Ready Player One (a movie review post)

First, I have not read Ready Player One.
I've thought about reading it for a while, now, because, evidently, it made a big splash in certain circles. It's one of those books that I would read for the sake of seeing what the big deal is as opposed to having any real interest in the genre or the subject matter. HOWEVER...
After seeing the movie, I have lost all desire to read the book.
And that is a failing on the part of the movie. If an adaptation is good, it will give you a desire to seek out the source material, and this movie killed the desire I already had in reading the book.

Well, Ernest Cline probably played a part in that, too. I heard an interview with him where he goes on and on, basically, about how great he is and how original his novel is and how no one had ever done anything like that before...
Wait a minute! Original? Does he actually think his idea about a virtual world is original? Because that's what he said.
But, maybe, he comes from an alternate Earth where Snow Crash and the Otherland series and a plethora of other novels were never written so he thought he was first. Except I'm sure that's not the case. He's just one of those guys who is full of himself. Maybe it was because his book was a smash hit, but, honestly, he's probably been like that his whole life.

The lacklusterness of the movie didn't do anything to convince me otherwise.

Yes, I just called the movie "lackluster," which is not to say that it wasn't full of luster. It's shiny and sparkly and full of sheen. It is, after all, Spielberg, and the man knows how to make a movie. So, if you just want to wallow in the visual extravagance of it all, this movie will do it for you. It's like a reflecting pool.

Which is to say that it's shallow.
Shallow as heck.
It has one message: People spend too much time online.
It has one message, and the movie isn't really subtle about its presentation of it: People spend too much time online.
It has one message that they are so worried you won't get that they slap you in the face with it at the end of the movie: Get the fuck off your computer a couple of days a week!
Okay, so they're not quite that aggressive with it, but it's close. It is a PG-13 movie, after all.

Part of the draw for me for seeing the movie was the supposed 80s pop culture theme. I mean, I grew up in the 80s so, of course, that was a draw. The problem, then, is that this is just not true. Which is not to say that the movie doesn't have 80s pop culture references; the protagonist does, after all, drive a DeLorean. But it's misleading to say that the movie is a tribute to the 80s. Actually, that's an outright lie. It's not the 80s that the movie is a tribute to but pop culture itself. Sure, the 80s gets plenty of screen time, but the movie opens with a nod to Minecraft and soon follows with a twister reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, neither of which have anything to do with the 80s. The Atari and D&D references are more appropriately attributed to the 70s.

There's nothing wrong with all of the other pop culture references -- I think it's better, in fact -- I just find the misrepresentation, mostly on the part of viewers from what I can tell, to be interesting. Maybe people seeing the movie are missing the non-80s references? Or, maybe, because there are a lot of video game references, they have no context at all for getting those? Or maybe they're placing other references they're familiar with into the 80s because that's when they became familiar with said reference. Like Willy Wonka, also from the 70s. I don't know.

People are weird.

To be clear, it's not a bad movie. The movie is thoroughly enjoyable in a cotton candy kind of way. It's visually exciting and won't tax your brain by giving you any thoughts or asking you to figure anything out. It's also totally forgettable, which I find unfortunate. Like cotton candy, it's going to melt in your mouth before you ever get a chance to swallow; I just find myself preferring things with more substance these days. Or all of my days, actually, I suppose.

No stand out performances, either. They're all adequate, but no one worth mentioning, not even Simon Pegg, though he's as enjoyable as ever.

Middle School Munchkins

On the scale of Favorite Years, I'm pretty sure this one is not going to rank very high. [Yes, that is a thing, the Favorite Year scale; it's not my fault if you've never heard of it before.] As I was talking about here, this year all of my kids are moving up to the "next thing" and I'm not enjoying that at all. bah! on aging! No my aging; I don't mind that, but, man, I just want my kids to quit growing up. Where's the reverse?

Anyway...

My middle kid, the younger boy, just turned 13. [We're working on his high school applications, right now. HIGH SCHOOL APPLICATIONS! Why is that a thing?] His birthday party, which involved a bunch of middle school boys sleeping over, was this past weekend. On the plus side, it's easy to entertain middle school boys, so a boy sleep over requires much less work than a girl sleep over. I say that from experience. Still, it was a lot of noise. [Seriously, it was a lot of noise. One of the boys (who had never been over before) has a rather booming voice (which I knew), and he's one of those people (like my son) who has to loudly exclaim at everything happening during a video game.]

The definite highlight of the evening was the game of Munchkin. None of the boys had ever heard of it and were a little apathetic about the idea of sitting down and playing a card game. I suppose board games, or anything that resembles a board game, are completely out of fashion these days. But my son really wanted to play, so I insisted. Ironically, that included having to force him to quit playing Minecraft on his friend's laptop (which shouldn't have been here to begin with because we had a no electronic devices rule in effect (because, last year, the boys did bring their devices and spent the whole evening isolating themselves on electronic crack). Apparently, my son conveniently "forgot" to tell this one particular boy not to bring his electronics, this boy being his main Minecraft buddy. [The underlying issue here is that my son's computer is ailing, especially the video card, and will no longer run Minecraft without crashing. The computer is nearly a decade old, so I can hardly blame it. At any rate, my son hasn't been able to play Minecraft (except for rare occasions when he gets to at someone else's house) for at least six months, now, so I'm mostly okay with this bringing his laptop and letting my son play Minecraft on it. Still, I had to kick my son off of it so that we could do what he wanted to do in the first place.]

Can I just say, right now, how difficult it is to set up a game like this with a bunch of middle school boys all asking questions at the same time, some of which are relevant but most of which are... less so. And all of them repeating, "Can we look at our cards?" while already doing it, so it was a good thing they could look at the cards or I would have had to re-deal about seven times. I say seven times (even though there were only four boys) because they would have compulsively looked at their cards anyway, even after being told not to, if that had been the case. I know this because three of them kept picking up cards they'd already played and putting them back in their hands and two of them kept trying to discard cards they didn't want to be holding no matter how many times I told them that they couldn't just discard cards and one of them kept trying to trade "door" cards even though you can't trade "door" cards. So, yeah, getting through the setup took much longer than expected.

BUT!
But once we started playing, it was a magnificent event! They were the most back-stabby players I've ever seen. One moment, one of them would be helping another of them; the next, he would be tossing a curse on him. It was both awesome and hilarious and made for an exciting game. They had no compunction and would do their best to make sure everyone lost every fight. Until... until they ran out of cards to make each other lose. It was a lot of fun, and they immediately wanted to start another game, but it was nearly midnight, and I had to just say no.

They also wanted to play immediately the next morning, but I had to cook breakfast for them and stuff and, by the time they were finishing up with their food, a couple of them had to leave, so we never got in another game. It was a big hit, though.

In other news, I am now on twitter. I'm still trying to figure the whole thing out, but feel free to follow my twitterings. I'll probably even follow you back.

"Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?"

I spend a lot of time at my kids' school. The younger kids' school, that is. I don't spend any time at the high school my oldest goes to. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I read from House in the 6th grade class, and, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach creative writing as an elective in the middle school there (I have 14 students this quarter).

Earlier this week as I was walking across campus, a young boy, a 1st grader, ran up to me. Now, I knew who this boy was because he's the younger brother of one of my younger son's friends, so I thought it was going to be something related to that. I was kind of surprised when he said, "Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?" And I wasn't sure what was going on, either, because he's a few years younger than any of the kids I've read to at  this point. But I smiled and said yes. His face exploded in a grin, and he said, "I love your book! It's great!" Then, he turned around and ran off.

It was really sweet. I was touched.

And I love that question: am I the guy that made the book? Not wrote it. Made it. It's amusing to me, because, actually, that's how all the kids ask me that question when they ask it of me. "Are you the guy that made The House on the Corner?" I used to say, "Well, yes, I wrote it," but I don't do that anymore, because I don't think there's a significant difference to them. It would be like asking George Lucas if he wrote Star Wars. Well, yes, he did, but, really, he made Star Wars. And that's what it is to these kids. I made this world, for lack of a better term, called The House on the Corner.

It's funny, because I never think of it that way. I never think of it as a world building project, although I know that it is. It's just not in my head that way. It's not like my son building with his Legos or in Minecraft. I sit down and I write. Sure, I visualize and try to bring that environment to life, but I don't think about it as building a world. Clearly, that's what it is to these kids, though.

It's all kind of cool.

I really like that question, at this point. Yes, I made The House on  the Corner.
What fun!

My other favorite question, and I get this one from even the middle schoolers, is "When are you going to make House into a movie?"

I still have to hold in the laughter when they ask me that, but I love that they ask me. Like I just need to decide to do it, you know? After all, I did make the book, why can't I just make the movie the same way? I've been asked that question twice this week, in fact. I guess I'll have to get on that.

the saddest day of the year and some review news

The tree is gone and all of the ornaments and decorations are packed up. Including that Santa Clause and the nutcracker that sat out on the piano this entire past year because I forgot to pack them up the previous Christmas. Everything is plain again. But the room is bigger now.
Okay, so it's not bigger, but there's no longer a tree in it, and, even though the tree was in the corner, it was a tree in the house, and that takes up some room.
But it's all gone, now, and the tree is outside in a big, black can looking so much smaller than it did when it was in the house.

I think I managed not to clog up the vacuum cleaner with pine needles this year.
Of course, I thought that last year, too.
And the year before.

In some ways, it's a shame we have to start the year by putting away all of the celebrations and make everything plain and normal again.
Then, I remember the year that my mom left the tree up until well after my birthday, which is in February, and how it had almost just become this part of the house that we all just accepted and no one noticed anymore.
We have to have that discussion with our kids every year, about how it's a good thing that Christmas is not every day, because, if it was, they would stop enjoying getting presents. It would be one of those things that my daughter would try to get out of because she wanted to go out to play, and the younger boy would be too busy playing Minecraft to bother with.

So, yeah, today was the day of ending the big Christmas event and packing everything away. A sad day.
But not so sad. It's time to get back to regular life again. Time to do some more writing. Almost time for the kids to get back to school, and that will not be a sad day. At least not for me. My daughter's ready to get back, too, even if the boys are not.

Well... so that's that. 11 months to go...

In other news, I have some reviews I'd like to highlight. Mr. Alex Cavanaugh himself read The House on the Corner during the holiday and had this to say about it:
"Once it got to the Imagination Room and the troll, it was incredibly compelling."
I can't really argue with that, now, can I? His whole review, which is fairly short, is located here along with his four star rating.
One other thing that Alex said is that the he found the character of Ruth to be the "most annoying creature in the world." I take that as a huge compliment, because it means I really did the job I set out to do in creating the characters for the book.

I really love hearing from people which character was their favorite. Ruth tends to be favored more among the younger readers, but it's not younger female readers, just younger readers as the boys favor just as often as the girls. Adult males have tended to prefer Tom. Sam has a good spread among all ages. I find it interesting and can't wait to see what people think as the story progresses.

The other review I want to highlight is one left for Shadow Spinner by a fairly high ranked reviewer on Amazon. The complete review is posted on "The Tunnel," but let me just share this one little bit here:
"The thing that really distinguishes this book and elevates it to the category of very happy find, is the careful and realistic way that Mr. Leon builds up the tension, the dread, the reveals and the threat in this story."
Then, he adds:
"There is room, though, for a thinking man's fantasy-father tale. There should be signs and portents. There should be odd things happening around the edges. Mom should be a little damaged and a little mental. Suspicious things should happen and there should be a slow unfolding of what's going to happen and what might happen. That's what you get here.
And you get it with real style."

Getting good reviews from anyone is great, and there is something special in having a friend genuinely like your work. You know, that person you hand it to and say, "I hope you like it," because you really hope that person likes it, and, when that person does it like, it gives you a little glow inside. But there's something else entirely when someone you don't know at all leaves a great review for you. It's an entirely different type of gratification.

So... it may be the saddest day of the year (Thursday, January 3, as I write this), but, you know what? Maybe everything's not so plain after all.