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Post by 🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀 on Apr 3, 2018 14:11:01 GMT -5
Please don't. It's rambling, terribly written and struggles to make any cogent argument. A reviewer should collect his thoughts before setting them to paper, or if not, organize them into something coherent and readable in the second draft. He does his thinking on paper and leaves it as is for readers to put up with. Yeah, it's a bit of a mess, that one. Ultimately, everyone goes into a movie with a different context/background. And saying 'nerd culture is a dumpster fire' is about as broad and meaningless as saying 'sport fans suck'.
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Post by lurker on Apr 3, 2018 15:14:25 GMT -5
I've heard the movie has issues with condensing things, especially the relationship parts with Artemis.
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Post by GamerL on Apr 3, 2018 17:52:03 GMT -5
While we're on the topic of geek chic in general when did it really start and when did it start to end? I think you can trace the earliest rumblings to 2005 but I think it really exploded in 2008 with the release of The Dark Knight. And obviously the beginning of the end was 2014 with Gamergate. Personally I'd say it started around 1999, when The Phantom Menace came out. Star Wars was definitely a geeky thing on the 90s, but the start of the prequel trilogy was a reminder that, hey, these are INCREDIBLY popular blockbuster movies that pretty much everyone has seen, not just AV club kids or whatever. It escalated with Lords of the Rings, since big budget fantasy was a huge gamble back then, continued with Harry Potter, which spawned its own YA boom (Hunger Games, Twilight) which is only now subsiding. Around that time you also had things like the manga boom and anime like Dragon Ball Z becoming much more popular. And then the PlayStation 2 getting into homes because it was also basically a cheap DVD player, so video games became more normalized. This also dovetails with the rise of the internet. I'd say the "fall" of it started with social media, when we began getting forced out of our bubbles and realize "oh some of us are really awful". But that doesn't mean it's "over" or anything, since you have people that grew up in the 80s and are taking that experience and putting in their own shows or music or video games or whatever. It didn't happen overnight and 1999 -2005 is definitely the primordial soup for geek chic, you are correct that all of those things were influences, especially the Lord of The Rings, that was a BIG influence, a huge blockbuster franchise based on high fantasy? That was definitely unprecedented. But what I'm talking about is when the scales tipped to where nerd culture was more popular than "mainstream" culture and when I say mainstream I mean what it was in the early 00s, think hedonistic spring breakers/24 hour party people, Xtreme sports, Sobe energy drink, Axe Body Spray, rap, hip hop, Eminem, P Diddy, 50 Cent, ya know, what advertisers would present as the baseline for "cool" But a funny thing happened along the way and suddenly nerd culture became more popular than mainstream culture, it became the new mainstream culture, going to Comic Con was cooler than going to a frat party. And I don't think that really solidified until 2008, a comic book movie was nominated for best picture (and very easily could have won), the brainy Obama was on his way to the White House as opposed to a brush clearing shitkicker, more and more people were getting smart phones and pretty much everyone was online by that point. But I first noticed geek chic as an aesthetic with the launch of Attack of The Show on G4 in 2005, so I would say 2005 is when the scales started to tip in nerd culture favor and by 2008 it was a done deal.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 19, 2018 11:23:26 GMT -5
Since we went on a road trip a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I ended up listening to the "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" podcast from some of the Rifftrax guys. It's an amusing perspective, since they clearly say at the beginning "We are only half aware of most of the media being referenced and don't really care about them". As I mentioned earlier in the thread, they tend to take things seriously that were meant to be jokes (like binge watching the entirety of Family Ties), but at the same time it really does home in on how badly written (or, perhaps more appropriately, poorly edited) much of the book is. One major thing I never though of: an MMO with (almost) permadeath would never, ever take off, regardless of how realistic it was. It's necessary for some kind of drama, but it makes no real world sense.
As a result of that, we ended up seeing the movie, which was...pretty okay? Much better than I expected anyway. Though everyone understood they'd need to change a lot due to licensing, it really just takes the initial concept, the characters, and the major plot beats, and basically does something mostly different. In the process, they cut out most of the worst world building and character stuff, which makes it less cringey, but also feels like it's missing something, particularly with the characters. It's a fairly long movie (2 hr 20 mins) and is still has a lot of exposition but it feels like some of the time could've been better used for something else. The CG is pretty decent except for the main character designs, which are dreadful. The action scenes were excellent too. Anyway, there are still some silly conversations and if you're the type that goes "they made a reference to something else!" and get real mad about it, then this isn't going to change your mind since it's still the core concept, but it really does fix most of the major issues with the book.
The 372 pages podcast continued with Armada, which we checked out the local library and my wife and I are taking turns reading.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Apr 19, 2018 22:50:41 GMT -5
Yea I liked the movie way more than the book. (And I didn't hate the book as much as a lot of people here did)
I enjoyed Armada in some ways more than RPO (though its excuse for the main character being a box of 80's references is even weaker).
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Post by kaoru on Apr 28, 2018 13:32:42 GMT -5
Watched it just now. The movie atleast ist fine. Hella cliched and dumb, but a colourful and fun romp for the most part. With the possibility to be a bit boring when watched not in this environment but alone on the small screen. At least it adresses, that living only in a virtual world isn't really a good thing, with both porcupine haired girl and maker of Oasis calling out the main character on it.
Of course one shouldn't think too much about this movie being about rescuing your favorite VR funland from the big evil megacorp that wants to suck the fun out of it to maximize the money they can make with it (putting aside that Oasis already has to be rather profitable or the servers would have been taken down) - all the while every reference in this movie is only there because your favorite IPs sold out, and every IP that is not there is probably missing because someone decided the price tag on it is too steep for the appeal they'd add. Street Fighter seems to be especially cheap in a bundle, characters from there are in almost any group shot of the movie.
At one point it gets you anyways. For the most part I was like "oh, that's this character... cute I guess", but when Mechagodzilla showed up and the theme started playing, something deep inside me jumped a little.
Pretty unrealistic tho that not every second player character was a big titted anime girl or a loli with ahegao face.
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Post by Owlman on May 3, 2018 6:15:24 GMT -5
Since we went on a road trip a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I ended up listening to the "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" podcast from some of the Rifftrax guys. It's an amusing perspective, since they clearly say at the beginning "We are only half aware of most of the media being referenced and don't really care about them". As I mentioned earlier in the thread, they tend to take things seriously that were meant to be jokes (like binge watching the entirety of Family Ties), but at the same time it really does home in on how badly written (or, perhaps more appropriately, poorly edited) much of the book is. One major thing I never though of: an MMO with (almost) permadeath would never, ever take off, regardless of how realistic it was. It's necessary for some kind of drama, but it makes no real world sense. It's worth noting that not all areas are PvP in Oasis. There are virtual schools, meeting places for businesspeople etc. The night club being a PvP zone is more of an exception. The whole Internet being a single MMO is still rather debatable, but if most people just use it for shop in virtual malls and do Wii sports in non-PvP zones, I can get behind it.
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Post by steven on May 20, 2018 11:05:37 GMT -5
I couldn’t finish it. I think I had 30 minutes left but after MechaGodzilla (my main reason to watch), I couldn’t be arsed to finish it. It just felt too artificial and lifeless to me. I love video games and such but this movie did nothing but bore me. Oh well.
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Post by jorpho on May 27, 2018 23:41:15 GMT -5
I got my ticket at the budget theatre today. It is indeed not at all infuriatingly, viscerally stupid. I suppose in a movie it's just that much easier to accept a baffling leap of logic when it's not buried in a heap of ham-fisted exposition. Many of the fancy pop-culture references might as well not be there at all, considering how briefly they appear. Probably my biggest complaint is that it was kind of hard to understand what Aich's orc was saying, but he doesn't have too many lines. And the ending could have used a little trimming. Makes me wonder how much was left on the cutting-room floor – certainly, I reckon Cline must not have gotten a lot of things the way he wanted them. It kind of leaves me feeling a little hopeful, but at this point he probably has enough clout that he could turn in the literary equivalent of a steaming pile of poo for Ready Player Two.
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