#6 LA 2017
It's Ready Player One week! Time is all garbled this week, as if someone put the flux capacitor through a blender or crossed some serious streams somewhere. Let's start at the beginning. Ready Player One is the only book I've read in the past 5 years, because I heard Steven Spielberg was making a movie out of it, and Steven Spielberg returning to pop culture is //important//. So I added a book summary for those of you who are curious about the source material, but not curious enough, and also the first book review of Weird Blog is a fact, aren't you so glad you signed up. As you'll find out, I believe the book is an abomination that hits you over the head with pop culture nerddom until you're begging for mercy, though maybe people who write movie blogs shouldn't be throwing stones. The movie, however, which came out a couple of weeks ago, is pure Spielberg joy and really worth a watch. So to mark the occasion of Spielberg's turn away from self-important historical dramas to actually important popcorn sci-fi, our weird movie of the week is his directorial debut, L.A. 2017, a 1970s TV show episode about a dystopian society 40 years in the future. Yes, that's right. In order to celebrate a movie that takes place in 2040, came out in 2018 and is all about about pop culture in the 1980s and 90s, by someone who is responsible for a lot of its references in the first place, we revisit a work created by the same person in 1971 and set in 2017. So while Ready Player One is Spielberg now pretending to be in the future looking towards his past, we focus on Spielberg in the past pretending to look towards a future that for us is now. Welcome to the Crazy Nostalgia Loop that is this week's blog. Our time troubles persist as we move on to my takes on Ready Player One the movie and Black Panther, as they mostly revolve around the look of the future in the contemporary science fiction. After that, we shine a little light on the latest trend of comic book trailers cut to classic rock songs, which is basically using 40-year-old music to promote retro-sci-fi that hasn't come out yet. And we close out the week with a sweet ode to Blade, which is nothing less than a new appreciation for an old friend. And if this wild time travel ride is already making you nauseous, let me tell you the same thing people keep telling me about VR: it's the future, baby, you're going to need a bigger puke bucket. hf!
The Name of the Game S03E16 *LA 2017* (1971)
Most people think Spielberg's debut was a little TV film called Duel (a sublime weird movie in its own right which you should definitely watch), while in fact his first solo foray into directorship, the one that got him noticed, was a 75-minute long episode of the TV show The Name of the Game, aired in January 1971. The show is actually an anthology series about a group of people who publish magazines for a living, but this episode works some nifty sci-fi into the format by having one of the regular characters pass out in his car after two minutes and wake up 46 years in the future. Los Angeles in 2017 is no longer just metaphorically a barren, toxic place, but also literally an intolerable hellscape where the air is so polluted you have to wear gas masks outside and the roads are riddled with carcasses of what used to be cars and people. Anyone who's still alive lives in depressing, tightly-controlled underground facilities and does things like banter by reciting random numbers to each other ("736" -"79012" "hahaha") even though they're otherwise perfectly able of normal speech, or attend concerts by geriatric rock bands, which is an amazing detail to get right. Sick people and criminals are now the same thing, therefore cops are also doctors, with the authotity to zap people to death. Corporations have taken over the government and instead of citizens, everyone is a stockholder in America Inc. Tasty stuff, no? I love 1970s dystopias more than I love nearly anything, but most of them are adorable, brightly coloured, borderline-silly thought experiments. LA 2017, on the other hand, manages to be genuinely nightmarish. All the action takes place in dark, narrow corridors or rooms resembling the inside of Iranian embassies, which are invariably decorated in a style I like to call "1970s decay". Spielberg deftly navigates the script's endless exposition with beautiful camera angles, perfect zooms and impeccable close-ups, and really succeeds in driving home its terrifying point. This kid is going places. There's a lot of delicious little nuggets I'd like to tell you about, but it's honestly worth checking out for yourself. To give you a taste, I'll end with a couple of pull-quotes, like these awkward messes: "30, female, sterile, sex-education major" and "Unconfirmed reports of a negro in Cleveland", and this chilling piece of logic: "If there is no privacy, there can be no invasion." Though that last one may be from Mark Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress. Gulp.
Book Report I: Ready Player One recap
RPO is a young-adult novel in a budding genre called LitRPG. It's stories where you follow the characters' avatars inside of a made-up game, as well as their actual lives in the outside world. I've seen stuff like this pop up in TV land for while now, think Video Game Highschool, webseries The Guild, and OG anime Sword Art Online. It's kind of cool or pure nerd creep depending on your point of view, and it's apparently seeping into literature, too. When Ready Player One came out in 2011, I think it had this as its premise: "In what scenario would my useless trivia knowledge of 1980s and 1990s pop culture save the world?" Lucky for us, fanfic writer Ernest Cline decided to venture into original content and answer this urgent question of our time. The story takes place in the year 2040, where an energy crisis, overpopulation and massive amounts of debt have left people with very little to look forward to in the real world, so everybody spends their time logged on to the OASIS, an endless virtual reality space which started as an online multiplayer game à la World of Warcarft, but grew to basically become the new internet. Everybody has an Oasis avatar not only to play games, but go to school, do business, meet others and live out giant portions of their lives. 5 years ago, the games' creator James Halliday, über-geek whose whole identity was defined by the pop culture of his youth, died and left the world a message: "I have hidden 3 challenges in the game, and if you can find them and complete them, you will get the Easter Egg and the Oasis, my company, and all of my money will be yours." Since then, people have been searching the game non-stop for these challenges, parsing every word Halliday ever uttered, every piece of fiction he ever read or saw, and every game he ever played. Individuals as well as entire "clans" of easter egg hunters, or "gunters" have been chasing down one lead after another without result. Big corporation IOI, which makes money by buying people's debt and keeping them indentured forever, has been spending millions on training players and funding experts in order to get their hands on the Oasis and all its potential for profit. The story begins when Wade Watts aka Parzival, nerdy loner living in a sci-fi trailer park, uncovers the first challenge and becomes the most famous avatar in the world. He soon finds out that he must band together with his gunter friends in order to stay alive, find the rest of the clues, and beat the Evil Company to the Egg. Blabla, friends are good, corporations are bad, the outside world needs paying attention to, and in the meantime ceaseless, shameless, pointless one-upmanship based on references to 1980s movies, 1990s sitcoms, vintage pop music, Dungeons and Dragons and Atari games. In the end, both the main character of the book and its author become millionaires, which I suppose retroactively justifies its premise that if you're an insufferable nerd who derives his sense of self from all the vintage things he can cite, you can expect a massive pay-off. Only good things can come from this.
Book Report II: Ready Player One review
If this book was a scathing parody of contemporary culture, it would've been perfect. The pathological pop references, that pastiche-identity-signalling thing hipsters do, the perplexing low-but-high-but-low stakes of our virtual lives. Sadly, it's serious. While the final page of the book tells you something like: "don't get wrapped up in this stuff, kids, chase girls in the real world instead", the rest of it is an unapologetic embrace of joyless cult nerdiness. Of course our millennial media affections being exploited to make more media is nothing new. If Ready Player One the novel stands out in any way, it's by being the most clumsy attempt at nostalgia I've ever seen, including your average Buzzfeed quiz. TV shows like Chuck, Community, and Stranger Things are all inspired by the same stuff Cline is into, but their references seamlessly blend into an original story or are so self-aware that they become sharp and funny. Cline just opts for mentioning a pop culture thing, describing the thing like there's no Wikipedia, and then moving on to the next thing. But even with all its trivia fetish, I hate to admit, it's not a bad read. The Oasis is as much of an addictive and engrossing concept for the reader as it is for the characters, and you do get swept up in the scavenger hunt of it all. But therein, I think, lies its biggest problem. For all the thrashing the book has gotten online in the run-up to the movie's release, I think there's one thing still missing from the critiques. What bothers me the most about Cline's work isn't the celebration of smug nerd culture while seemingly condemning it. It's not even the fact that the story describes an epic fight against a powerful corporation, only so the Oasis can change hands from one individual to another, while the idea of collective ownership never occurs to anyone. No, what really disturbs me is that Oasis inventor Halliday, who is presented as the heroic underdog of history, is so wealthy and powerful, that he can steer an entire generation towards his personal, inane obsessions. I mean - the protagonist is a poor, marginalized teenager with no future, and he knows the only way to get out of the slums is to win Halliday's easter egg challenge. So he spends his waking hours studying every detail of this person's life, in the process completely absorbing the values and idiosyncrasies of some dead rich dude. It would've been totally normal if Halliday's ideas or products served as a source of inspiration, but the fact that there is a cash prize for whoever proves the most well-versed in the random minutiae of one person's existence is frankly perverse. One of the challenges in the book (they changed it in the movie) takes place at Halliday's childhood home, which has been recreated to precise specifications in the game. So creepy, especially since a lot of the players are kids. Using your money to posthumously elicit the attention you lacked growing up from children whose lives depend on it, is the most vindictive kind of brainwashing, an inter-generational hostage situation of sorts. No invention merits this amount of influence. If you thought reports that Steve Jobs' autobiography was producing an army of Silicon Valley assholes were a fluke, you should read this book and get a sense of the advanced assholedom the future has in store for all of us.
Look of the Future I: Ready Player One Visuals
First of all: why did Spielberg ever have to start making serious movies? He is just too good at mind candy that will rot your brain and leave you utterly satisfied. Though let's not kid ourselves, people, even if Ready Player One is by no means perfect, and Spielberg gets subtle nowhere, he remains a towering master of visual storytelling. The camera work alone takes pans and tilts and dollies and cranes to spectacular, almost experimental extremes, even if it feels all too familiar. He also manages to make the extra 3D money worth your while, which makes him one of 2, maybe 3 directors in the last 15 years. Not to mention the constant visual gags where he contrasts the movements of people outside the game with their in-game actions. Those scenes with the colour-coded mass game deaths of the IOI players (see pic), are instant classics. Mark my words, kids are going to watch this movie over and over again and in 20 years wonder why they don't make them like this anymore.
Now let's talk about the graphics of the Oasis. When the trailer came out, a lot of people commented on how this software of the future resembled something rendered on the PS2. And it's true, the virtual reality of Ready Player One doesn't look better or more realistic than most contemporary games. In fact, it looks worse. But I think that's the point. I think the design of the Oasis is an interesting solution the contemporary sci-fi conundrum we touched upon in the Altered Carbon post, which, to recap, was about how sci-fi nowadays borrows its look from 20th-century visions of the future, without carrying the same meaning and philosophy they did at the time. Like a good pleasure bot, contemporary sci-fi looks pretty, but it doesn't say anything. Enter the "dated" graphics of the Oasis, a perfect fit for a debt-ridden, regressive society that no longer innovates, and which most people are trying to escape and a few are trying to cash in on. There is no reason this technology should look sleek and avant-garde. Compare the movie's 2040 outside world, with the cheap, gaudy, messy environment of the Oasis, and you can see that the visual limitations of the game are not an FX issue, they're deliberate. Comments like "that escapist thing about nostalgia wasn't cutting-edge enough and showed us things we already know" make no sense. Because this is what Spielberg is saying: the future is not going to look slick and shiny and pretty, it's not even going to look messy and neon-y and pretty. The future is going to look like the past. It's an idea that despite all the retro design of the last decade, I think is still incredibly hard for us to accept.
To close the segment on a happier note, I want to mention how Ready Player One's visuals are also making a point about video games. Movies have been losing customers to video games for a while now, and attempts at crossing that divide have been rocky at best. There's that well-known meme that Hollywood has yet to produce a single good video game movie. Ready Player One is a fascinating in-between case, because it's somehow both a cynical indictment of gaming and a testament to its special magic. The graphics are corny, yes, but you get used to them, and within minutes, like you would in a game, you're buying into the logic of a world where King Kong smashes around cars that instantly turn into a pile of coins. On the other hand, Spielberg's genius at knowing what to show when and how makes these shitty graphics look better than they ever would from a first-person perspective. The one scene I can't get out of my head (SPOILER!) is where they're trapped in the hotel from The Shining. At a certain point, the characters find themselves in an abandoned hallway face-to-face with the elevator. Everyone knows what's coming next, but you're still surprised when blood starts flooding the hall, and the characters get swept up in the tide. This level of interaction with an iconic film feels like absolute sacrilege and at the same time a fantastic, mind-blowing, almost cathartic thrill. The kind of thrill only a game can provide. Or a game movie. I hated it then I loved it and now I can't wait to watch it again. RESET!
Look of the Future II - Black Panther Visuals
Steven Spielberg's retrograde vision of the future brings me to that take on Black Panther I promised a while back. Because the thing that I liked most about BP was its production design. Almost everything about this movie has been discussed almost everywhere, so let me just say this: I thought it was a good Marvel flick and one of the few ones I would like to watch again. I loved seeing a girl in a headscarf kick some Boko-Haram-esque ass and it's nice that Marvel isn't done teaching us International Relations after Avengers Civil War. But for me, the best thing about the movie was its unabashedly Afrofuturistic set, prop and costume design. I'm going to argue that not only is Black Panther's look unique within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that it could be a boon for contemporary science fiction as a whole. And I know what you're thinking - "Yay more freewheeling art opining!" I know, right?
First up - Marvel. Let's be honest, the first generation of this century's Marvel superhero movies didn't exactly offer much in way of visual delights (cue Armen eyeroll). To be clear, I'm talking Disney-Marvel collaborations, like Ironman, Captain America, Antman etc; Fox's X-men franchises are a whole separate story. I think there are two reasons why phase 1 Marvel looked so bland. The studio was working towards the Avenger crossover movie, and they wanted to keep a homogeneous style across the board, so they filmed everything in the standard filter setting and wouldn't let directors mess with the colours afterwards. Also, Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame was put in charge of the flagship Avengers film, and as good a writer as he is, the guy cannot decorate a room to save his life. If you need proof, just compare the industrial neo-goth design of the first Blade movie with the vampire's nest called The Factory in season 2 of Buffy from a year earlier. The idea is the same, but the Blade's cold, symmetrical, concrete sets just take your breath away (no vampire), while I know from experience that you can sit through about 6 viewings of Buffy S2 before you figure out why they call it The Factory in the first place. But in the last year or so, it feels like Marvel's execs have stopped helicopter-parenting their projects. They seem to be less fearful of picking unconventional directors and allowing them some room to play. And it shows. I was charmed by the rich palettes and chaos-with-character thing they did in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the design of Thor Ragnarok's wacky garbage city is so experimental, it's almost hard to watch (Does anyone know what this style is btw? It looks very familiar, but other than "mod meets 80s gymwear" I just couldn't figure out what it reminds me of). Even among this new crop, though, Black Panther's visuals stand out. They're something else. They're...I would say "visionary" if "visionary visuals" didn't sound so very stupid. But yeah, that's what they are. The world of Black Panther is not just beautiful, sparkly and coherent, but it exudes a depth and philosophy beyond anything Marvel has served up so far. The movie never downplays the Afrofuturism of the original comic book, in fact, it joyously exemplifies it until your eyes are popping out of your head for all the cool shit you keep seeing. I could give examples, but there's very few moments in the movie where Wakanda's shiny tech doesn't steal the show. So just go watch it again, help it break whatever sales record it hasn't yet obliterated.
In addition to being a game-changer for Marvel, I think Black Panther can also help point the way out of sci-fi's current production design impasse. Like I can't stop repeating, contemporary science fiction is in bad need of a make-over. It's been in recycle mode for a while now, and it's getting real tired. I'm not just talking about the return of cyberpunk, but also related, ever-replicating retro-futures like steampunk, dieselpunk, and 1950s-punk (I can't wait for Ancient-Greece-punk, where Archimedes fashions a pair of funky sunglasses out of dirt and logic and wears them in the bath.*) If we get a utopic vision at all, it's your basic space age throwback, that smooth white/transparent Apple look with the round edges and so many teal lights, like in Oblivion or Ex Machina. And almost everything else is generic bulky tech with lived-in metal and hard angles that looked cool when Verhoeven did it in the early 90s, but hasn't been able to impress anyone since. The kitschy nostalgia soup of Spielberg's Ready Player One can be seen as both a reflection of our current lack of imaginary futures and a response to it. But I think Black Panther's production design is ultimately the best way forward. BP's futurism not only looks gorgeous, it not only feels fresh and new, but it's optimistic in a way I didn't even realize was possible anymore. I mean - it depicts a literal utopia nobody has trouble believing in. Obviously, I'm not saying "let's all do Afrofuturism", because uhm //problematic//. But it made think that maybe the idea of technological advancement as a disruptive, radical break with the past is no longer as inspiring as it used to be. It's possible this kind of modernism has proven unstable, alienating and destructive, and we are all be pining for something a little more sustainable. Black Panther offers a vision of the future that brings the past into it, that incorporating tradition into innovation in a conscious and respectful way, and preserves identity instead of undermining it. Am I personally a fan of this ideology? Not really. I'm an old-school modernist - I don't really believe in tradition, and I hated the monarchy story line even more. Then there's the question of whether the West even has any real tradition to fall back on, or whether it's just cultural appropriation and willful self-destruction (hot). Perhaps we can concentrate on the "sustainability" element of it instead and start churning out eco-futures about getting along with nature and not destroying the planet for once? God, that's boring. I don't know. I just know that Wakanda is the first thing in a long time that doesn't look like a rehash of a reboot of a remake. So even if it is only to make sci-fi interesting again, I say Afrofuturism forever! Or at least for now, until Hollywood finds out about an artsy thing they did in South-America twenty years ago.
*I have since learned that this is called “sandal-punk” and I’m not going to lie, I feel pretty messed-up about it.
That Time Rock & Roll Went Commercial
Speaking of nostalgia, Solo is coming out in a month and they just released the new trailer. It makes Donald Glover's Lando look especially good, but none of the official trailers really live up to this bootleg re-cut to Sabotage.
Which brings me to my next point: comic book movies and classic rock have really found each other recently, especially in the trailers. One of the best examples is Thor Ragnarok's exquisite use of Immigrant Song, just 👌🏼
And this Suicide Squad trailer blasting Bohemian Rhapsody in the background was so well-received, that the studio hired the trailer company to edit the whole movie, which explains why the movie came out as one long, incomprehensible trailer.
My favourite, though, is Ready Player One's comic-con teaser. Watching the first minute, I got anxious that maybe it didn't look that promising. Then half-way through Tom Sawyer kicks in, and the movements of the players perfectly align with the music, and suddenly I'm riding goosebumps all the way to the end and am pumped beyond all reason. Is there anything this song can't make epic? So so nice. Mean mean pride.
To book-end our trailer talk: one of the Honest Trailers guys joked that someone should do a Like A Prayer/Solo trailer re-cut, and the internet obliged. It kind of works, too. Take me there, Han. Put your Millennium Falcon into hyperdrive and take me there. You can shoot first, I don't care.
Side note: I don't think I'm emotionally ready for another Star Wars. I still haven't fully recovered from the Rian Johnson controversy. There used to be 20 years between some of these. Is 12 months to catch my breath (no Vader) really that much to ask?
Blade Revisited
And finally - Black Panther broke all the records, Shape of Water won all the Oscars, and Deadpool 2 is about to drop world-wide, so naturally, it's time to revisit the Blade Trilogy. See, Blade was the first blockbuster black Marvel superhero franchise, Guillermore Del Toro directed Blade 2, in Blade 3 gave us the first Ryan Reynolds sarcastic smart-mouth Marvel character, more than a decade before he perfected the role behind his Deadpool mask. The boys from Honest Trailers have already done the work for this one, but if I had to pick one highlight from each movie, it would be that iconic blood rave scene in Blade 1 of course, the suave vampire ninjas in the beginning of Blade 2, and that thing Ryan Reynolds calls his bloodsucking ex-girlfriend in Blade 3 that we've all wanted to say to an ex at some point, but just lacked the poetic flair: "you cock-juggling thunder cunt!" Perfection. I actually don't remember being that into this franchise back when it first came out, but now it's all I want to talk about. So who knows, maybe in ten years you’ll find me hunched behind my computer like this, writing a 5000 soliloquy to the Avenger movies.
--- Your turn, clan: Have you seen RPO yet? What did you think of it? Which style of future do you prefer? When is the last time a trailer made you feel a thing? And what's your favourite Blade memory? Or share a good cupcake recipe, why don't you. Weird Blog, like the Oasis, has no rules, just a crappier interface and way more interesting friends. GG ---