The First of What Will Probably Be Many “Ready Player One” Reference Guides

Posted on March 26, 2018 at 1:50 pm

Ernest Cline’s book, Ready Player One, takes place in the future but its main character is as enmeshed in the past as he is in the video game puzzle created by the mysterious man who is something between Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and whoever invented Grand Theft Auto. The book and movie are filled with references to the pop culture of the 1980’s and there are likely to be many critics and fans examining every frame to find them all. Rotten Tomatoes kicks it off, from “Saturday Night Fever” to “Terminator,” “Iron Giant,” “Say Anything,” and the original “Mad Max.” Of course “Ready Player One” director Steven Spielberg was himself responsible for many of the iconic pop culture moments of the 1980’s.

There are tons of nods to and cameos from Spielberg’s big blockbuster hits, especially the one about the dinos. The Spielberg gems come thick and fast and pretty early in the pic — so eyes out. It all makes a bunch of sense, given that the filmmakers had to secure the rights for every easter egg they use here. And it has us imagining a Spielberg-directed Ready Player One sequel, full of easter eggs referencing the original Spielberg-directed Ready Player One: Our pop-culture–loving minds were just blown.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Opening This Week: It’s Back to the 80’s with “Rock of Ages” and “That’s My Boy”

Posted on June 14, 2012 at 11:57 am

Until VH1 recycles it’s “I Love the 80’s” series again, those homesick for the era have two choices opening in movie theaters this week that are both affectionate tributes to the era. It makes sense — studio executives in their 40’s and 50’s came of age to the music of Bon Jovi, Guns n Roses, Def Leppard, Joan Jett, Jefferson Starship, Journey, and Foreigner, so the prospect of a juke-box musical like “Rock of Ages” is irresistible. And Adam Sandler, whose movies are always in some way about the 80’s, populates his new film, “That’s My Boy,” with 80’s figures like Vanilla Ice, Tony Orlando, and Todd Bridges. His character’s most meaningful gift to his son is a feather earring from a Loverboy concert. Reviews of both will be posted in a few hours.

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Opening This Week

Take Me Home Tonight

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:44 pm

This is the movie John Cusack never made, a loving tribute to the 1980’s and especially to the music and movies of the era from “Say Anything” to “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” “Take Me Home Tonight” doesn’t go for cheap “had we but known” or “how could we be so cheesy/wear that/like them?” jokes (I’m talking to you, Hot Tub Time Machine) but instead relies on our nostalgia for the 80’s and for what we did to muddle through them. It takes us home to “I Love the 80’s” land with the opening shot: “Video Killed the Radio Star” played on an enormous boom box.

Twins Matt (Topher Grace) and Wendy (Anna Faris) Franklin have recently graduated from college and are still living at home. Wendy is on the brink of the next step, with a serious boyfriend (her real-life husband Chris Pratt) and applications to graduate school. But Matt seems stuck. He has a job behind the counter at Suncoast Video. And he is still dreaming of the girl he had a crush on in high school, golden girl Tori Frederking (Teresa Palmer). If only, Matt tells Wendy and his best friend Barry (Dan Fogler) so often that they recite it along with him — if only there had been an opening for him to pursue her back at Shermer High School (yes, the name comes from “The Breakfast Club”). And then, Tori walks into the store.

In a spasm of fear, desperation, and longing, Matt impulsively tries to act like the kind of person he thinks would impress Tori. He pretends not to remember her. And, when he finds out she’s working for the (now-defunct) financial firm Drexel Burnham, he pretends to be working at Goldman Sachs. They agree to meet up at a big party, cuing up all of the ingredients for a very wild night.

It has shoulder pads for girls and blazer sleeves pushed up to the elbow for guys, “Come on Eileen,” Wang Chung, and “Straight Outta Compton” (sung by Matt and Barry as they steal a car to impress Tori) and a trampoline scene like Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins in “Big.” It’s all with such unabashed affection for the era and its characters that it is hard not to share it.

Grace, who produced the film, is one of Hollywood’s most likable leading men with comic timing unmatched since (while we’re talking about the 80’s) Michael J. Fox. The scene where Matt thinks the worst has happened, only to find that more bad news is ahead, works far better than it has any right to. As Matt’s unconstrained id counterpart, Tony-winner Dan Fogler spends a lot of time out of control (and some of it coked out as well), but he manages to give Barry some sweetness, too, whether competing in an impromptu dance-off or mingling lust and terror at an invitation from what 20 years later would be called a cougar. Faris is underused but a pleasure to watch as always and Palmer brings a pleasant freshness and decency to the underwritten dream girl role. It won’t make anyone want to go back to the 80’s, but it might make them want to see Grace’s next film.

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Comedy Romance

Movie Blogs: Best of the 80’s and You Pick the Classics

Posted on August 12, 2010 at 8:41 am

On The 80’s Movie Project you can weigh in with your thoughts on the best, the worst, and the most outrageous from the decade that included “American Gigolo,” “Anaimalymics,” and “Every Which Way You Can.”
And Baltimore Examiner movie critic Tom Clocker, who is kind enough to comment here from time to time, has undertaken his own version of the “Julie & Julia” experiment. He’s going to watch 365 days of classic films based on suggestions from his readers, and blog about what he sees. Check out his blog and let him know what you think he should watch.

Adventureland

Posted on August 25, 2009 at 8:00 am

We all have at least one, a summer when everything changes, when we first start to become the person we truly are. Every writer tries at least once to tell the story of one of these summers and the best of them connect us to our own stories as we laugh and cry along with them.

Director Greg Mottola’s last film was the box office smash “Superbad,” and like that, this is the story of young people at a turning point, told with sex, drugs, rock and roll and with some surprising sweetness. The mix is much more on the sweetness side in this frankly autobiographical film; don;t let the ad campaign mislead you that this is another wild and raunchy story.

For one thing, this movie’s lead is four years further along. James Brennan (“The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg) has just graduated from college and things are not going the way he planned. His parents have had some financial reversals. Not only is his planned trip to Europe with his friends canceled so he can stay home and get a job but there’s no money to pay his tuition at graduate school, and his parents seem disturbingly callous about how this affects him. He finds to his distress that an undergraduate degree in literature does not qualify him for pretty much anything, so he ends up getting a job for which no qualifications of any kind are necessary — working at a decrepit amusement park called Adventureland.

We know what to expect, of course. In just about every summer job, summer camp, and summer trip movie ever made there will be a girl of great sensitivity and insight and a girl of great hotness. There will be a bully or menace of some kind and a boss who is clueless or evil or both. But the humiliating lessons are more in the painful twinge than wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-20-years-later-in-a-cold-sweat category. The bosses (SNL’s very funny Bil Heder and Kristin Wiig) are not evil and not really clueless. They just have the requisite benign obtuseness that enables them to continue to run a business that (1) relies on children in unleashed frenzy mode as customers and (2) relies on teenagers in major hormonal crisis mode as staff. Mottola manages to avoid the cliches and create characters with warmth and specificity and — that rarest quality in movies of this genre — some grace.