I put on Hook while babysitting my niece a year or so ago mostly as an excuse to give it a re-watch, and my god are those Lost Boys sequences painful. Hoffman and Hoskins have some fun scenery-chewy moments, and Charlie Korsmo (remember him from Dick Tracy and What About Bob? ) is actually quite affecting as Williams's son--he's like the Elliott's brother of this film, I guess ('cept I love E.T. and everyone in it)--but the film really is every awful thing that Spielberg's haters accuse him of being.
And The Lost World is even worse, though for different reasons. Probably the only Spielberg film that can honestly be called lazy.
― pitchforkian at best (cryptosicko), Monday, 22 February 2016 03:35 (eight years ago) link
Close Encounters is my favorite film of his after Raiders. Apparently he's slated to direct the film adaptation of Ready Player One??!
― octobeard, Monday, 22 February 2016 05:30 (eight years ago) link
The BFG looks to be even more of a disaster than Tintin
― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Monday, 22 February 2016 12:34 (eight years ago) link
General Observation: WHY ARE ALL THESE FILMS SO LONG?
and bad.
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 22 February 2016 12:46 (eight years ago) link
delete thread? just til you ppl learn to watch master filmmakers. Go pick on Zulawski.
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Monday, 22 February 2016 12:57 (eight years ago) link
Wrong again, bye.
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 22 February 2016 13:15 (eight years ago) link
One for the lovers and the haters: Spielberg in 30 shots
― T.L.O.P.son (Phil D.), Friday, 4 March 2016 17:58 (eight years ago) link
Spielberg so great that even the 3 seconds of "BFG" from the goddamn trailer seems worthy among those clips.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 4 March 2016 18:14 (eight years ago) link
it's possible that some of the material shot for the trailer will be reused in the movie tho
― leet gentlemen's club (contenderizer), Friday, 4 March 2016 18:26 (eight years ago) link
"omg iconic amazing" dropoff about halfway through that thing is pretty decisive
tall hat, cgi tintin & pensive horse not quite holding up against scheider dolly zoom, etc
― leet gentlemen's club (contenderizer), Friday, 4 March 2016 18:31 (eight years ago) link
u mad, tintin chase sequence is as good as anything in the Raiders movies. Agreed that's a bad choice from War Horse, though. Better shot would be the British cavalry riding into the German machine guns and the riderless horses appearing in shot on the other side.
― T.L.O.P.son (Phil D.), Friday, 4 March 2016 19:27 (eight years ago) link
always loved that rise/pull-back as indy regards the idol
― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Friday, 4 March 2016 19:33 (eight years ago) link
a man putting something in context
empire of the sun shot rly something too, almost too much something
― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Friday, 4 March 2016 19:36 (eight years ago) link
btw somehow NYC is getting to see a new 35mm print of Close Encounters from the late '90s 'director's cut,' which is an amalgam of '77/80 but no goddamn starship interior, hooray.
http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2016/04/22/detail/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 4 March 2016 19:58 (eight years ago) link
Ian Freer on Spielberg and the Amblinification of modern movies:
But there is something in the films themselves beyond nostalgia that makes them resonate today. Unlike many modern films aimed at a family audience, Amblin – named after the 1968 short Spielberg made as a calling card – created genre flicks that didn’t pull their punches. Gremlins had a gleefully malicious streak – in one scene a gremlin is ground in a blender and exploded in a microwave – that lead to the creation of a new US rating, the PG-13, and felt edgy compared to the more anodyne feel of contemporary family films. But they also didn’t shy away from messy experience. Refusing to talk down to audiences, Spielberg created a whole sub-genre of sci-fi as autobiography, using fantasy as a means to smuggle in tough emotional truths delivered with finesse and telling detail.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/midnight-special/steven-spielberg-jeff-nichols-80s-movies/
― painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture (DavidM), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:15 (eight years ago) link
Watched "Empire of the Sun" with my older daughter. Maybe goes overboard with the dramatic crane reveals, but what an immaculately crafted film.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 8 April 2016 21:23 (eight years ago) link
In the top three Spielberg films, for me.
― painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture (DavidM), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:30 (eight years ago) link
mine too
P51 MUSTANG CADILLAC OF THE SKY
― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:32 (eight years ago) link
There's a JG Ballard series coming up here where they're screening EotS, and the program notes say they're including it as a botched adaptation. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:33 (eight years ago) link
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=05&year=2016#showing-45800
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:36 (eight years ago) link
that's interesting -- from what i remember of both the book and the film there are some sizable tonal differences at times, but "botched" doesn't seem right. did ballard himself not like the movie?
― tylerw, Friday, 8 April 2016 21:37 (eight years ago) link
here's what he wrote!
I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: "But they're actors."
Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live - and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp - the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/04/fiction.film
― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Friday, 8 April 2016 21:40 (eight years ago) link
ha, that is great
― tylerw, Friday, 8 April 2016 21:42 (eight years ago) link
FWIW, for a director so closely associated with families, EotS - along with ET and AI - are his only three told more or less exclusively from the perspective of the child, right? Anyway, "Empire" has stuck with me since its release. Some truly incredible shots. (And a fleeting Ben Stiller.)
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 8 April 2016 21:42 (eight years ago) link
turned 70 three weeks ago
Molly Haskell has a book on his oeuvre out... including her commentary on 'the Shrieking Female' in the films.
https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/molly-haskell-steven-spielberg
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 10 January 2017 17:45 (seven years ago) link
Tom Shone writes about the Molly Haskell book, and Spielberg's view of masculinity:
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/if-you-think-spielberg-cant-do-women-youre-missing-his-point-about-men
“Haskell is on to something, but only if you turn it 180 degrees. What is critiqued in Jaws is precisely the masculinity that she claims sets the film’s Robert Bly-ish ideological agenda. Refusing to cast Charlton Heston in his film because he seemed too heroic, Spielberg chose as his heroes a physical coward, afraid of the water, fretting over his appendectomy scar, and a Jewish intellectual, crushing his styrofoam cup in a sarcastic riposte to Robert Shaw’s bare-chested Hemingway act. Throughout the film and his career, Spielberg sets up machismo as a lumbering force to be outmanoeuvred by the nimble and quick-witted. His films are badminton, not tennis. Their signature mood is one of buoyancy; his jokes are as light as air. He’s a king of the drop shot.”
― painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture (DavidM), Sunday, 22 January 2017 22:15 (seven years ago) link
Rewatching Lincoln for the however-many-eth time. The scene with the two telegraph operators, ruminating on equality while composing his telegram to Grant, it is still such a thing of beauty to me - so much crammed into that scene
― Flamenco Drop (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 23 January 2017 02:11 (seven years ago) link
Something Evil's good! I know I saw it as a kid when it originally aired (1972)--guarantee that I covered my eyes for half of it--and that Johnny Whitaker left some kind of a lasting impression that was reawakened the first time he appears. Watching it today, I honestly found it creepier than either It Follows or The Witch. Towards the end, amazing how much of a blueprint it was for The Exorcist a year later.
― clemenza, Tuesday, 28 March 2017 03:56 (seven years ago) link
Was wondering what our Steve was up to, especially post BFG flop, and ... it's "The Post," a Pentagon Papers movie.
I got a shiver of anticipation when I read the announcement on Monday that Steven Spielberg would direct “The Post,” a drama about The Washington Post’s role in exposing the Pentagon Papers, starring Tom Hanks as the fabled Post editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham. Set in 1971, the movie will center on the paper’s war with the White House over whether the Post had the right to publish the top-secret military documents — first leaked to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg — that charted the escalation and futility of the Vietnam War. I have no idea if Spielberg has been mulling this movie over for a while (the rights were bought by producer Amy Pascal last fall), but everything about the timing suggests that it’s no coincidence the announcement was made 45 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump. “The Post” is clearly a film that Spielberg wants to make because he sees it as a parable of today: a high-stakes political drama of secrecy, lies, and leaks, and the rights and responsibilities of a free press. The parallels could hardly by more incendiary.That’s why it’s a fast-track movie. “The Post” is scheduled to begin shooting in May and to be released later on this year, even as Spielberg is in the midst of post-production on his dystopian climate-change sci-fi epic, “Ready Player One,” and has had to push back another project he’s already at work on, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” (starring Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance). Spielberg has a pattern of turning into a master juggler when he takes on a drama of historical import. He completed “Jurassic Park” the same year — 1993 — that he shot, edited, and released “Schindler’s List,” and he repeated the pattern, in 2005, with “The War of the Worlds” and “Munich.” It’s fascinating to think that Spielberg makes his topical-urgency movies on such a breakneck schedule, because that’s probably part of what gives them their history-written-with-lightning quality.
That’s why it’s a fast-track movie. “The Post” is scheduled to begin shooting in May and to be released later on this year, even as Spielberg is in the midst of post-production on his dystopian climate-change sci-fi epic, “Ready Player One,” and has had to push back another project he’s already at work on, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” (starring Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance). Spielberg has a pattern of turning into a master juggler when he takes on a drama of historical import. He completed “Jurassic Park” the same year — 1993 — that he shot, edited, and released “Schindler’s List,” and he repeated the pattern, in 2005, with “The War of the Worlds” and “Munich.” It’s fascinating to think that Spielberg makes his topical-urgency movies on such a breakneck schedule, because that’s probably part of what gives them their history-written-with-lightning quality.
http://variety.com/2017/film/columns/steven-spielberg-the-post-pentagon-papers-1202006970/
― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 30 May 2017 19:50 (six years ago) link
Promising--I'd be content if it's 85% as good as All the President's Men..
― clemenza, Tuesday, 30 May 2017 21:54 (six years ago) link
From Lance Henriksen's "Random Roles" on The AV Club today:
AVC: How much interaction did you have with Francois Truffaut?LH: A lot. I was on that movie almost six months!AVC: I was wondering. It’s not a massive part, but it’s a sprawling film.LH: Well, remember, I was very young as a movie actor, you know? [Snorts.] What the fuck is a movie actor? But, anyway, I was a young actor, and I was just happy to be there. I really was.Truffaut was a funny guy. He was a really nice guy. And I was fumbling all over the fucking place, and nobody noticed. I remember I walked up to Spielberg and said, “Steven, I want to capture one of these little aliens and drag him into a Porta Potty. I’ll throw my coat over him and drag him in there, and we’ll have one.” And he looked at me like… He looked at me incredulously. Like, “What the fuck?” Finally he said to me, “That’s a different movie.” I said, “Oh…” [Laughs.] Good people on that film, man. I’ve been around a lot of talented people. And I didn’t know what talent was! But a little of the shit rubs off on you, and you start gaining your education.I remember Spielberg wanted candy glass on all the modules on the big set that we were working on—you know, when the windows all blow out from the signal from the mother ship?—and he took the money out of his own pocket and bought it. It was thousands of dollars. These are passionate people who say, “I’ve got to have what I know will work.” So, yeah, that was a great experience. It really was.
LH: A lot. I was on that movie almost six months!
AVC: I was wondering. It’s not a massive part, but it’s a sprawling film.
LH: Well, remember, I was very young as a movie actor, you know? [Snorts.] What the fuck is a movie actor? But, anyway, I was a young actor, and I was just happy to be there. I really was.
Truffaut was a funny guy. He was a really nice guy. And I was fumbling all over the fucking place, and nobody noticed. I remember I walked up to Spielberg and said, “Steven, I want to capture one of these little aliens and drag him into a Porta Potty. I’ll throw my coat over him and drag him in there, and we’ll have one.” And he looked at me like… He looked at me incredulously. Like, “What the fuck?” Finally he said to me, “That’s a different movie.” I said, “Oh…” [Laughs.] Good people on that film, man. I’ve been around a lot of talented people. And I didn’t know what talent was! But a little of the shit rubs off on you, and you start gaining your education.
I remember Spielberg wanted candy glass on all the modules on the big set that we were working on—you know, when the windows all blow out from the signal from the mother ship?—and he took the money out of his own pocket and bought it. It was thousands of dollars. These are passionate people who say, “I’ve got to have what I know will work.” So, yeah, that was a great experience. It really was.
― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Tuesday, 27 June 2017 14:19 (six years ago) link
is... he saying he wanted to fuck an alien in a porta potty?
― circa1916, Tuesday, 27 June 2017 14:31 (six years ago) link
he wanted one for his very own, like Elliott.
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 27 June 2017 14:39 (six years ago) link
1941 is at least as funny as It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, I think. That is, about half the time. Belushi is pretty much Bluto in a plane, and the Tim Matheson-Nancy Allen mile-high plot is lame, but the rest of it is mostly agreeably misanthropic, if exhausting. The actors are funnier than the comedians: Robert Stack, Lionel Stander, Warren Oates.
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Monday, 3 July 2017 03:57 (six years ago) link
Murray Hamilton's continuing exhaustion with Eddie Deezen is a synechdoche for the movie itself do u see
― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Monday, 3 July 2017 15:12 (six years ago) link
as someone pointed out, both Deezen and his dummy are 'doing' Jerry Lewis
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Monday, 3 July 2017 15:14 (six years ago) link
Separately...hmm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbSfX3OnQy4
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 5 July 2017 16:19 (six years ago) link
40th Anniversary re-release?
― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 5 July 2017 16:27 (six years ago) link
i'm assuming/hoping that's a 40th-anniversary reissue teaser rather than the announcement of a close encounters cinematic universe
― bitumen: the animated series (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 16:27 (six years ago) link
or heaven forbid a sequel
― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:16 (six years ago) link
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind? Close Encounters of the Second Third Kind?
― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:29 (six years ago) link
The Adventures of Richard Dreyfuss Across the 8th Dimension
― Cannibal Adderley (WilliamC), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:32 (six years ago) link
Close Encounters of the Second Kind, wherein we learn how they became close encounters.
― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:32 (six years ago) link
closer encounters of the third kind
― bitumen: the animated series (bizarro gazzara), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:38 (six years ago) link
yes, a weeklong re-release in Sept
http://variety.com/2017/film/news/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind-teaser-trailer-mystery-ufo-1202487286/
there IS a "fourth kind"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Kind
― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 5 July 2017 19:40 (six years ago) link
First look at Ready Player One.
― some sad trombone Twilight Zone shit (cryptosicko), Friday, 14 July 2017 17:28 (six years ago) link
oooof, I was hoping that'd prove to be one of his vaporware projects
― ﴿→ ☺ (Doctor Casino), Friday, 14 July 2017 17:31 (six years ago) link
Only possible silver lining here is that Cline is such an absolutely god-awful writer that Spielberg can only make the material better. Maybe?
― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Friday, 14 July 2017 17:38 (six years ago) link
Took me a second to realize what I was watching was the auto-play Toyota ad and not a trailer.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 14 July 2017 18:18 (six years ago) link