Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

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.

what's your point here exactly? that people in film school like him because he's successful? wtf does that have to do with anything

>how about you discuss the "disturbing adult themes" in, say, Catch Me If You Can?<

No, not a classic. Quite a decent Missing/Inadequate Dad Complex meditation (major Spielberg motif), tho, with both Leo and Walken putting in unusually deep performances before returning to check-cashing roles.

The Terminal: America as Last Best Melting Pot AND Dubya's Fortress ("America is closed").

JP2 was the last of his I skipped.

I think Walken's performance in Catch Me If You Can is completely immemorable, as immemorable as he gets, at least. Also, I'm not sure how I understand in what way Savion Glover's character in Bamboozled is any more of a "2-D sketch" than Leonardo DiCaprio's character here (note: this does not imply that DiCaprio's character IS a "2-D sketch"). And yes, the 25th Hour beats the crap out of both of these movies, and anything Spielberg's done in, oh, 10 or 15 years. I was keeping off the sucka punches on the "Spielberg more provocative than Lee" comment but if you wanna kick yourself in a metaphorical discussion-genitals go ahead!

Not quite. Film schoolies love him because he is the archetypal film school product. Speilberg sat through all the same classes, learned all the same rigamarole as them and then he went out and became the Nu Robot Overlord of films. It sprinkles fairy dust (read: imagined money & power) over the whole film school experience.

The best thing about WSS too.

Took me an hour to realize who Eve Hewson's real life dad is.

I kept thinking, "This is Spielberg's Rio Lobo," an auteur's flex, cribbing from Close Encounters, E.T., Minority Report, etc.,

This is making some big claims for Rio Lobo! I like that movie fine, but it would be a much greater work if it was cribbing from various Hawks films and not just Rio Bravo.

Ha! Well, I make no big claims for Disclosure Day other than as excellent distillation of other Spielberg.

Took me an hour to realize who Eve Hewson's real life dad is.

Yeah I wasn't clocking her at all and then the credits rolled and I went "Oh wait, gotta be."

Two hearts beat as one.

I really liked this! Trains in Spielberg movies hit differently now. The end needed to elevate/levitate for me and it didn’t but that didn’t erase my enjoyment of everything leading up to there. Perhaps better to cut out as relatively abruptly as it did than keep straining for something it wasn’t going to achieve.

The childhood home existing on a soundstage moment yet another of Spielberg’s work increasingly literal depictions of his own process.

lol my first thought was Nathan Fielder, actually.

The whole Jane character, maybe a lot of what I didn't think the movie did well revolved around her. She has no chemistry with O'Connor, she's the fulcrum of the (barely explored) faith component, she exists mostly as a plot vector to get the widget to the TV station. Also, when she was possessed and was gonna get him, I had to stifle a giggle, though that kinda campiness was another element that reminded me of Hitchcock; I kept thinking of "North by Northwest" throughout, except this one wasn't particularly fun, per se (and if fact, a handful of lines/glances/punchlines/gags fell totally flat when we saw it).

Also, come on, the whole idea of these two people being essentially sleeper agents was kind of dumb, imo. Like, why? Why them? Why were they imbued with these abilities as kids only to just kind ... exist for years until called into action (again, with no real imperative or stakes, at least not for the aliens, afaict). Like, I wish there was some fated confluence of things happening that pushed this story forward, rather than the hoary "brink of war" nothingburger. Might have also played up the surface-explored faith stuff. (Or perhaps related, and to make explicit, I wonder what a thinker like Tony Kushner might have done with this story rather than the hacky Koepp.)

I keep reading dismissals of Koepp all over the place, and I don't understand what makes him more hackish than the rest. If anything, he takes his portents too seriously.

I thought it amusing how the three leads are all English.

I'm surprised you liked Firth, I thought he was particularly miscast and his bad guy motivations muddled, or at least another thing not really explored. And also kind of silly, the notion there would be a covert extra governmental super spy organization dedicated to keeping this a secret that is massively staffed, armed, and highly visible everywhere, but I suppose silly is not a deal-breaker

Koepp, he seems to specialize in good enough at best, and bad at worst. He is just really serviceable and nothing more than that, but I think his greatest weakness is not having any fight in him to push back against the indulgences of his collaborators. I think perhaps that is why he keeps getting hired!

I was never really aware of Koepp as a writer to follow, even though it turned out I'd seen a lot of movies he wrote, until the 1-2 Soderbergh punch of Presence + Black Bag. I'd been anticipating this one as much for him as for Spielberg. The range of DD reactions in this thread definitely has me curious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXlYNEej9t0

Seeing it tomorrow :D

Kushner with Spielberg: Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, Fabelmans
Koepp with Spielberg: Jurassic Park, Lost World, War of the Worlds, Crystal Skull, Disclosure Day.

Aside from the more or less perfect Jurassic Park, the failures (relative) of the others are baked into the scripts, imo. But clearly Spielberg likes him, just as he likes Kamiński, who has, incredibly, shot every Spielberg film since Schindler's List. His presence probably accounts for some of Spielberg's productivity, because he's really good, I just sometimes wish Spielberg's movies had a different look. I'd have to see it again, but I find that some of the overexposure or bleach-process or whatever technique it is that leads to that look often erodes the shadows that might make the thriller-menace more intense.

Where did they find Elizabeth Marvel, she's got presence! More than Wyatt Russell, who I generally don't mind but who I also thought was miscast here.

Well, not miscast -- that role, I'll agree, is a victim of mediocre writing. Thirty years ago it would've been the Clueless Girlfriend.

Ordering my tickets for tomorrow as soon as the work day ends

xpost Hmm. I think he was miscast *and* poorly written, heh. I think the role might have been better served by a less recognizable actor. Likewise Firth's cartoon baddie had nowhere near the drive or menace of (iirc, I only saw it once) someone like Ben Mendelsohn in "Ready Player One" or ... hmm, it's interesting how few Spielberg films have conventional bad guys. Anyway, Firth character was a victim of mediocre writing, too, imo, and Domingo as well. Hewson, she's maybe miscast but for sure poorly written, just mostly there for the sake of plot expediency, getting the story (and people) from point A to point B without making much of an impression. Even O'Connor, he's kind of a black box, affable though he is. There are lots of relationships and turns in this film that are sort of just hand-waved away but probably needed more time to land (like the whole pay-off of the childhood home, the "what are they building in there?" mystery the film kept trickling out, or even the why-them? of O'Connor and Blunt in general).

It's weird, I don't feel like this movie was out of Spielberg's grasp or anything, he still seems every bit the astute technical master. It's no flop just, as I said, an ambitious failure, imo, and I am genuinely surprised Spielberg couldn't quite find a way to make it work. That's why I'm torn blaming the cast or writer or even the DP. Spielberg's the director, the buck stops with him.

I agree the building of the childhood home wasn't worth the suspense.

Oooh, if there's a list of actors I can't stand in any shape or form today it's Ben Mendelsohn.

Maybe that would have made him a good villain rather than some inexplicable wannabe evil lair Bond-baddie, lol. I did see an amusing take that Frith might be the first villain who gives up just because he's ... tired. He gets this look of resignation and just sits down. I thought that was funny.