Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

Well yeah, but that and the jumpcutting was what made it awesome. The movie wouldn't have worked at all if it had gone for "sympathetic" or "realistic".

Yeah, I agree with that.

RFAD didn't lose me until the very end, with Leto and Wayans in Deliverance State Penitentiary or whatever the fuck that was. It was really exciting and harrowing and so on and then took a big fat dump on that with the moralizing and melodramatic end.

What would have been the point if it had been all Trainspotting-esque, ie "We've flirted with TEH DRUQKS but now we're older and wiser whew that was a close call"? It's so awesome that effectively goes "drugs will lead you to death row or the insane asylum, oh and along the way you will get limbs lopped off and have to pound a dildo in front of most of off-duty Wall Street; HAVE FUN, BUCKAROO *jump cut*"

most of them weren't strictly speaking jump cuts but i get what you mean; i found that stuff kinda goofy to be honest!

Movies move, hence the visual dynamics are generally more crucial than the other shit.

N_RQ right about Woody largely being filmed theater, tho beginning around "Manhattan" he started to move the camera nicely.

(I refuse to use "OTM" now that I'm picturing it tattooed on some of your rumps)

I also like how it totally looks like everyone's going to have a happy ending right up until each character makes a slight error in judgement that promptly dumps them into the bowels of Hell. It's grossly unsubtle and that's why it so fucking awesome. (IMO)

what do you mean by movies move? how do they move in a way that sound doesn't? ever heard of stereo panning?

overall, dud. you can always tell which movies he's touched with his hammy fingers.

it's easy, they usually have his director's credit front-and-center!

What about the ones touched by his bacony fingers?

mmmmm, bacon fingers.

would those be breaded and deep-fried slices of bacon?

i love how this thread is encompassing all varieties of human experience.

I think that perhaps Spielberg would be offended by all these pork references???

I don't want the RFAD characters to reform, I just want them to meet less laughable miserable ends. Ellen Burstyn's wasn't bad, and even Connelly's was disturbing but not laughable - but that Leto/Wayans end was awful.

The last shot was pulling back from the hospital bed revealing his missing arm, wasn't it? That's almost Spielbergian in its lack of subtlety. Or Lucasian, had he screamed NOOOOOO.

The shoot-up montages didn't seem like much until I saw part of that Jason Schwartmann speedfreak movie and realized how much worse they could have been.

I just saw DUEL for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and man, that movie fucking rules hardcore.

I think I am genetically predisposed towards liking movies where Jared Leto is disfigured, dismembered and/or killed (ie every Jared Leto movie).

i also like these threads that go for hundreds of posts w/o one comment from the thread-starter.

In this case, you really can't blame him.

Cause "movies" originally meant "moving pictures." God...

Yeah, Jared Leto only takes parts/gets offered parts where he gets the shit kicked out of him, doesn't he? The best bit of American Psycho is totally when he gets axed in the face to Huey Lewis and the News.

xpost for fuck's sake

morbius you still don't have a point

xpost - Lie. Nothing sounds awesome from the mouth of ND. Flat Mormon voice = evil.

The best part about Morbius's post is actually that I can't even figure out what he's referring to, like who that is meant for. I'd like to think Jared Leto.

Mind of Ally not retain more than 3 consec postssss.

OK, Jared Leto gettin his face pulped in Fight Club DID get me hard, and bye!

But you guys, DUEL!

... but you guys: Pinky and the Brain!

... SeaQuest DSV! Columbo: Murder by the Book! Harry and the Hendersons!

Arachnophobia!

Uh, Morbius, I DID read the posts leading up to yours. I mean I responded to one of them. That doesn't really change the fact that whatever point you were just trying to make was horribly disassociated from anything else occuring around it.

But, like, that's yr thang so it's be cool.

you guys know they're making Spun 2?

I wish I had not set this thread to mail its responses to me.

his panoramas - classic
his people - dud (except when he's doing comedy)

Close Encounters would be much better if he had left in the scenes deleted from the middle of the movie (that were in the original version?)

Jaws = A
Close Encounters = A-
Empire of the Sun = B+
Jurassic Park = Bomb
Ryan = Neither
A.I. = **
Catch Me If You Can = *

I really want to see Duel, and maybe also Sugarland Express. A guy I lived with all 4 years of college was in Amistad, and I still haven't seen it. Some day.

also, for context...
Barton Fink = C+
Lebowski = B-
Sex, Lies and Videotape = B+
Erin Brockovich = **
Traffic = *
Ocean's Eleven = B
Do the Right Thing = A+
Mo' Better Blues = ***
Jungle Fever = *
Crooklyn = **
Pi = **
Requiem for a Dream = F

what's with the stars AND letter grades?

It's a Christgau thing.

I've never understood the Christgau scale, but I think that's a benefit.

"traffic" = crap. hey, stevey, that part of cincy where the girl goes to buy crack has poor white people living there too. and the informant (played by miguel ferrer, one of the few good performances) getting killed in the most dumb dumb dumb dumb way possible (HI WE'RE THE DEA WE LIKE TO PARADE WITNESSES IN BROAD DAYLIGHT AND ORDER ROOM SERVICE EGGS FOR THEM) = fucking retardedly stupid. how soderbergh went from making a movie as good as "the limey" to that is beyond me.

Just rescreened E.T. a couple of hours ago; hadn't seen it since 1991. It appalls me that anyone can accuse this film of sentimentality. The post-'70s malaise has rarely been explored this cogently: kids using Star Wars toys to cope with Dad running off to Mexico with a young tootsie, and their attractive mother, still dumbfounded and barely surviving.

It's got a marvelous rapt quality. There are scenes that defy description (E.T.'s ravaged corpse being chewed on by raccoons; Elliott in the backyard waiting for the alien to appear); others approach comic bliss, like the biology class sequence, with a drunk Elliott kissing his crush in the manner of John Wayne in The Quiet Man.

Henry Thomas gives one of the most intelligent child performances in film history; it's unlikely that Drew Barrymore will ever top her sassy, slattern-in-making Gertie.

Great one-liners too ("How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?").

gotta see ET again.

wow i was wondering why i never posted on this thread: i was in japan!

anyway--classic with dudly moments. i've argued for him all over ilx tho so i'll leave it at that.

Any faults with his films lie in the writing rather than the direction (not that he doesn't have a MASSIVE influence over this), he's a pretty flawless storyteller.

I really felt for him last week when creepy Tom Cruise turned up uninvited at an awards ceremony for him.

I need to see E.T. again too.

having read the writing behind Minority Report and now finally having seen what he did to it I must confess I'm confused as to what point our man chap is trying to make

though not filled with nearly the vitriol I had when first arguing my points on this thread, I will say the right that this man can do and has done in filmmaking is being eroded rather rapidly by the wrong. Paycheck was a better treatment of the PKD causality-displacement themes than MR, for my money, and MR itself is nominally the stronger story of the two by a long shot. Though perhaps in trying to tell the more difficult-to-cinematize of the two, Steve bit off more than he could chew. He seems to be missing the mark for that reason a lot lately, with material that I can see myself enjoying immensely in a parallel universe where Spielberg doesn't repeat the same information over and over again in between rhythmless action set pieces, trying to teach me that 2 minus 2 is 0.

Pederastic Park?
by Adam Parfrey

A vicious sort of urban legend began to flourish about the time of Richard Gere's alleged alliance with rectal rodents. Its subject was Steven Spielberg, and the gossip had to do with the director's overweening fascination with child actors. Mindful that hearsay is sometimes false, we are withholding the delicious details. But the fact that this rumor exists at all confirms an underlying unease over the presumably innocent entertainments created by Hollywood's oldest Wunderkind.

Spielberg's latest theme park-style extravaganza, "Jurassic Park," isn't as explicitly swishy as his failed "Hook," but it reveals components of the auteur's personality that have parents wondering about the movie's appropriateness for children.

"King King," "The Lost World," and "Godzilla," three monster epics cannibalized by "Jurassic Park," achieved their thrills without resorting to on-screen menacing of tots. Indeed, only on milk cartons can we find children so physically raped as the celluloid juveniles of "Jurassic Park." The film's sadistic tone is established early on, when a fat child challenges the paleontological theories of protagonist Sam Neill. Neill turns on the boy, and in low, menacing tones, he demonstrates to the child how a prehistoric nasty would mangle and devour him. Adding a distinctly Peter Kurtenish frisson, Neill slashes near the child's belly and crotch with a large, sharp claw.
Perhaps among all our "childlike" wonderment with the subject of dinosaurs, we forget that child abusers commonly invoke the threat of large beasts to frighten and silence their victims. Is the director conjuring the trappings of childhood obsessions only to wield them for a darker purpose?

Although overtly sadistic, "Jurassic Park" was reined in by its obeisance to special effects; it revealed few of the excesses of "Hook," in which Spielberg's psychodramatic inclinations were allowed to roam free.

"Hook" is the culmination of over a decade of false starts in bringing J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan to the screen. At first, Spielberg was reportedly considering a live-action redo of the Disney animated feature, starring Michael Jackson as the perpetual pre-pube. But the auteur of suburban childhoos wasn't satisfied with a simple remake.

The high-concept Hollywood sound bite, "What if Peter Pan grew up?" not only indulged Spielberg's predilections, it provided the film's investors with a tinkingly trendy phrase redolent with the "recovery" metaphysics that have become the ethos for Hollywood's haut monde, the same haut monde who have lately forsworn the continual cocaine-and-Quaalude concatenations so relentlessly documented by former Spielberg producer Julia Phillips in her autobitchography, You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.

The recovery movement is led in part by ex-drunk John Bradshaw, who smilingly encourages his readers to throw off the ruinous shackles of adulthood in order to "liberate the inner child." It comes as little surprise that Steven Spielberg takes part in Bradshaw's therapies, which include workshops where "lullaby music is played and participants cradle and stroke one another."

Asking Steven Spielberg to liberate his inner child would be akin to asking a serial murderer to actualize his anger. By his own admission, Stevie has experienced little in the way of adulthood outside of his overprotective upbringing and the adulatory, toadying fantasy land of Hollywood. Bradshaw's "inner child" therapy is a mere baby-step away from the Diaper Pail Fraternity, a Sausalito-based group for grown men who revert to incontinent fantasy, where surrogate mommies exclaim and coo as they wipe the kinky kid-fetishists' dirty behinds.

Spielberg's is redolent not only of the inner-child component of recovery, but also its darker aspect: child molestation. Bradshaw seeks to place blame for psychological malaise on a dimly remembered past in which some form of traumatic abuse took place. The less the so-called abuse is remembered, the more convinced are Bradshawian therapists that it actually occurred. At the time that "Hook" went into production, all the radio and television talk shows fixated upon child abuse in a catharsis of mass scapegoating. Suddenly, millions of Americans were convinced that they had been molested by their nuclear family or ritually abused by Satanists.

On the crest of the child-abuse wave, Spielberg's Peter Pan project was transformed into Hook, whose ad campaign abandoned the traditional flying fairies in lieu of a stark visual of the prosthetic steel claw gleaming against a black background. The gruesome hieroglyphic was a perfect mnemonic device (see Hook, think Hook) ”but more importantly, it transferred any possible pedophilic overtones from Spielberg himself (the auteur hero) to the classically pederastic fantasy figure of Captain Hook, the fiend who spirits children away to a Neverland where Cabbage Patch foundlings enliven the sodomitical lives of Village People pirates.

Here, Spielberg could be evading responsibility for his alleged tendencies by projecting them onto his villain, a strategy employed by Hitchcock and other directors renowned for their sadistic inclinations.

Peter Pan had, of course, become such a dusty chestnut that almost no one would object to its pedophilic content.

Who would remember that its author, Sir James Barrie, was a full-blown boy fancier who never consummated his marriage to actress Mary Ansell and carried on a passionate "friendship" with the sons of Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies?

Even today, no one can comfortably explain why Barrie insisted on naming his eternal child "Pan," after the goatish satyr of mythology.

In a tradition begun by Sir Barrie, most stage productions of Peter Pan cast a boyish woman in the lead role, a transvestite tradition Spielberg may well have paid homage to by casting Glenn Close as the bearded pirate named "Gutless."

Pederastic organizations such as NAMBLA insist that children are wise, sexual creatures who should be given the opportunity to be fondled, sucked, and anally penetrated by middle-aged men.

The NAMBLA Bulletin has a special column called "Boys in the Media," tracking the doings of such Hollywood chickens as Macaulay Culkin, known affectionately in the Bulletin as "Mac." The self-described "Ganymedian" L. Martin, who write the "Boys in the Media" column, spoke by phone about Stephen Spielberg and Hook.

"Spielberg is known for his interest in young boys, certainly," said Martin. "A lot of the members have been talking about Hook, telling me how much they enjoyed it."

NAMBLA spokesman Renato Corazza refused to confirm or deny Spielberg's possible membership in the Man/Boy Love Association: "We don't divule our membership rolls."

And is it merely accidental that another pederastic magazine goes by the acronym P.A.N. (Paedo Alert News)?

Spielberg's costume designer Anthony Powell endows Hook's "Lost Boys" with a cute Benetton-meets-Oliver Twist look tailor-made for the chicken-hawk sensibility. Dance of the Warriors, a futuristic fantasy about a warrior cult of young boys who fight right-wing Christians for the privilege of having sex with aging boy-lovers, sports on its cover a salt-and-pepper boy couple who almost precisely mirror two of Spielberg's Lost Boys. The book appeared in the pedophilia sections of gay bookstores just at the time that Hook was going into pre-production.

Just who are Spielberg's Lost Boys? Walter Keane-style big-eyed orphans? Lord of the Flies in Suburbialand?

Hook's smarmy press kit tries to make each personality distinct. There's Rufio ("the proud leader of the Lost Boys, whose determined jousting with Peter for the honor of guiding the troupe of ruffians leads to a new understanding between the two rivals in Neverland"); Ace ("the Lost Boy with all the angles figured out for his peers"); Thudbutt ("whose imposing size belies his gentle disposition among the Lost Boys--but don't get him angry!"); No Nap ("a street urchin complete with suspenders, knockers, a newsboys cap...and a heart of roughened gold"); Latchboy ("the curly-top redhead who always finds himself in the thick of any mischief contrived by the band of tarnished angels"); Pockets ("one of the smallest Losy Boys, who has a particular soft spot for helping Peter get his wings in Neverland"); and Too Small ("the tiniest Lost Boy in stature but one of the feistiest in nature, who wears his pajamas through thick and thin").

Hook's emotional highlight, strangely absent from the shooting script's first revised draft, is the touchy-feely communion of the adult Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. We're treated to prolonged takes of the tykes touching and caressing Robin Williams's face and body.

When the Lost Boys smear war paint on Wiliams's naked torso, the idyll is reminiscent of a certain gay body-painting video advertised in The Advocate "that focuses on creative eroticism, that expands and extends the beauty of foreplay."

There's not room enough to detail the pedophilic implications of other Spielberg productions: the man/boy relationship in "Empire of the Sun," which begins with John Malkovich's comment about young Christian Bale's "sweet mouth" and reaches its emotional climax when Malkovich directs the chicken to move his cot next to his; the child-alien/human ectodermal interactions in Close Encounters; and the sanitized incest theme of Back To The Future.

However, it was E.T., Spielberg's most exalted triumph, which seems to clothe boy-love fantasy in New Age vestments.

Spielberg uses every trick in the director's chapbook to induce us to love a wrinkled, potbellied cosmic interloper that hides in boys' closets and communicates with a glowing, phallic finger.

It was young Henry Thomas's taunt to his twelve-year-old celluloid brother--"penis breath"--that had Spielberg conjure, if only for a disturbing instant, the image of a bald-faced lad with a cock in his mouth.

Although the "negligent" participants got off with nary a knuckle-rap, we must not forget that Spielberg also produced the actual snuff film "Twilight Zone," in which Vic Morrow and two young children were beheaded during filming.

Perhaps the most perverse aspect of Steven Spielberg's work is its obsessive posture of sentimental innocence.

Psychologists trained in the vocabulary of sex criminals often note the cloak of goo-goos and sugar frosting as the subconscious moral gymnastics of repression and guilt transference.

But now that "Jurassic Park" has more openly revealed the overtly sadistic aspect of Steven Spielberg's curious desires, there is only one more place to go for this self-styled avatar of contemporary myth. His movie, "Schindler's List," was filmed in Auschwitz.