It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson here with Genevieve Kovsky.

And Scott Tobias.

Keith has been temporarily de-res due to a minor programming glitch here, but he says he still has some quarters, so he'll podcast next time with whoever wins today's conversation.

Here on the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum, and that all

culture is more interesting in context. So every other week, we get together to talk over a classic

film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we're going into the mysterious

high-tech world of computers to see what video games are like from the inside.

Scott, you're my player too in this conversation. Tell us about this week's pairing.

Yes.

Steven Spielberg's new action-adventure movie Ready Player 1 mostly takes place inside a virtual world called

The Oasis, where anyone with an online connection in a VR helmet can live out their fantasies and escape the ugliness of a deteriorating real world.

But the designer of the Oasis has died, and a former intern at his company is trying to take over the virtual world and commercialize it,

turning it from a public playground into a private cash cow. A group of young players are on a quest to find the hidden keys to the kingdom and win the rights to control the oasis,

and that quest looks an awful lot like playing a giant, free-form, puzzle-solving video game.

All of which reminded us a lot of the 1982 Disney movie Tron, which also has a greedy corporate overlord, sees in control of the virtual world of

video games from its original designer, and a scrappy group of players fighting back from inside the computer.

In Tron, though, the takeover is already complete, and the people on the quest are mostly computer programs,

fighting for freedom on behalf of the programmers who design them.

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