Ready Player One 2018 Film

As with my last movie review I stated that I'd do only one more review for 2018 and here it is. Ready Player One, adapted from the novel that unites MRA and SJW in mutual hate. No I will not review Infinity War, fuck that.

I went to the theater I usually don't go to because it's more expensive and boy do they put their upcharge where their mouth is. I got to sit in a leather recliner with buttons to adjust it and it was lovely.

This movie smoothed over a lot of problems I talked about here. It changes and pair downs the challenges. That's a problem with adapting novels though, they always hat to cut an consolidate and that is why I think movies should stick to adapting short stories and adding to them and leave the novels to mini-series that can flesh out what is dropped in movies. I'd have vastly preferred the Harry Potter series as a BBC or Grenada series, that lasted seven seasons instead of the Hollywood eight films (most inconsistent in stage design, direction and acting choices) that cut so much out and butchered the fourth book badly.

The challenges here are a race, a Shining reenactment and Adventure. The racing challenge was stupid and comes off as 90's/00's nostalgia, cannot remember any 80's racing games, though I could be mistaken. I hate the movie Shining, so I didn't enjoy that, or the elevator of blood because I'm having blood problems as we speak, but I like that we got some development with AECH. I liked that Art3mis solved it when she found the ballroom of zombies dancing to Midnight, The Stars and You (which is in The Shining) which is the closest I had to a nostalgic cry because I was introduced to it outside of Shining's context and was thus not ruined for me like it was for everybody else. I feel that it's the same as people being introduced to Singing In The Rain in Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick sure knows how to ruin good things. As for Adventure it was in the novel as a gate, but used here as the last challenge worked. Unlike the novel, there's no completing gates. Just the challenges to win the keys.

Other nitpicks I have about the movie are The Rebellion (yawn...), everybody being in the same town (movie coincidences) and drones that look like they haven't changed much in thirty years.

I didn't mind the changes in what the character's avatars looked, because more people ought to do crazy stuff with their online personas instead of, me: but skinny, me: but without birthmark, etc. They gave Art3mis the birthmark, but like Wade they didn't make her fat, so win/lose. AECH gets to be a black lesbian played by a black lesbian. They de-aged Sho to eleven years old which is such a Spielberg move, but neither are played by actor's of Japanese descent. Their avatars Wade: Cartoon-like with exaggerated features, white and blue hair, Art3mis: A pink bird humanoid, AECH: A cyborg orc, Daito's a Samurai and Sho's a Ninja. They expanded I-Roc's role to bounty hunter working for IOI. He says some of the funniest lines. At one point he says: "There's three things in the world I hate, Steampunk, Pirates and Tabbouli, like why do they even..." As my brother likes steampunk, my sister likes pirates and my pop likes Tabbouli, I felt like he was calling out my family there and laughed.

They have the club scene in the novel in the movie with changes. Of course they play Blue Monday and Stayin' Alive because you can license those songs easily unlike Cyndi Lauper, or Billy Idol apparently. At one point Wade gets a selfie with a cat-furry who's so cute, but sexed up in wrong way, but she turns out to be a turncoat for IOI. I know it was in the novel, but I fucking hate Travolta mode. I swear if I ever got the power to make a Hollywood film, no Saturday Night Fever references.

One other thing I'd like to mention is the lack of licensed Rush songs.

Ready Player One (Novel) And It's Controversy

I want to get out of the way that I'm writing this  whatever it is (not a real review), without the context of the film adaptation. I'll get to that review later. If I had reviewed this book back when I first read it I wouldn't have had to devote paragraphs upon paragraphs of the representation problem. I'd have just said, here are the things that rubbed me the wrong way. The end. Jolly good read.

And it is, if you don't have a knee-jerk reaction to nostalgia. It's funny that my brother who turned me on to this book, me, another friend my brother turned on are not 80's kids really. We're 90's kids. We still enjoyed it anyway. Everybody who hates this book hates pandering Nostalgia. They hate successful geeks who made it and get to shove their love and passions down people's throats. I want to say that I don't have Nostalgia. My childhood is one dark pit and a lot of things I liked are ruined by the darkness going on in those times. I like media of many era's with bias for the 20th Century, most of it made before I was born, so I can't have Nostalgia, I just figure I stumbled on some treasure I can appreciate other's can leave behind as they age out. Cline could have made every reference and Easter Egg about the 1930's and I'd have had more of emotional resonance than I do with 80's, that I enjoyed, or discarded after the fact from it's time.

These people also hate Kevin Smith and his type of geek humor. I don't, even though he's said and had character's say shit that piss me off. Mallrats and the fucking often parroted Superman/Wonder Woman breeding shitfest, or Chasing Amy's Archie's the bitch, Jughead's the butch bullshit. The slashing isn't bullshit, it's the assumptions of putting them in a stereotypical dynamic and undermining Jughead's aromantic personality and function. This isn't an indictment of Smith though, it's a Cline review, and I will say one last comparison that when I would read Parzival and AECH, I read them as a Dante and Randall dynamic from Clerks.

I have read the book years ago, and I've met Ernest Cline himself. I didn't ask too much questions because I didn't want to pester him and make an ass of myself. You see acting like a warrior for better representation just gave me a kiss off and hostility in my days of dealing with jerks like Ethan Van Sciver. So there's a time to be civil. I could have said make better female characters, research people with different backgrounds and have them proof-read your work, but it was a brief meet and greet and I figure I take the picture of my brother and him standing by the Delorean and be done. Could I have made a difference in the world of shutting down old, entitled, geeks? No probably not. The thing I learn about any discourse is that the person on the other side is going to dig their heels in deeper into their thought process. Did we not learn this with the election two years ago? I think perhaps had I not been on the go, as one aspiring writer (who am I kidding) and a successful writer, perhaps I could have talked to him and he would have listened to what I had to say on representation, even if I'm not the right person to discuss race matters and gender. I'd like to think Ernest Cline is a sensible guy who could learn. That's just faith, I guess.

The book has some problems, but none that I would scream as blatant J.K. Rowling trash, but still coming from an older singular world view. This is probably why the future shouldn't be written by white male Generation X writers. However, whatever we're called now, are currently being outmoded by Generation Z as we speak and our values have turned out to be racist and archaic as our parents, or worse even because they still had the Holocaust etched in their minds. Our generation studied it and either got gunned down by cops if black, decided to be nazi's if white, or got worn out by the constant undermining of each other that fed into the hatred older people have of twenty year olds. Or so the generation theory goes. I'm not convinced it plays out quite like that. The thing is that when this whole gun legislation blows over and it's business as usual, I'm not convinced the white side of Gen Z isn't any less racist then we have been and if equality becomes more norm it's because white people will have aged and bred out.

With that in mind, I get the arguments, did Wade have to be white, or male? No probably not. I suppose no protagonist never need be both ever again, but here we are still.

Other problems in the book, are just how stereotypical are Daito and Shoto? Daito, I think is Japanese American? Correct me if I'm wrong. How much does white American culture feed into how Japanese Otaku culture is nevermind... It's not up to me to decide what is offensive.

AECH turning out to be a black lesbian, a cop out to not actually write a black lesbian? or an appropriation of the trans-narrative for a non-trans character. Don't know. Lots of women pretended to be men on the internet and didn't turn out transmen afterall like me, so I don't know. The argument is that the future should be less homophobic and racist to allow AECH to be comfortable to choose an avatar that reflects who she is, escept with the way things are going, I just don't see the future as better on identity rights and writing it that way divorced of modern commentary could be glaring. Even if the population becomes less white in the future, I just don't think by 2044, the power won't rest in the hands of white people. They're still the older generation. Perhaps we'll see a change by 2100.

One thing that isn't mentioned a lot is Art3mis and if you're me and have watched Fanboys, screenplay by Ernest Cline, you sort of know he has one way of writing geek girls, AECH notwithsatnding. Sarcastic, spunky and geek out about anything that isn't Star Wars, or Star Trek, or any space stuff. Girls can like James Bond ironically, make period puns with their Halloween costumes. These girls in Art3mis's case have to love distaff products like She-Ra, Supergirl, and the female-led John Hughes movies. Basically girls can be geeks, but they stay in their lane of what's catered to them. I don't think Ernest Cline did this on purpose, he just didn't know other types of women? A lot of the older women geeks retired into obscurity and started families while men like him and Kevin Smith grow up to make a career out of being a geek. There's tons of girls who hold themselves to this girl-only, pink-only mentality. I've known those types, but I also know the types who appreciate traditionally male products and franchises. The reason being that girl stuff is for girl's only, but because there's less of it, girl's have to seek out boy, or neutral for all products if their mother allows them. So a girl might be able to relate to Luke Skywalker, or Batman, because they're human, but a male can't afford the same courtesy to Princess Leia, or Catwoman because they have Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewie, Obi-Wan, the villains. It took until the last season of Batman: TAS to introduce Batgirl after all and in three episodes until they revamped the show to be a team format. Before you had the brief appearances of Summer Gleason and Renee Montoya if you wanted non-villains to look up to.

Before Cline's time growing up in the 80's, the earliest Star Trek Con organizers in the 60's were women, the earliest Star Wars fanzines in the 70's were edited with columns and had submitted stories by women. I found this out by digging through fanlore wiki, looking through credits and citations and finding either downloadable scanned fanzines, or in most cases the library university information where this stuff is filed in boxes. Some of these women writing Star Wars fanfic did become authors, maybe not on blockbuster levels, but they have goodreads pages, book listing on Amazon and I've lowkey wanted to message them about their fanwork, but think that's kind of cruel because these women are in their 60's having written a body of work of origial work and I message them about that story in that fanzine they hoped long buried?

The last thing about the novel I don't want to talk about, but feel I have to: The masturbation controversy. The passage spread around on social media out of context with no further commentary than it's sexist. It probably is, because it comes from the mouth of a socially awkward problematic nerd (Halliday) who someone initially in a similar place (Wade) eventually sheds as he makes meaningful connections with other people. Don't forget that in the novel he buys himself a blow up doll and then disposes of it in shame because he realizes how pathetic he is. The thing is whether the question is whether men, specially nerdy men on the internet with no real life social skills are toxic and disgusting, the point they always tried to tell me when I judge these men, is that masturbation is a normal function and that I, a dysphoric transmale who is completely not sexual or partake in bodily functions, is the weird one. Yet I here plenty of discourse that trans people should get to use their genitals, asexual people totally masturbate as it's a biological function, not a sexual one, and thta I'm still the oddball one. So my question is when did everybody agree with me on the masturbation passage in the novel as being gross and that men shouldn't masturbate? Did I step in Bizarro world?