Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

like about 60% of Skull too

xp

Doom was made around both SS & GL bustups, yes

Heart being ripped out in TOD kinda obvious as a divorce metaphor

Or guy tearing off his own face.

Or the old lady getting launched out of a second-story window.

or Molo Ram and his secret trap door under Kali.

Slim Pickens trying to defecate in 1941

Spielberg cut his teeth in one kind of genre thriller or another, his upping the ante a bit in the era of the slasher film shouldn't require all that psychohistory.

i agree w/ that.

i think of the '80s as his peak but as much for the films he produced as those he directed (with poltergeist in an ambiguous category)--if not for spielberg, certainly no E.T./Indiana Jones films but also no Back to the Future, Gremlins, Used Cars, Innerspace....

but I think there are highlights t/o Spielberg's filmography, so i wouldn't want to press the argument too hard. IMO Jurassic Park, Catch Me if You Can, War of the Worlds... these are all peaks of one kind or another. Jurassic Park may be the most emblematic Spielberg achievement.

and thanks for that bob gale interview, always nice to hear from the other half of the team that made Back to the Future/Used Cars/etc.

duh, I forgot to mention Jaws. i guess i was thinking 80s and later.

difficult listening hour is a marvelous proselytizer for the glories of JP.

I had to ask Lucas about the heart. The metaphor seemed too perfect. Is that your heart being ripped out? I asked. “Yeah,” Lucas said, but he insisted the glee with which it was ripped out was Spielberg’s.

from some Grantland piece

i always think that Zemeckis took a lot of the premises of Spielberg's cinema and kind of surpassed the master in terms of narrative and stylistic engineering. Spielberg may have caught up on the latter, but never the former; I don't think Spielberg has ever worked with a script as sublimely well-tuned as BttF's, though Jurassic Park might come closest.

Everything Jaws was trying to do, War of the Worlds did way better ... aside from showing restraint, of course.

to be fair I don't know of a better-written popular genre movie script from that period than BttF... Die Hard is beautifully proportioned, though without BttF's filigree.

xpost

I'd say WotW is largely at least as good as Jaws... except for the ending, which even Spielberg can't sell (you could charitably read it as one of those false happy endings, a la Bigger Than Life)

BttF is a sneaky incest-spiced kids' movie that profanes Chuck Berry

Die Hard script >>>> BttF.

Actually, I just watched the latter again this past week with the kids, and for the first time it almost lost me. Just the shitty lighting, and the dumb jokes, and all the dated in a bad way stuff. In the end I and it still rallied, and the kids liked it, but no way would I ever put Zemeckis>>>Spielberg. Zemeckis is much more of a cold stylist. I never get the feeling he has much passion or reverence for the medium. Or for people.

shitty lighting?????

philistines, all of you.

Backlot sitcom lighting. Everything brighter than everything else.

BttF is bad. He made good movies when he thought he was a kid. Then he didn't.

^ strike that and pretend i was high. was talking about spielberg and meant WotW. exit, stage embarrassed...

can't think of any Spielberg movie I like more than Roger Rabbit. Jaws maybe.

clearly BttF would've been better if shot in black and white with a lot of poetic wide-angle shots of empty lots

BttF is a sneaky incest-spiced kids' movie that profanes Chuck Berry

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Friday, February 20, 2015 3:27 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you say that like it's a bad thing!

ppl sticking w/ stuff they loved when they were 12

BttF is a sneaky incest-spiced kids' movie that profanes Chuck Berry

helluva first line for a positive review

Chuck Berry has profaned himself enough.

WOTW is, aside from the Raiders series, Spielberg's absolute best action/thriller/"horror", and I'm including Jaws, which I love. None of his other movies have anywhere near the sustained tension/terror of that one. (Schindler possibly excluded.)

I will stan for pretty much any Spielberg as much as anyone, but movies like Munich are playing an entirely different game, and doing it a lot better.

it's amazing how those two movies he released in one year

Jeez, I forgot he pulled a JP/Schindler with those two.

ppl sticking w/ stuff they loved when they were 12

Says the wheeler and wuzzle fan.

Zemeckis may well be a cold stylist. His best movie is the ice cold Death Becomes Her.

The quotes upthread: you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

weird to say "cold stylist" when "used cars" and "back to the future" are so funny (and the style of the former is pretty loose). i think bob gale is an important factor.

Recently saw Roger Rabbit for the first time in ages and it was a drag.

yr a drag

People Thanked Most Often In Oscar Speeches:

Steven Spielberg (thanked 42 times)
Harvey Weinstein (thanked 34 times)
James Cameron (thanked 28 times)
George Lucas (thanked 23 times)
Peter Jackson (thanked 22 times)
God (thanked 19 times)

god's done some terrible things but he's no peter jackson

God is neither as fat nor as wrathful as Harvey Weinstein

xpost Seriously, I was so excited to see it again. But it was so clearly constructed around its insane practical effects that everything that wasn't animate was practically, well, inanimate.

I used to like Romancing the Stone, maybe I should watch that again. At the very least it's a movie where everyone is clearly having fun (or at least cocaine) and not just some exercise in tech R&D, which is what hurts a lot of his movies. And he's even worse with endings than (more recent) Spielberg.

yeah but Kathleen Turner

the coke movie is The Jewel of the Nile, which also boasts a Billy Ocean theme song with the leads in white suits as the Temptations.

shit i better watch War Of The Worlds i guess as it gets a ton of ILX luv.

Keeping in mind that I have very idiosyncratic tastes in this stuff.

WotW is great until Tim Robbins turns up.

Otm

Thanks, Alfred, for getting When The Going Gets Tough stuck in my head.

Spielberg will be directing Jennifer Lawrence in an adaptation of Lynsey Addario’s widely acclaimed memoir, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War.

Addario tells the story of becoming a photojournalist after being inspired by a Sebastião Salgado exhibition, before getting her big break documenting life as a woman under the Taliban – a story that gained global significance following 9/11. She subsequently reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Congo and Libya; she was kidnapped in the latter country by Gaddafi’s army, her driver was killed, and she was threatened with murder and rape. After her kidnap ordeal, she returned to her husband, started a family, and took a step back from the frontline.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/03/steven-spielberg-jennifer-lawrence-war-photographer-lynsey-addario-its-what-i-do

they keep casting jennifer lawrence as woman at least a decade older... i guess she's box-office.