“YOU DON’T HAVE TO be a videogame freak.” I heard that reassurance on my way in to see Steven Spielberg’s newest extravaganza ‘Ready Player One’, which arrives in theaters everywhere next week. It’s based, after all, on Ernest Cline’s 2011 barnstormer young-adult novel of the same name – which memorably made USA Today hail the author as “the hottest geek on the planet”.
I then got the same reassurance from the director himself. The world premier screening was held at the South By South West festival, in Austin’s legendary and beautifully renovated theater The Paramount; and Spielberg emerged onto the big screen’s narrow strip of stage … to the kind of rapturous welcome that rock-stars may take in stride, but few others.
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Dateline: Austin, Texas – I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY ‘SIDESHOW’. But I’ve noticed something while here on my annual foray to SXSW, that gigantic combination of movies, music and all matters digital (plus growing spin-offs like education, video-gaming, comedy and more) that now pulls almost half-a-million participants into the Texan capital.
A DEVELOPING STORY that’s being tucked away here and there across our national media deserves a lot more attention. Its main attraction? Well, it features a crude and deeply corrupt President who is also allegedly a sexual predator.
LIKE MANY POWERFUL STORIES, this one starts in a black South African township. One day in the early 1950s, a boy was photographed jumping for joy.
