Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

A.I.

lincoln is pretty ambiguous and quite dark in some ways imo

yeah, Munich isn't as ambitious as his early genre films! whaaa?

I should watch AI again. I recall being disappointed, but maybe years removed from having to wonder what Kubrick would have done will make it easier to watch with fresh eyes.

AI is heartbreaking in a really ambitious sorry of way imo. Like, equally smart and sentimental.

Kubrick gave AI to Spielberg (w/ same basic scenario), his death is not the reason he didn't direct it. (years of posts about this if you need em)

AI is chilly as hell, the sheen of spielberg's sentimentality just makes it even more brutal

wheeeeeere is the sentimentality in that film?

in the fake feelgood ending

You've gotta be kidding. Do you understand what's even happening in it?

It's also in the Kubrick treatment, every bit of it.

AI

The think AI is hardcore cold, but it's pervaded by at least an eerie simulacrum of (not a pejorative) sentimentality. I mean, it is about a lost child looking for his mother, guided in part by his teddy bear ...

Also one of the few movies to consistently reduce me to tears.

Boy, I can't remember anything about Catch Me if You Can beyond the title sequence (which was great).

It's pretty good! It's got one of the few great recent non-kooky Walken roles.

Josh otm about the simulacrum of sentimentality. Munich also boasts a queasy, compelling tonal mixture. His late pictures have been fascinating even when they don't fully succeed.

Will check AI this wkd again, because I would certainly *like* to like it. Funny, CMIYC was probably the last Spielberg I enjoyed straight away (and have to back to Jurassic Park before that), even if I didn't think it was a "great" film.

I am open to re-evaluation, if it means Morbs will be nice to me..

― Jonathan Hellion Mumble, Friday, January 29, 2016 12:59 PM (1 hour ago)

I generally value Morbs' contrarianism on this site, but you're chasing a holy grail that just don't exist, man...

it's contrarianism to believe Spielberg is a great filmmaker?

Part of being a great anything, I think, is to include mystifying and garish passages in your work.

No, I meant his general ilx curmudgeonliness. I agree with him on Spielberg.

http://www.sembo.se/media/8238016/nice_950x350_top.jpg

i'm generally a spielbs fan but holy wow has he produced some bad shit over the past fifteen years. he's had a pretty decent directorial run, though i missed his one-two punch of tin tin and war horse.

Tin Tin was fun. I couldn't get through War Horse.

Best Spielberg = 'Murder by the Book'

i had some problems with Munich but overall it's a pretty essential film in the '70s geopolitics/terrorism genre. that and Carlos are sort of the ultimate double feature.

War of the Worlds has some "eh" moments but it's just generally great

xxpost

Haha! Not even that great of a Columbo episode, alas.

AI
Catch Me If You Can
The Terminal
WOTW
Munich
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
War Horse
Tin Tin
Lincoln
Bridge of Spies

Only one of those movies looks like it's running in place (and I don't care for The Terminal). They've all got flaws of one sort. Still, an amazing new millennium run.

Tin Tin was so much better than I expected, tons of fun. Loved Lincoln and AI. CMIYC also tons of fun. I forgot to see The Terminal and haven't seen the new one, but seriously, if that list is supposed to mark his fall, man, what a fall. Because even the flawed ones are majority solid, imo. Like, WOTW, what it gets wrong it gets so wrong that it pushes the illusion it's not a good film, but that's just maybe 20% of it - the very end and Tim Robbins. Because the rest is really, really strong. (see also: Minority Report).

Spielberg is so good that he's entered the high standard trap. "Yeah, the first 10 or so movies he made were almost all great, with many iconic masterpieces, and several of the films he produced in that era are almost as good, and sure, the next 10 or so movies have had their share of masterpieces and icons, and yeah, sometimes he was working so fast he released a film a year, sometimes two films in a single year, and OK, most of his recent output has been really solid, too, sometimes great, and even when he's off his films are rarely less than confident and competent, and almost always worthwhile, but other than that, what has he done?"

yeah, I forgot Minority Report! What a run.

Privileging early Spielberg above mid-late Spielberg just sounds like millennials goin' OH I WATCHED INDY, JAWS AND E.T. A HUNDRED TIMES WHEN I WAS 8

I saw all those plus CE3K in their theatrical runs and was happy. Then I grew up and so did he (tho E.T. is already a rich work for adults).

I'm not sure I'd privilege early Spielberg, per se, just that his initial run is pretty unimpeachable. It's not until the 90s that he has his first real misses (Hook, Lost World) and even the latter there has its moments. But certainly his mid to later career is every bit worthy of discussion/thought/debate as his initial stuff. He's like Hitchcock in that regard.

Always was released in 1989.

Ooh, yeah, forgot about that one.

btw the 21st-c thing of his i hate most is the last 20 minutes of Minority Report. Truly like a bad Columbo episode.

It's not until the 90s that he has his first real misses

um, no. i found The Color Purple so mortifying i've never been able to rewatch in 30 years. And i don't quarrel with 1941-abuse THAT much.

(re TCP: adapting a novel in exactly the wrong way)

Yeah, I'm not a fan, but I think that might be my taste. It's certainly well made and acted, iirc.

haven't even seen it once

get with the millennium morbs, we like jurassic park

You've gotta be kidding. Do you understand what's even happening in it?

yeah, this. the ending is nearly as devastating as anything in an ozu film! it's brutal and terrifyingly sad.

otm

I think the only flaw of AI, really, is designing the future-robots to look too similar to past Spielberg/movie aliens. It's definitely a little confusing, especially for a film that's already put its viewers through the emotional ringer.

This is pretty good on AI: http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/335/6_ai_artificial_intelligence

Often feel one of Spielberg's greatest lifts from the Classical Hollywood era is his ability to smuggle in darker or ambivalent themes into his films while maintaining a more obvious (melo)dramatic sheen.

Watched AI again over the weekend (after screening Jaws and Close Encounters), and sorry to say it didn't seem better on second viewing. There are some basic aspects of it that I don't like -- thin character development, fairly ridiculous logistical details like Joe and David being able to pilot the helicopter/submarine, bad use of narration -- but the main issue I have is that it doesn't actually have anything interesting to say about artificial intelligence. It really did just seem like a Pinocchio story in sci-fi clothes to me. Granted, there were a couple of scenes that tugged on the heartstrings (particularly the one where Monica leaves David in the woods), but by the end of it, I was not only unmoved, but genuinely happy that it was finally over after what seemed like a completely unnecessary, story-arc/momentum-killing coda.

I'm sure I will lose any of you who like this movie (esp the ending) with that statement. I can't overlook it: the ending took what might have been a decent-to-good modern adaptation of Pinocchio and turned it into a maudlin B-movie. I can't find any reason why that ending *had* to happen, other than to give the *appearance of* a happy ending, or one last chance to tug on the heartstrings. Otherwise, fading out with David and Teddy stuck underwater staring at the fairy statue perfectly closes out the story arc, and gives the film a sadly poetic ending to boot.

And not coincidentally, this is my primary gripe with (late) Spielberg -- he seems unable to make a movie that doesn't conform to old school Hollywood cliché, at the expense of a story that could otherwise be interesting and thought-provoking. Terry Gilliam said it another way, and I paraphrase-- "Spielberg movies give you answers, Kubrick's makes you ask questions."

Heh. The hermetic let's-prove-this-thesis-statement approach to filmmaking is what often repels me about Kubrick, who often directs as if he's going to try, dammit, to force feed the answers.

Nearly 1000 posts on this thread - looks like a must read.

I think the AI advance in the movie is not that science has made a human replica, it's that science has made a creation that is not physically or intellectually but emotionally more human than human. Uncorrupted, unconditional love. Time and time again in the film, he is exposed to the shittiness of human existence. And his reward is an eternity of loneliness while society falls apart around him.

But I'd argue that uncorrupted, unconditional love *isn't* human -- it's exactly what you'd expect out of something that was designed and programmed. It executes something very well, but it is incapable of the kind of contradiction and second-guessing of a human. (And also -- similar to HAL in 2001 -- seems primarily motived by self-interest.) While David's story was tragic, it was hard for me to feel a lot for "him", because I knew he wasn't human. I knew he wasn't capable of actually realizing how deluded he was. In fact, I couldn't even justify calling him "deluded", because he was completely ruled by his imprint to Monica. You can't have tragedy without the notion that it might have been averted had the hero just realized in time, or made different choices. This hero wasn't capable of doing that, so the movie's arc was in a lot of ways pre-determined and anti-climactic.