Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

It's one thing to get excited in a 'film school' sort of way about his technique. It's another thing to sit in a dark theater and be moderately entertained by his movies. But has Speilberg overcome the limits of his medium to create great and lasting art in the way of Cocteau or Fellini or Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges? Not in my view. He generally makes clever confections. He's a great chef.

However, his depiction of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan is a classic that stands head and shoulders above his normal work, including the remainder of SPR.

Take, for example,Brininging Up Baby. It aims at nothing more than sheer entertainment, but it is so entertaining that it sheerly delights me with its artistry and wit, its little-red-wagon sense of fun. It is an exemplar of light-hearted foolery, a gush of google-eyed silliness, a whole 'nother world you step into.

E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial aims at something a bit more than 'mere' entertainment. It wants to achieve a certain modicum of significance, in a warm and fuzzy sort of way - as a statement about wonder and innocence or something like that. But it doesn't really work on that level. It achieves a sappy, happy sentimentality about wonder and innocence. You cry when ET is dying at the hands of the mean, cold-hearted scientists because, um, never mind why. But can you take any part of it back into your life and make it work for you.

That's why Spielberg is meh. He's a perfect B+ student. He gets all the low-hanging fruit and most of the middling stuff, but never quite bags the topmost stuff.

He may be pretty middlebrow, but stuff like Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, WOTW etc is very entertaining, well made cinema. I agree that he often feels like he's trying to make a bigger statement than he actually achieves, but I cannot think of another director working currently who has consistently entertained me so well over the last 25 years.

No mention of it yet here, but I'm on the side that feels A.I. is one of his best films, too. There's plenty not to like about it, but the stuff that works (the whole opening act, the journey to drowned Manhattan, fuck it, even the ending) is some of the most mesmerising, compelling sci-fi I have ever seen. Real cinema of wonder in a very pure form.

xp

i actually LIKE spielberg and feel he gets a bad rap from "entertainment is not art" types, but howard hawks is a greater director than spielberg for the same reason charles schulz is a greater artist than dave sim.

i. dis. agree. there, that wasn't so hard. in this context, i don't care about great directors. i care about entertaining films. hawks' films are *quite* entertaining. but they don't stand out particularly from hollywood films of the 'classic' (c. 1930 - c. 1960) period.

he has a slightly nasty, right-libertarian view of society based on the rugged-individualist/masculinist ideal (women have to be men). it's this glib view of 'how to deal' that i mean by 'audience-minded'. he's all about winners.

expressive editing (blah phrase, but whatevs) is not film school bullshit. following the aesthetic choices of 1950s cahiers du cinema is film school bullshit!!

point is the kind of stuff spielberg does, like the beach scene, was beyond the dreams of any classic hollywood director. they'd have fucking killed to have done it. maybe sam fuller with spielberg's crew would be the best thing.

# Indiana Jones 4 (2006) (announced)
# Untitled Steven Spielberg/Abraham Lincoln Project (2007) (pre-production)
# Untitled 1972 Munich Olympics Project (2005) (filming)
# War of the Worlds (2005)
# The Terminal (2004)
# Catch Me If You Can (2002)
# Minority Report (2002)
# Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)

This list, of films I have seen, arranged more or less in descending order of quality (last = best) is the reason why I'm not interested in any of the films above:

# Saving Private Ryan (1998)
# The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
# Schindler's List (1993)
# Jurassic Park (1993)
# Hook (1991)
# Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
# Empire of the Sun (1987)
# The Color Purple (1985)
# Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
# E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
# Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
# Jaws (1975)
# Duel (1971)

In conclusion, Thank You Mr. Spielberg for bringing some really fantastic adventures to the big screen, and showing us some highly exciting moments, No Thank You Mr. Spielberg for saddling nearly all of them with increasingly awful casting as time marches on and for trying to choke us to death with your faith in the human spirit or whatever you want to call that unbelievably smug annoying self-congratulatory horseshit.

xpost,
more complexity and disturbingly adult themes
So do the fucking Matrix movies. OMG HE DIES TO SAVE EVERYBODY

this is kinda otm -- it's there in the movies -- but the horseshit bits are outnumbered by the highly exciting moments. or, they're *both* there. same way fall-flat bits of unfunniness and misanthropy coexist with real chills in hitchcock.

otoh, is 'saving private ryan' really that smug? it has those terrible bookends, and the matt damon bits are really annoying, but i've seen far less convinving movies about war.

The first time I saw Duel I knew it was supposed to be "atypical" Spielberg but I still spent probably half the movie waiting for some insipid deus ex machina to rob me of all my actual emotions and replace them with spoonfed lotus blooms. This is what he's done to his legacy.

Looking at that list above I realize I've disliked a LOT of his movies, without even really realizing they were Spielberg flix. I mean the only movies that I like in that list are Raiders, Last Crusade, Duel, Catch Me If You Can (and that's not even an active like because I forgot I saw it until recently) and...uh...well, I don't actually like Jurassic Park at ALL but Jeff Goldblum dresses fantastically in it so I'll give it a little bit of a pass (THAT FINAL SHOT OF THE T-REX AND THE RAPTORS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST SHOT IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY AND DIRECTION AND THAT IS A STONE COLD FACT PEOPLE). I'd like Saving Private Ryan better if the bookends were deleted and it was about a half hour shorter.

Dr. Morbius, how about you discuss the "disturbing adult themes" in, say, Catch Me If You Can?

jaws fucking rules ally. jpark3's pretty great, the best of the bunch no doubt. poltergeist was pretty great. band of brothers was incredible. into the west was rousing fun.

Jaws does NOT fucking rule!

UNIFIED WORKS suck anyway

ie his refusal to end his recent movies unyuckily is the price he is prepared to pay for the chance to shoot [x] idea

i don't buy this really, but i wd admire SS lots if i discovered this is where he's secretly at

oh, begone intentionality! i think most movies are compendia of bits with lots of redundancies put in to keep front office happy. it's always been like that(?). spielberg is a total enigma as a man -- i have read a biography of him and know NOTHING about him.

but cutting through or ignoring the 'greatest generation' blah i've been impressed by the action scenes in the saving private ryan/band of brothers projects.

as with albums, ignore the rubbish bits.

My hyperbole is totally correct, watch JP again and wait for it...that final shot of the freaking T-Rex. Claymation dinosaur, why you ruin shot all the time? I would've liked Jurassic Park better if there was no dinosaurs, but instead Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.

Anyway I am still interested in finding out how Spielberg classics like Catch Me If You Can or The Terminal or The Lost World explore more disturbing, dark, and adult themes than Bamboozled and are more complex than The Big Lebowski! I'll give Morbius Soderberg.

XPOST ARGH STOP IT WITH THOSE MORPHED ANIMALS

Does this make him classic, or just Darryl Zanuck reborn?

I stick with my B+ assessement. He has good chops, and a consistent record. I like him OK, but nothing he makes excites me much.

aimless -- steve is hurt, but he will try to improve his record for next semester.

There are a (surprising?) number of beats this movie has in common with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ...

Same guy wrote both, didn’t he?

This Vulture oral history of Spielberg is pretty good:

https://archive.ph/LLI3u

Contains this relevant chunk:

Koepp: I took The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull job with some trepidation. I was really stepping into the assistant storyteller role, of trying to model something that had happened in the past and worked great. Larry Kasdan is a friend of mine, and I was talking to him about a problem I was having with the scene where Harrison and Karen Allen are in this truck and he’s talking about how he’s gone out with a lot of women since her. He says that they all have the same problem. And she says, “What’s that? ” And he says, “They weren’t you.” That’s Larry’s line. And it’s the best line in the movie, because Larry probably should have written that movie.

Janusz Kamiński, cinematographer: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by far was the hardest movie I’ve ever done in my life. It’s the only movie where I was trying to copy another look, and I don’t think I succeeded, because Douglas Slocombe who did the other Indiana Jones movies was just brilliant, and I’m not Douglas. My best friend, Phedon Papamichael, made the fifth Indiana Jones movie with James Mangold. I said, “It’s going to be the hardest movie you’ve ever made.”

Kennedy: Crystal Skull was a tough production for Janusz. Steven was struggling with that movie. Harrison was struggling with the movie. They didn’t want to do a Raiders movie that involved aliens, and they kind of got into a fight with George about it.

Lucas: I wanted it to be kind of a War of the Worlds sort of thing. Harrison said, “I’m not going to do another science-fiction movie.” And Steven said, “I’m not going to do another science-fiction movie.” I said, “Steven, this is perfect because it’s the 1950s, when flying saucers were a whole thing,” but he said “no.” We did about five scripts, and finally Steve and I compromised: “Look, what if they’re not aliens but from another dimension.”

Kennedy: They ended up all of them doing what George wanted to do, which was probably the right thing. But Harrison and Steven were not 100 percent onboard. That’s why the movie, out of the four that Steven made, is the weakest. And that’s why Harrison was so deeply committed to Destiny. He didn’t want that to be the end.

Lucas: Steven put that last shot in, where they get into a flying saucer and take off. He was rationalizing it by saying, “Well, they’re going to another dimension. They have to get there somehow.” I said, “It looks like a flying saucer.” He did make a science-fiction movie after that, and Harrison did an alien movie.

Sorry to Wyatt Russell but I was distracted by how much his soft eyes and round face remind me of JD Vance. He can play him in the President Vance biopic.

Escape from DC

Was talking with a friend who saw Close Encounters for the first time last week, and realizing now that Wyatt Russell gets the Terri Garr one in this one (the significant other who gets anxious and has lines like "Are you crazy?!").

But will Wyatt Russell co-star in a Tootsie in his future?

...in which a struggling actor (Anna Kendrick) can't land an acting gig and decides to audition for a role as a ranch hand.

Basically this movie is a cross between Close Encounters and Crystal Skull.

When I was a kid, I thought a fourth Indiana Jones movie would have to revolve around Indiana Jones turning into a father figure - Crystal Skull was a long way off but it was also years after Last Crusade and I got the impression nobody was betting on another Indiana Jones movie (much less two of them). It made logical sense because the third one was all about that, supposedly drawing from Spielberg's relationship with his own father, and now that Ford was clearly older and sporting grey hair in his films, it just made complete sense. So when I first heard that the movie would feature his long lost son, I thought it had real potential. (If wasn't an actual biological son, I thought it could also make sense if he became a father figure to one of his students, like the ONE student who was actually passionate about archeology rather than sitting there to swoon over Ford.) It's just too bad they cast beefhead and never made anything resonant out of that storyline - no surprise they'd write him out of the next one.

The Beef wasn't among the least offensive things about that movie.

Cate Blanchett is 10 times worse than LaBeouf

I didn't care for the rest of the movie, the only thing that could've held my interest was that storyline and Blanchett had nothing to do with it.

tbh I can barely remember her aside from the wig - I just took it as a humongous paycheck that allowed her to do more work with Todd Haynes et al

He played what the script required; she as usual tried to look for "nuances" even in camp.

The scenes with Mutt at the beginning are the only real salvageable parts of the film

Really loved the first two hours of this

One thing I wonder about with this is how long the script had been in development. The idea of TV news being the central form of 'reaching the masses' feels at least a decade out of date. The whole 'special bulletin' TV format reminds me of Tiannamen Square and 9/11 and OJ and Katrina, but not so much anything from 2010 onward. That said, I took the movie's world on its own terms, and it didn't pull me out of it too much; it just made me wonder how present-day mass communication would be dramatized differently

Maybe it is set in the near future, when TV news is important again.

I do love that the news employees trust was rewarded. Her special report could have been: "5G causes genetic mutations"

The movie does show the news quickly moving to everybody's phones fwiw.

Skibidi spaceship

I love the idea of airing 70 years of flying saucer crashes and alien autopsies, and, after they've got the world's attention, *then* wheeling out an actual alien they've had hanging around for an exclusive sit-down interview with spaced-out aspiring newscaster Emily Blunt. Meanwhile, the anonymous newscaster currently on air has captivated the globe with her awestruck vulnerability.

"Mr Alien, your thoughts on the latest crisis in North Korea?"

Slight tangent, but a friend of mine from school met with an ABC News producer in 2008 to talk about prospective work, and he was actually told the format was a dinosaur on its way out (the producer’s words and IIRC same producer switched paths and went on to do documentaries). But that was 18 years ago and the evening news is still around and seems to retain a substantial presence even if it isn’t central to news consumption like it once was. I haven’t watched the nightly news in ages but at this point I wonder if it’s really dying a slow death or if it’s settling into a sizeable niche role in the culture.

Old people do live long.

the evening news is still around and seems to retain a substantial presence

"Seems" being the operative word there. Screaming "We're important!" at the top of your lungs at every opportunity has some effect, I guess.

I’m definitely no expert about this, but it’s something I think about when weighing how the news shapes the country, especially in the last 10 years. (In terms of broadcast this really applies more to cable news than network news.)

i'm listening to that podcast where they talk to spielberg about 2001 and he absolutely articulates all of the things i liked about this film

idk, i'm glad i wrote as much as i did about this film before reading this thread. i just... like having the luxury, the space of letting these ideas filter through, to take time to give voice to them, even if i'm wrong. he does these movies and i think "oh, this must be what it feels like to have a normal childhood". idk, maybe spielberg is a liberal. i think of spielberg less as a liberal and more as a _humanist_. that's something i am, deeply, at my core, and i love this aspect of his work more deeply and passionately than anything else he's done.

i get the criticism of koepp as a writer, but it's one of the reasons i liked the film as much as i did. tony kushner of course is one of the all-time greats and working from a kushner script spielberg can make a profound, thoughtful, meditative film. the reason i thought of this film as so quintessentially _spielbergian_ was because it _wasn't_ one of those kinds of films. it's him in his blockbuster mode. i looked at the most recent sight and sound list to see where spielberg was represented, and it was two films - jaws and raiders. ok, there's a certain bias there - i definitely think that later his "auteurist" films will be more respected some decades down the line. that said, the guy basically invented the blockbuster, and having seen too many formulaic, tiresome licensed property blockbusters these past few years, i was impressed by the freshness and vision he brought to something that is _absolutely_ a summer action blockbuster. that's why koepp did the script imo. it's a _tremendous_ balancing act to make a summer blockbuster that says anything at all. not only does this film say something, it says something that's pretty consistent with the things he's been saying for 50 or so years.

i don't find what he's saying anodyne or banal. i find it meaningful. if he talks about it like an old man, well, he _is_ an old man! the emphasis he places on tv news is obsolete, sure. the emphasis he places on _greys_ is obsolete. it's not a cultural myth that means anything in our times. but i mean, where's the fuckin' bar here? for me, it's _megalopolis_ lol. that's where i'd put the bar. part of who he is... i mean he came from television. that's where he got his start. he has an understanding of how television works. i don't think he particularly _cares_ to know how the internet works, and frankly i'm sympathetic to him on this point. i mean i love (some version of) the internet but my major point of contact with internet discourse is a 25-year-old internet message board! i'm listening to this podcast and he's talking about watching old movies on TCM and i just had to laugh and say yeah, of course, of course that's what he does. i do love that about him, genuinely love that.

_disclosure day_ is out of step with the times today, absolutely, in terms of subject matter and technology and any number of things other people can surely name better than i (i'm not super in touch with the times today, myself). next year? five years from now? ten?

of course he's changed in lots of ways. the fundamentals? nah, the fundamentals haven't. he's learned a lot, and he's gotten old. the first is mostly good, and the second is, well, it's just a fact.

> i'm listening to that podcast where they talk to spielberg about 2001 and he absolutely articulates all of the things i liked about this film

"disclosure day", not "2001"! i don't see "2001" the same way spielberg does. that's why it's so interesting to hear him talk about "2001".

I agree that it's a delight to watch a master at work

co-sign all of this

I feel pretty much the same way. Corny Old Spielberg is the equivalent of a cozy blanket: this is what I expected & pretty much what I paid to see.

And yeah I think sweating the mechanics of how this should ACTUALLY go down is wasted energy bc he’s just vibing on a version of a story he’s been telling himself for like, 50 years or more. Sure it’s kinda dumb. But shifting perspective & it’s kinda comforting that he thinks about in THIS way. He thinks we’d do all that. I love that he holds humanity in that kind of regard, even now.

That big ole grey at the end should’ve been wearing a USS Arizona cap or something for full old guy vibes

I'm all about the weather shimmy

Molly Haskell's glowing review in Film Comment

And it even won over long-time skeptic Richard Brody - with the exception of 1941, he's usually dismissive of his films.

(actually not entirely glowing by Haskell and some reservations expressed from Brody as well - when he shared a link to his review, he paired it with a blurb that suggested more enthusiasm on his part - but still a lot that they liked, which is impressive for two people who weren't completely on board with his work)