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No wonder Reddit loves this book: it's actually Reddit

From the same Twitter user because I'm feeling masochistic and I want everyone here to hurt as much as me

I never knew I could hate something as much as I hate this. Sorry Colin!

That is literally the dumbest thing imaginable, though it does answer a question I had about the trailer since 50 year old pop culture is generally not what young people are into, but I guess Reddit is a religion in the book?

This sounds awful but at least it'll get Spielberg back in Armond White's good graces.

Folks, I'm here to tell you this book is at it's best when it is simply listing authors, directors, books, movies, etc. When it attempts to say something, it makes the depth and weight of these passages seem like a goddamn ocean.

But the problem would be fixed if more of the people being namedropped were women, right?

This reads like fan fiction. The only thing missing is whatever combination of series characters arouses the author the most.

Brian C wrote:This sounds awful but at least it'll get Spielberg back in Armond White's good graces.

Nah, it'll make him rant against him more for giving in to the nihilism of our culture.

I didn't get any hint of parody from that trailer. The only thing that could salvage this, probably slightly, would be Spielberg approaching it like Keaton in Birdman or that '90s movie that parodied action movies.

This all sounds incredibly embarrassing. In lieu of imagining what it'd be like to be forty and write those paragraphs, I'm just going to pile-on. What does this say about our culture, indeed.

I one-hundred percent buy that Kubrick's on the high school film-geek---as is the vague "The Criterion Collection"---syllabus, but do they still screen Barry Lyndon? (Last week's announcements probably forced their hand, I guess.) In those circles in the middle of last decade, Lyndon was a contrarian choice to "rise" above everyone else, but I'm not certain anyone truly ever fucked with Thackeray and the film. Then, inevitably, you grow a bit older and Lyndon becomes legitimately great, removed from the context of silly social politics.

The Tye Sheridan character's going to grow up to be the person who only gets the pop culture questions right on Jeopardy! and is non-competitive in Final Jeopardy.

I'd argue that we're cherry picking the more irritating bits of the character in those quotes, but it seems as if I'd be swimming against the tide! That first listing quote is tied into the whole Halliday's contest idea (and that Halliday kind of created the whole contest to cause people to consume all the pop culture items he loved. That's his "Bible": the list of all the source material to study up on, which might have the solution inside) that has consumed not just Wade's life but that of a significant proportion of the other people in the world, looking for an answer to the first riddle. A couple of things inside that stream of cultural items actually pay off later on, but which ones? And does that make having watched everything else that didn't have a pointer towards the greater goal pointless, or enjoyable and enriching for its own sake?

And the DeLorean/Knight Rider/Ghostbusters over-blinged car description is part of the mid-section when Wade's treading water as a famous celebrity and making a showboating entrance to the floaty dance club, just before the fall from grace. In other areas I was quite amused that with his newfound celebrity Wade immediately signs his avatar up to promote every single brand deal, appropriate or not! (But it provides him the financial means to escape the very tangible threats from the real world further), or that he is famous enough to have people tuning into his 24 hour curated pop culture channel! But there are other things going on too than just culture referencing, even if the whole lens of the story is filtered through a pop culture saturated world.

Plus one of the big themes of the book seems to be about the way that in the online world 'normal people' appropriate and adapt pre-existing cultural artefacts into their lives in all sorts of ways, taking what they most personally need (perhaps at just that particular moment of time) out of the original world and twisting it into new and unorthodox forms far out of the hands of their corporate creators, which is perhaps a very current idea in the era of YouTube mashup videos and fears over intellectual property getting cheekily misued to send a message not previously intended, or authorised by its original creator.

Those three notes that play as the words "Read Player One" light up one at a time are the lead in to the song "Pure Imagination" from WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.

Come with me, and you'll be, in a world of pop culture masturbation

I honestly wonder what "holy grail of pop culture" is supposed to mean. It seems like that analogy is used to describe something that is unobtainable if not outright mythical, or at the very least rare and priceless. Just doesn't apply here.

I can't quite work out a context for whatever sentiment it's supposed to approximate here, other than maybe something completely inane like "masterpiece of pop culture". But I dunno, that doesn't seem to quite describe whatever it is that's trying to be communicated. I guess the true sentiment behind it seems more contradictory, something more like, "Here's something completely new and exciting and unique! That also you're already familiar with."

Maybe, in my old age, nerd talk has just passed me by. Still, sounds dumb to me.

The holy grail of pop culture would be like if they never released Stranger Things on any home video format. This is more like the suicide snowcone of pop culture.

colinr0380 wrote:I'd argue that we're cherry picking the more irritating bits of the character in those quotes

But the whole book is written that way. I mean after a short while how is the interest being kept when we're just reading one person's ideas of a pop culture mash up world in constant description that don't play out like story points but like a 12 year olds idea notebook? like it's almost pointless to write the book in the first place. If I wanted to imagine a world where the SAW puppet, Lara Croft, Isaac Asimov, Jay & Silent Bob and the cyberdemon from Doom were all casually hanging out at the Korova Milk Bar drinking Slurm and talking about that night's Podrace Quidditch match while tipping fedoras before toasting drinks what need would I have to read someone who has a weird boner for DeLoreans writing entire pages virtually bragging to the reader how much pop culture they have soaked up in decades?

Roscoe wrote:Those three notes that play as the words "Read Player One" light up one at a time are the lead in to the song "Pure Imagination" from WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY.

The music featured from the moment he puts on the visor up until the halfway point when Rush starts is a modern-trailer-ified adaptation of that song.

Turns out Ernest Cline wrote something even worse than this (Way, way NSFW)

That's NSFL, really. :-&

Props to that performer for managing to hold in his laughter for nearly four minutes (and for nailing whiny Val Venis).

Cline wrote that when he was twenty-eight!

New trailer-- I'll just steal one of the top YouTube comments:

Yeah I don't think I am going to see this movie unless I lose a bet or something

I don't remember ever hearing a more incongruous "big turning point line followed by licensed track" in a trailer before. So kudos to WB for a lack of self-awareness I didn't think possible.

Not sure to post this in this forum or the Worst Covers thread, but this new poster has some pretty laughable photoshop.

Another Spielberg film without a John Williams score??

Scoring schedules for this and The Post overlapped and Williams couldn't do both simultaneously, or didn't want to. He probably had his choice between the two and went with the film that interested him more.