Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

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.

Never said that. But Lee can't really fake provocation regularly anymore. Cine-hipsters turn to City of God, Y Tu Mama Tambien etc for that pose now.

Yeah, Walken's much more memorable sleepwalking through gangster and vampire roles, or SNL. Hey, he recites lines off the expected beats!

I was quite moved by the ending of The Terminal and chilled by A.I.

By the same token Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't make $250 million as an actor by being chopped liver, either. Although it is rather hard to pin down exactly what his talent was. Your point being?

and it STILL looked fake

The fact that the home they return to is a recreation on a soundstage was meta in so many different ways but unavoidably so following on from Fabelmans. All of his father-angst of Close Encounters now gives way to something much bigger & less self-centered; this movie reflects much more a Spielberg who feels firmly part of the world, and who CARES for the world, than the angst of a single 20-something dude who stilll believed his dad had abandoned him

Love this.

I enjoyed this. My only gripes:

-Having the most generic, boring creature designs for the aliens

-Spielberg's naive hippie optimism doesn't play as well in 2026

Colin Firth's character was also comically bad at his job but that is actually fitting for 2026

Nothing deep to say, I just loved this movie.

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.