Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

I think by far the best work to come out of Dreamworks' WWII productions was Eastwood's diptych in 2006. They need to be seen together, ideally Letters from Iwo Jima first (though it was released the other way around). It was fashionable to knock Flags of Our Fathers as being the lesser of the two and uneven, but conceptually it's brilliant and a necessary film as it addresses one potential issue with Iwo Jima (it had been criticized in some circles for watering down the atrocities of the Japanese - I personally disagree but it does bring up the power images/cinema has of potentially re-writing history, the core idea of Flags of Our Fathers).

Jurassic park is a pile of shit

Nah, it's a competent film with flashes of brilliance, and fun to watch with kids of a certain age (say 13-21).

omar otm

Plus the mission/dilemma presented to the squad in SPR just rings so false to me. I just didn't believe it would be done

It's also so unbelievably compressed. They get their mission, and then the next scene are already all "screw this Ryan guy," and then with annoying regularity interrupt things with further surface deep debates about Ryan, like he's this mythic Kurtz figure or something. It's so phony and pro forma. So are the many scenes of Hanks' hands shaking. Like, we get it, and it's effective, but not when you have a scene that is literally his hand shaking, then a reaction from one of his men, then his hand shaking, then a different man, then his hand, then another man, and so on. Just to show that they all see his hand, you know? And then they get to Ryan, and Ryan sees his hand shaking, too. Did you notice his hand was shaking? Because war.

Also hate how Jeremy Davies is handled in it. In the final battle he's depicted as a full-on frozen-in-place coward, which is fine, but there's been no indication of this tendency before this. He's been in battle and killing, he's been in tough spots before. Like, you know, D-Day. He's been a participant, and then suddenly, nope, shaking in his boots. Same with Matt Damon, who gets his own silent breakdown shot at the end. These are people that have been in midst of things for weeks and months, brave dudes that have already displayed their bravery. But for the sake of the movie's phoniness we need some breakdowns to balance out the overt bravery of Hanks, Sizemore, Pepper and I guess most of the rest.

Ebert, in his review, singles out Davies as "the key performance," but that's bullshit. Just as he (imo) misses the point when he says of "Thin Red Line" that "John Travolta and George Clooney are onscreen so briefly they don't have time to seem like anything other than guest stars," or that "the soldiers are not well-developed as individual characters. Covered in grime and blood, they look much alike, and we strain to hear their names, barked out mostly in one syllable (Welsh, Fife, Tall, Witt, Gaff, Bosche, Bell, Keck, Staros). Sometimes during an action we are not sure who we are watching, and have to piece it together afterward." He admits war is probably like that, but chalks it up to Malick's disinterest in the characters, rather than, as the movie itself often asserts, his hypothesis of humanity as an almost interchangeable collective that shares a single soul.

Also hate how Jeremy Davies is handled in it. In the final battle he's depicted as a full-on frozen-in-place coward, which is fine, but there's been no indication of this tendency before this. He's been in battle and killing, he's been in tough spots before. Like, you know, D-Day. He's been a participant, and then suddenly, nope, shaking in his boots.

Yes. But at the end of the movie his sole job is running ammo to the people who are handling the weapons. At least until he finally, belatedly picks one up for his "war is hell, do you see?" moment.

xxp The film even quotes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath ("A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody" or in the case of The Thin Red Line, "Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man. One big self.") Hell, it's in the TRAILER. I liked Ebert as a person, he writes well about other things in life, but his film reviews could be pretty awful, especially when it seemed like he was looking for one and only one reason to dismiss a whole film. There's an interview with Steven Soderbergh where Ebert tells him point blank he didn't like Erin Brockovich and Soderbergh, who doesn't get worked up and is genuinely curious, asks why. Ebert's response is simply "there's too much cleavage." And Soderbergh is just waiting for more, but when that's clearly all Ebert as to offer, he's like "okay...."

I just watched again, I guess he stresses that he's never been in combat before, but I took that to mean he's never shot a gun since basic training, though he's certainly been *around* combat. I suppose the distinction can be made that being in the midst of things is different from being on the periphery, but I think if he was an actual freeze in place coward we would have seen it foreshadowed earlier in the film. You know, like Hanks' hands shaking. Though iirc that hand shaking has no payoff at all.

The weird thing about Ebert is that he often really gets a lot of things that other people miss, but when he himself misses things, he misses big.

im confused as to how frustrating is being used almost as praise for spielberg above

agreed that SPR has always been competent (the very high end of competent) but hugely uninspired, BOB beats it in every way bar the big opening sequence (which wouldn't fit into the BOB approach anyway).

TTRL is otoh a masterpiece imo

Excellent point, JiC.

erin brokovich sold itself on the cleavage and i think its a valid reason to seinfeld pass altogether tbf

They're called boobs, Ed.

Ebert, who famously didn't award many negative reviews, embarrassed himself with that Erin Brockovich review, which I watched live on their show. Of course he fawned over the crap Traffic because it was An Important Film.

theres room for both to be bad but the important point stands that the reviews were in and of themselves bad also i guess

what did he make of americas sweethearts

Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a pile of shit
CGI makes me sick

theres room for both to be bad but the important point stands that the reviews were in and of themselves bad also i guess

what did he make of americas sweethearts

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

ftr Erin Brockovich is top Soderbergh and almost a great movie.

i may well yet watch it based on that good word

Julia Roberts-Albert Finney chemistry is tops imo

Just watched EB for the first time a couple weeks ago. It's good. Finney is great.

Soderbergh at his best. The legal conundrum is clear. He doesn't condescend to the working-class characters. He enables a star to give her best performance to date.

ftr in addition to being a masterpiece jurassic park is in its treatment of desire/obsession/art/movies a direct spiritual sequel to close encounters: equally beautiful but less childish

alfred otm about ebert review of brokovich: "the costume design sinks this movie"

Would watch a movie of Finney and Roberts in crap clothes and eating worse fast food as they debate legal strategy:

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

Soderbergh is the best genre director working today, I think. His thrillers and crime movies are frequently amazing and never fail to get the job done.

Someone mentioned Fuller upthread; The Big Red One (the restored version that's available on DVD) is better than Saving Private Ryan. I haven't seen The Thin Red Line. The only Malick movies I've seen are Badlands and The New World.

ftr Erin Brockovich is top Soderbergh and almost a great movie.

I had never gotten around to it but watched it on a transatlantic flight this summer and found it entirely satisfying. All a bit Hollywoodized of course, but with that light Soderbergh touch that his good stuff has. I agree about the Roberts-Finney chemistry, very likable on both sides.

there was an amusing cut scene where Brockovich had just gotten fired and was taking her stuff out and said "any of you cunts want to help me carry this shit?", but they cut it cos it was 'too much'

Erin Brockovich was by a considerable length the best movie up for the best picture Oscar that year

And if we're to the point of saying Flags of Our Fathers is superior to Saving Private Ryan, sorry, disembarking this train

The weird thing about Ebert is that he often really gets a lot of things that other people miss, but when he himself misses things, he misses big.

This is, for the record, every single film critic ever. Every film critic misses things in an embarrassing way

Erin Brockovich was by a considerable length the best movie up for the best picture Oscar that year

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.),

This.

Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a pile of shit
CGI makes me sick

― earosmith (Neanderthal)

there's actually not that much CGI in Jurassic Park

the majority of the dinosaur shots are animatronic (which is why most of it looks better than today's blockbusters)

I actually love JP but just heard the post in the LFO cadence and ran with it

p much the only one in the series I can even watch. I hate the new Jurassic World series, Lost World was garbage, never saw JP3.

book actually had the balls to kill Hammond though which the movie didn't.

Iirc JP3 was not terrible.

The CGI in Jurassic Park has a majesty and groundedness that is still almost unmatched. It’s a miracle of a film that benefited immensely from Phil Tippett being able to bring in what he had envisioned for stop-mo VFX

Still, I DO wonder what a Joe Dante take on the material could have been like. I’ve also always wanted to read the rejected Malia Stotch Mormo draft of the script, and I should see if the Margaret Herrick Library has a copy

Still, I DO wonder what a Joe Dante take on the material could have been like

Probably not terribly different from Small Soldiers.

I imagine the casting would have been radically different. I’ve wondered why Richard Dreyfuss and William Hurt both turned down the film, although I thought that Hurt didn’t want to work with Spielberg initially because of their close friendship

I’d love to hear some kind of official account regarding longstanding rumors about Dante supervising some of the post-production on The Lost World because of Spielberg’s commitment to Amistad.

i enjoy JP when i'm along for the ride, but it has a problem it shares w/so many other blockbusters post-early New Hollywood blockbusters like the first handful of Spielberg classics, and it's just the broader dumbed-down acting and dialogue. i really can really hear the screenwriting and see the mugging for the back row more over time with a lot of these.

BABIES SMELL

idk Laura Dern and Sam Neil recede into the background if I'm being sinister, or, if I'm feeling generous, are exactly the precise second-tier non-stars (in 1993) a director would want in such a spectacle.

lol god xp

i mean w/Spielberg, imagine how the scene with Indiana Jones, Brody, and the two military intelligence agents at the beginning of Raiders would have been written and directed by the end of the decade. If the Spielberg who made Last Crusade had been in the chair. That's a scene which is eerie, zero comedy, a couple of gov't agents out of their depth who nonetheless aren't dumb and willing to listen to what these two guys have to tell them.

i get what you're saying alfred, i think you're likely more forgiving of some of that than i am, to your credit.

That's a great observation, his ability to put across a scene so silly and pulpy as something that should be taken seriously is a gift. It started with Jaws, really.

what i like about the scene is it's a little naturalistically sloppy. the guys talk over one another, some interruptions, there are these very subtle shots which really make it work thoroughly (the quick side-eye Porkins in the background gives Indy while he's thinking, facing away from the camera, in the foreground. Indy getting psyched talking about the Staff of Ra and Brody smiling, looking at him, approvingly and seeing his excitement about the upcoming quest. the perfect moment for the John Williams score to make an appearance as the agents look at the depiction of the ark unleashing its power.

And if we're to the point of saying Flags of Our Fathers is superior to Saving Private Ryan, sorry, disembarking this train

Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers (you can't split them apart), but again, not a fan of Saving Private Ryan regardless.

You can absolutely sever Letters From Iwo Jima from Flags of Our Fathers. The former feels like a movie from a different filmmaker, and it’s immeasurably superior to the latter

dern's performance in JP is all mumbles, chuckles, little asides to herself, thinking out loud, thinking silently, laughter of various kinds (fond, knowing, anxious), remaining half-inside conversations while pulled half-outside by something she's professionally obsessed with, and finally: screaming. imo it does manage to be competitive with the guy who says "hitler's a NUT!"

book actually had the balls to kill Hammond though which the movie didn't.

these are two different characters with the same name: one is a cartoon villain created only to be killed and the other is a tragic self-portrait

xxp respectfully disagree - as mentioned, one of the core ideas of the film is needed to address the power cinema has in re-writing history, something Iwo Jima has been criticized for by its detractors.

Hammond in the book is i believe fairly megalomaniacal, rather than the wrongheaded avuncular guy in over his head. i don't disagree btw that Laura Dern is a better actor in JP than the fella with the pipe in ROTLA, especially when it's put like that, but i think the overall execution of the latter film is very gripping in ways that JP is not with use of character. i won't dispute the sheer entertainment value of JP obv.