly for a side character who we've not seen do anything terrible. Usually a film will give that kind of painful end to someone the audience hates. It works as a cathartic moment. I wouldn't have been shocked for D'Onofrio's character or Dr. Wu to die that way, but it's jarring to see the movie take a perverse sort of glee in how this innocent side character is toyed with before a gruesome end.

Another tonal misfire is a scene between Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus's technician characters as they are told to evacuate. Johnson says he's staying behind. The music swells, and he moves in for a kiss goodbye, but the spell is broken when she's all "Whoa! What's going on here!" The swelling music literally stops. I'm shocked we didn't get a needle scratch on the soundtrack, to be honest. And then the scene gets more awkward. It feels like they wanted to do a Joss Whedon-like subversion of a trope with some jokey humor, but didn't stick the landing. It's a weird place to stop the movie and suddenly decide to toss in some self-aware moments.

I don't know if those two beats count as self-indulgent, but they both felt out of place.

I definitely found entertainment in the film. It's the best of the three sequels and its high points outdo the high parts of the previous two films. Honestly, if you try not to focus too much on the InGen silliness, you can probably get through 2/3 of the film without many serious issues. It's the utter silliness of the ending that kills all goodwill and makes it impossible to give the InGen stuff a pass.

Still, I can see how some people walked out of there feeling like they got their money's worth, even as I understand people walking out really, really hating this film. Chris Pratt is a lot of fun, and if they'd fixed Bryce Dallas Howard's character, maybe this thing would have worked enough to make that ending more satisfying.

Bitter embarrasses himself begging Steven Spielberg for a job via YouTube

It's been a while since we had a new video on this site, and what better way to kick things off with a fad that's sweeping the nation - asking celebrities for favors over the internet.  It's hiring season in Hollywood, particularly with regard to television and the Bitter Puppet is aggressively looking for a new job, which lead to.... this...


In all seriousness, I am ready to move on from this business of script reading, folks.  I'm hoping that this is the year I can transition into being a writer's assistant, for as we've discussed a number of times, that's an effective stepping stone on the way towards writing for TV.  Hell, I'm not too proud to go in for a writers' PA gig either.

I'm aware that these gigs are competitive and that the slots that don't go to people the writers have worked with before are quickly reserved for studio or network-mandated favors.  But I'm also a firm believer in the fact that there's always a way in through the door - or a way to make your own door.

So to anyone out there who might be hiring for such a position, I hope to meet with you soon.  Don't worry - I have plenty of references.  (You'd be surprised how many people are willing to vouch for a puppet!)  Feel free to drop me a line at zuulthereader@gmail.com with any leads.  And best of luck to everyone who's waiting to hear about the fate of their pilot!

And for those of you who enjoy these videos, a new stretch of episodes kicks off next week!

Friday Free-For-All: Spielberg watches the 1976 Oscar nominations

A friend of mine sent me this clip this week.  Supposedly, he thinks that Spielberg's mannerisms remind him of me.  I don't know if I totally see it, but I'll take it.

My parents totally used to have a chair just like the ones Steven is sitting in.



Rather interesting to see how confidant he must have been in order to invite the TV crews there.  I also have to salute his blunt candor.  If you've already shown the hubris of letting the crew film it, you might as well go all the way.  Today, I imagine most people would be more political in their reaction.  This might come as a shock, but I like people unafraid to tell it how it is.