Steven Spielberg on virtual reality and cinema

Here are a few big Hollywood movies. Which were directed by Spielberg?


Jaws
Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
Raiders of the Lost Ark
ET
Blade Runner
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The Last Samurai
Jurassic Park
Schindler's List
The Hobbit
Saving Private Ryan
AI
Minority Report
Ready Player One







Ready Player One trailer

Interview with Spielberg on VR and Cinema

Listen from 3:15 - 5:33

Main idea:

Which two aspects of cinema does Spielberg feel VR cannot replace?

Discuss

Do you agree that VR can't be a narrative technology? 

Is Spielberg right?

Listen for detail:

Number these words in the order they are used:

protagonist
conventional
undermine
obfuscate
free range
strangers
confined to
movie going
diaspora
short leash
entirely







Check

obfuscate
protagonist
conventional
undermine
free range
strangers
entirely
short leash
confined to
movie going
diaspora





Grammar:

____ we made this film five years from now, we probably could have introduced virtual reality.

What do you notice about the tense used and the time referenced?




 Discuss

1. Do you enjoy writing? What do you get out of it?

2. What makes writing more interesting? What makes it boring?

Extract of a review of Ready Player One:



Do this quiz first:


12 collocations

Try to put these adjectives into the most suitable gaps. Warning - this is quite confusing!

furious        spectacular          striking          dingy          hectic       dazzling             stunning

Steven Spielberg’s 1._____ sci-fi action-adventure, Ready Player One, is set half in the real world and half in virtual reality, so it’s not surprising that two of its characters should discuss the differences between those competing realms. What’s  2.______ is that the characters should have their discussion in the middle of a 3. _____ gun battle in a zero-gravity disco – and yet you can somehow follow both their arguments and the course of the shoot-out.

It’s 4._____ stuff. Recently, a generation of directors has been paying homage to Spielberg’s popcorn films (in Super 8, Jurassic World, and Stranger Things, for example), but with Ready Player One he proves with 5._____ aplomb that no one does Spielberg quite like Spielberg. No one has more empathy with pasty American kids from broken homes. No one packs scenes with so much information, or elaborate action set pieces with so much energy, while ensuring that you always know what’s going on and why.

And Spielberg isn’t just competing with his imitators and his 1980s self. He is blasting his way into the 21st Century. As his  6.______ film travels back and forth between a 7.____ Orwellian dystopia and a computer-generated dream world, he stampedes across territory occupied by Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis, not to mention the directors of The Lego Movie. He isn’t just making this territory his own, but demonstrating that it was his all along.

Discuss:

1. What is different about the adjectives I removed and the ones I made bold?

2. What in the end, was the most suitable arrangement of the adjectives? Did you learn something by figuring this out? What exactly?

Which selection from the text illustrates the the reviewer’s key point?

A) a generation of directors has been paying homage to Spielberg’s popcorn films
B) He isn’t just making this territory his own, but demonstrating that it was his all along.
C) he stampedes across territory occupied by Terry Gilliam, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis,

 Try to put these adjectives / participles into the right gaps.

Adapted from        higgledy-piggledy      orphaned         rundown       infinite     vertiginous

 7.__________ the best-selling novel by Ernest Cline, and scripted by Cline and Zak Penn, Ready Player One is set in the year 2045. Its 8.______ hero, Wade (Tye Sheridan), lives in a grey Ohio ghetto called The Stacks, where  9._________ skyscrapers are made of mobile homes piled on top of each other and held together with scaffolding. This opening setting would be enough to occupy most films, but no sooner have we glimpsed Wade’s 10.______ home than he slips on his VR gloves and helmet and flits across to the OASIS, an online role-playing game.

Most of the population passes most of its time in this game, it seems. The America of 2045 is so 11.______ that it makes sense to cross over to an 12.______ digital wonderland where you can live in every film you’ve ever seen.

Analysis:

Each of the things in bold is kind set formula that is constantly used in this kind of writing.

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Ernest Cline, and scripted by Cline and Zak Penn, Ready Player One is set in the year 2045. Its orphaned hero, Wade (Tye Sheridan), lives in a grey Ohio ghetto called The Stacks, where higgledy-piggledy skyscrapers are made of mobile homes piled on top of each other and held together with scaffolding. This opening setting would be enough to occupy most films, but no sooner have we glimpsed Wade’s vertiginous home than he slips on his VR gloves and helmet and flits across to the OASIS, an online role-playing game.

They all have the same purpose really: to pack the information in tightly and to link it smoothly. In contemporary English it's often seen as "good writing" to be able to condense your ideas efficiently. Why do you think this is?

Do you think it would be the same for Spanish, French or German?