Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

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.

xps Joseph McBride's book on Spielberg is likely the best one out there by a wide margin. Spielberg's never been one of my favorites - while I appreciate his natural gifts as a storyteller and enjoy his work enough to see almost everything, I also have strong reservations about most of his work - but McBride does a thorough and fantastic job detailing each film as both a critic and a historian. Spielberg is pretty much his favorite filmmaker since John Ford, and he makes clear and strong arguments as to why that is with each of his films. (By the same token, his criticisms of his lesser work are about as convincing as well.) Spielberg himself has read McBride's book and word got back to McBride (I think through Spielberg's assistant) that he absolutely loves it. If anyone should do a Truffaut/Hitchcock-type book, it's McBride, and it would be fitting - McBride was also close friends with Truffaut, wrote the definitive biography on John Ford (perhaps the greatest influence on Spielberg's work) and actually wrote a great Truffaut/Hitchock-type book on Howard Hawks, i.e. he's done this before.

Correction: it was another (unnamed) director, not Spielberg's assistant. Per McBride:

Adrian Hennigan in the Israeli publication Haaretz thinks someone should have adapted my STEVEN SPIELBERG: A BIOGRAPHY instead of Spielberg making THE FABELMANS. But I don't want any of my books adapted into movies. I've turned down several offers. James Lipton's questions to Spielberg -- including the comment mentioned in the article -- were discoveries from my book, used without credit. Spielberg did seem stunned to be asked about them. A director who worked with Spielberg told me that as a result of my book, "Steven loves you, loves you, LOVES you."

McBride's books about Frank Capra and Billy Wilder also good.

Ernst Lubitsch too. There are some others I don't have so can't comment.

Random thought, but would this movie have been improved like 5% if 20 seconds of this song (or just the chorus melody, maybe as a ring tone) were shoehorned in at a key moment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUm96Zij-tE

This was fine, it was solid enough. A little song, a little dance, a little CE3K down your pants.

Lol

fun thrill ride and a delight to watch but the plot falls to pieces the second you think about any of it. I'm supposed to believe a US military black ops unit is gonna chase some mook around in cars in 2026? once they know where he is, they'd fucking kill him with a swarm of drones then go pick up the backpack at their leisure. and these aliens? every bit of footage was crashes... how can they have that degree of psychic magic technology yet not be able to land spaceships in any other way except plowing them into the ground? and at the end when they're about to go live in the studio and there's a room full of dudes with automatic weapons. duh! just open fire and kill everybody. why wouldn't they? nah, they just give up and file out of there like they lost a pickup basketball game. incoherent. like, they blow up the... power substation and backup generator? just blow up the Internet access point and the station's transmitter, you halfwits.

They crashed because Pan Am kept flying into them

like there was no single action setpiece that didn't involve the bad guys being comically inept at their jobs

I accepted all the improbabilities. This is the guy who made several Indiana Jones movies.

feel like someone with the resources of Spielberg in 2026 could have tried a bit harder to make his action scenes less incoherent. you storming a motel and you only have your guys in front, not behind it too? you gonna make a movie like that, you need a Harrison Ford or Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry it with charisma and/or wisecracks. or the CGI of Jurassic Park. this movie had nothing like that. a bunch of personality-free nepo babies doing competent work, sure. it isn't nearly enough.

The team were instructed not to go outside the bathroom because apprehending someone while pooping os wrong

just saying that Commando does this assignment better than Disclosure Day did

a bunch of personality-free nepo babies doing competent work

This would surprise Josh O'Connor.

But not Eve Hewson or Wyatt Russell

I accepted all the improbabilities. This is the guy who made several Indiana Jones movies.

I don't think this is an apt comparison. Those movies are explicitly fantasies, this one is set in the "real" world. I saw someone count I think no less than nine times our lead nerds were tracked down by this armed and lethal secret elite spy force and escaped. Including one time where our man Josh O'Connor, upon seeing the least-subtle flashing-light motorcade of dozens of gun-toting baddies descend upon the farm house, and, from a distance, sneaks undetected through an open field *toward* the baddies and out maneuvers them all. I actually found that kind of stuff pretty amusing, a la "North by Northwest," but it definitely did a lot to deflate what little suspense existed. Even the lead henchman, at least twice, when Firth has given up, he's all, wtf, dude, you're just going to sit there?

Ha! I just learned about Russell a few seconds ago. They hit their cues.

I actually found that kind of stuff pretty amusing, a la "North by Northwest,"

An apt comparison because I don't think this thing is set in the real world either; it has elements that nod towards a real world, not any less than Raiders did to Nazis, Germany, and archeology.

I don't mind doing work for a movie. I DO mind having to finish the assignment because they couldn't be bothered.

I'm impressed with anyone who can break down a plot; it's never been of the slightest interest to me! I say it without irony.

xxpost Eh. Indiana Jones is fantasy, with magic. This movie is science fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWhhkWntfA

Sorry, all, I'm unyielding. Expert second-tier Spiels that could've done with a Kushner polish.

I'm impressed with anyone who can break down a plot; it's never been of the slightest interest to me! I say it without irony.

This is pretty funny, lol. I can totally get with "I'm not really a lyrics guys," but I'm not sure I've ever encountered "I'm not into plots" before. But I'll concede that yeah, if you discount the plot, the script, some of the acting and maybe the entire central conceit, this wasn't that bad.

I actually went into this dreading it a bit not because I had any doubts about it being a fun Sunday watch, but because to me it was a director handling potentially a very heavy subject if you take it seriously as a real thing that might one day happen. It would in fact cause the kind of upheaval Evil Firth talks about. But the movie just could not maintain any focus on that at all. Nothing they did was in service of what it seemed to want to be the movie's heart... empathy is the brightest spark of humanity and possibly the only entry point to communicating with extra-terrestrial life. OK! I'm interested. But one guy just kinda said it one time and the rest was a circus that had very little to do with that.

Given so many Spielberg films are top tier, Alfred, where would you slot this second tier one? Sound, Solid?

It's rare that I'm bothered by narrative holes xpost. I'm a Big Sleep child. But I said enough about my own problems in my review linked above.

When it boils down to it, any movie that involves a government agency attempting to oppress and/or kill civilians would typically be over in 5 minutes in real life. The power imbalance on an individual level is too wide.

As far as the alien videos, most of the roots of alien lore in the US involve crash landings so I felt like it was starting with what was rumored to happen in Roswell and expanding from there.

There were also several videos of alien craft flying just fine and evading Naval aircraft too. Plus even the best technology fails now and then!

I'm more bothered by the lack of consequences, moral or otherwise, endured by Spielberg's heroes.

My main issue with Spielberg extraterrestrial films is that they're never challenging in that the extraterrestrial life are almost always hippies trying to share gifts with mankind or befuddledly get stranded on Earth but they always more or less have intent that seems obviously warm-hearted to everybody but the evil government.

The values and beliefs of extraterrestrial life probably wouldn't even be comprehensible to people on Earth. They grew up on a different planet with a different atmosphere and their bodies and brains have different biochemistry. Their feelings about things like death and pain and concepts of emotions might be completely different.

I liked in The Shape of Water where the creature outright eats the housecat. It has no concept of this being a loved family member, it sees a food source!

In Flight of the Navigator, the alien craft doesn't realize how badly the abduction traumatized the kid and his family! It just thought it was doing a study where it would return him to his home no problem.

I wish there was more of that weirdness rather than everyone of his being the benevolent version of "We have such sights to show you!".

Maybe that's why I'm more of an Invasive of the Body Snatchers guy although obviously those were outright villainous visitors

Yeah but that’s the thing: Spielberg alien movies aren’t ever truly about Them. Trite as it is, they’re always about HIM. It’s always a framework for him working out his baggage; he’s not going to give you the mechanics of why and how because that’s not what he cares about.

If it was anyone else I would be bothered by that & I can see why this one bugs a lot of ppl but I’m happily unbothered.

(I did actually love the movie though....it may not be the things I want but I enjoyed what it was nonetheless)