Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

Wrong again, bye.

One for the lovers and the haters: Spielberg in 30 shots

Spielberg so great that even the 3 seconds of "BFG" from the goddamn trailer seems worthy among those clips.

it's possible that some of the material shot for the trailer will be reused in the movie tho

"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

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.

always loved that rise/pull-back as indy regards the idol

a man putting something in context

empire of the sun shot rly something too, almost too much something

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

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/

Watched "Empire of the Sun" with my older daughter. Maybe goes overboard with the dramatic crane reveals, but what an immaculately crafted film.

In the top three Spielberg films, for me.

mine too

P51 MUSTANG CADILLAC OF THE SKY

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

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=05&year=2016#showing-45800

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?

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

ha, that is great

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.)

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

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.”

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

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.

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.

http://variety.com/2017/film/columns/steven-spielberg-the-post-pentagon-papers-1202006970/

Promising--I'd be content if it's 85% as good as All the President's Men..

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.

is... he saying he wanted to fuck an alien in a porta potty?

he wanted one for his very own, like Elliott.

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.

Murray Hamilton's continuing exhaustion with Eddie Deezen is a synechdoche for the movie itself do u see

as someone pointed out, both Deezen and his dummy are 'doing' Jerry Lewis

Separately...hmm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbSfX3OnQy4

40th Anniversary re-release?

i'm assuming/hoping that's a 40th-anniversary reissue teaser rather than the announcement of a close encounters cinematic universe

or heaven forbid a sequel

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind? Close Encounters of the Second Third Kind?

The Adventures of Richard Dreyfuss Across the 8th Dimension

Close Encounters of the Second Kind, wherein we learn how they became close encounters.

closer encounters of the third kind

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

First look at Ready Player One.

oooof, I was hoping that'd prove to be one of his vaporware projects

Only possible silver lining here is that Cline is such an absolutely god-awful writer that Spielberg can only make the material better. Maybe?

Took me a second to realize what I was watching was the auto-play Toyota ad and not a trailer.

Some confirmation that Spielberg directed Poltergeist.

Peter Benchley was a lousy writer too, i think

xpost I mean, there was never really much question in my mind. It's not like any other Hooper film I've seen, but it's super Spielbergian.

filmmakers have been known to produce something different when they get the biggest budget of their lives... and Spielberg was always credited with the story and as co-writer.

The clearest proof that Spielberg did the heavy lifting (beyond being involved in every single step of the production) is that so many of Hooper's movies both before and after are virtually inept, with the almost accidental brilliance of "Chainsaw." I mean, on either side of "Poltergeist" is "Eaten Alive" and "Lifeforce," which both suuuuuuck. Just about everything he's done has been ugly and sloppy, with the glaring exception of machine-precise "Poltergeist."