"Ready Player One" is weak and lame. I like Stephen Spielberg more than lots of people in Hollywood, but the man is a hack who films books, and really needs to start picking some better books. Most of the hype that I actually noticed going into the film is the alleged presence of multiple pop culture characters, but that's not so much a thing. They're probably in there like easter eggs that you have to pause your Blu-Ray to spot. The premise is that in the future where life is all dystopian and oppressive and people have to live in vertical trailer parks, there is this virtual reality game that occupies everyone's time, call The Oasis. It's an open-world interactive MMORPG, where you can make just about any avatar you want, and lots of people who are not named characters choose to play as their favorite movie or cartoon heroes.

The plot centers around the creator of The Oasis and his will, where he built a challenge into the game, with the player who solves it inheriting his ownership of the game and its hosting company, which basically will make the winner the ruler of the game world, with the ability to change it however he likes, and something of a power in the actual world, due to the influence of the game. Basically this dead guy is Willy Wonka who runs the Matrix, instead of a candy factory.

The plot is a major disappointment, as the potential of the setting is largely unused, there is little appeal to the characters and the method of success has nothing to do with any sort of appreciable virtues or positive qualities, simply how far up the late inventor's ass one is willing to crawl, and the protagonists who engage in this "quest" are implied to be the true believers and the ones who really care about the Oasis, as opposed to the corporate suit who has hired an army of players and researchers to cheat his way through the game to get the prize himself for $$$. It's like defining Star Wars fandom based on knowledge of George Lucas' biography. I will defend Star Wars, and Lucas' creative efforts, to the death, but all I know about him is that he has a beard, and he has kids, because those kids made cameo appearances in the prequels. The final challenge, within the virtual reality game itself, involves playing a classic game on an old Atari game console, with lethal (for virtual reality definitions of lethal) punishments for losing at the game within the game within the game. Finally, one nerd for higher manages to beat the Atari game, only to be killed, and our hero steps up and smugly announces that challenge is not to beat the game, but to discover the easter egg in the game. This particular Atari game is famous among losers for having the first such easter egg, specifically, the programmer's name. Somehow this indicates a superior form of gamer, because he just plays to have fun, he just plays for the joy of moving a blog of pixels around on a screen. Apparently, if you don't embrace rudimentary video games like they are the exact same immersive experience as a virtual reality game with a body suit that applies pressure to the same places where your avatar is touched. If you DON'T treat this old game as something to be enjoyed for its own sake, instead of taking pride in winning by the established rules, you're a hyper-competitive part of the problem!

The action sequences and pop culture references are not sufficiently engaging in their own right to overcome the indifference generated by the smug dipshit protagonists.

A Quiet Place, on the other hand, is very worth it. It looked from the previews like it could go either way as a monster movie or some pretentious artsy thing. It was the monster one. The cast is really no more than a couple and their kids, in a setting where some sort of alien monsters have overrun the world, hunting by extremely keen senses of hearing, and nothing else. The family in question have a deaf child, which explains how they so readily adapted to silent communication, with even a preschooler up on the ASL. Over the course of the whole movie, there are like, two, verbal conversations, with all the rest of the dialogue in sign. Of the pair of movies I have seen in the last few months featuring monsters & sign language (and the juxtaposition of the human reproductive system with water), this was far superior to "The Shape of Water." It's a typical horror plot, showing the details of the survival methods used by the family, many of which are not immediately obvious or intuitive, until you realize how when the danger comes from making even the slightest sound, being able to see where you are going, for example, is critical. Thus, there are lights strung up all around the exterior of the family's house, with the ability to switch them to red to call father or children home for emergencies. Because you can't yell or ring a bell or any of the normal means. Adding to the tension is the certainty of how taking almost any action to protect oneself is inherently futile due to the noise. There are not many horror movies where the character clutches a shotgun in the presence of a hostile monster and you are hoping he doesn't shoot it. Because that's just as bad. Anyway, it's well done. The kid actors are much more tolerable when they are seen and not heard (literally), and John Krasinski, who also directed, and Emily Blunt, are good as the couple. This was one of the better movies I've seen this year.