Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

The Terminal stripped him of any claim to classicness.

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.

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)

Hmm. Brody I always read as a contrarian, so a positive notice from him gives me pause.

I can't think of any director whose work I so consistently outright enjoy watching, no matter what I think of the film. For example, I think "West Side Story" was totally unnecessary, but I was enraptured by every last shot and sequence, just a sheer joy to focus on how it was put together. Lots of the new one felt like that to me, too, even if I think it's a minor failure (which is mostly the fault of the script and acting).

I'll have to think of Spielberg as a a humanist. My instinct is that the description is apt, but at the same time, there is a strain of cynicism that courses through his films. The central conceit of so many of his movies is maybe the more abstract pick-a-side *concept* of humanism vs authority/authoritarianism? Not that his own allegiance is usually that ambiguous or difficult to discern, but he's not often didactic or particularly afraid to leave things dangling, either.

I've always loved that the only really scary scene in E.T. is when the hazmat-suited government agents invade the house. It's like an alien invasion except the aliens are the feds.

how do you define cynicism in this case?

ET laying in a ditch near death was absolutely horrifying as a kid.

But yeah, the hazmat guys was a fun/scary twist on who the invaders from another place could be.

Maybe that was the first time I saw something really bad happen to the hero in a movie? I lost my damn mind, my mom almost took me out of the theater.

E.T. in 2026

"Alien invasion a liberal conspiracy to teach Critical Race Theory telepathically"

"Alien actually James Carville"

Wasn’t there a raccoon or something skittering around ET in the ditch? Ugh, that still gets to me.

Yes! A total gross-out for me.

I'm terrified of raccoons so...yeah

Given how many ticks and diseases they carry, why not?

My complex had a million of them at the community mail area because morons would throw food waste in those bins.

I remember going to get the mail at 4 am once and coming back to see raccoons swarmed around my car, including one who stood up and reached for the car door handle

how do you define cynicism in this case?

As in, the government is not (necessarily) your friend, or, left to its own inclinations, humanity will destroy itself or each other in pursuit of technology/greed. The new one establishes a dialectic of "the world needs to know" vs "the fragile world can't know because it will destroy religion and/or our corporate overlords, who are keeping the chaos of humanity in balance."

only really scary scene in E.T.

My memory isn't good enough to recall how people originally reacted to the discovery of ET in the shed. We know *now* that he's a good alien, but back then? It's kind of a spooky scene. It's shrouded in fog, we don't know what ET looks like or what his deal is. Was the revelation that ET is benign a surprise? A relief? Was the scene as it originally played, to audiences unfamiliar, suspenseful?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXJJI784zTA

The creepy score alone, a kissing cousin to the same year's Poltergeist (which was released a month later) ...

As in, the government is not (necessarily) your friend, or, left to its own inclinations, humanity will destroy itself or each other in pursuit of technology/greed. The new one establishes a dialectic of "the world needs to know" vs "the fragile world can't know because it will destroy religion and/or our corporate overlords, who are keeping the chaos of humanity in balance."

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 19, 2026 8:35 AM (twenty-one minutes ago)

mmmm

first off, "the government isn't necessarily your friend" _doesn't_ seem cynical to me! he grew up, you know, with Vietnam, that boomer distrust of government... every president from LBJ on has been a massive fucking liar, IMO. that's not saying that the people before him _weren't_. just that the term "credibility gap" was founded to refer to LBJ, and that gulf has gotten wider and wider until it's... i mean, the people in power now are basically the opposite of empathy.

the whole thing about "the fragile world can't know", what the movie does for me - and this aligns with my own beliefs - is that the people who are afraid of this knowledge are afraid of what's inside themselves. afraid of themselves. it's interesting, because so much of what disclosure day _is_, as a film, i hear listening to the "essentials" podcast with spielberg. like, spielberg sees the core of _2001: a space odyssey_ as empathy, which is a very very spielbergian take haha.

i think the ways in which spielberg is liberal is because he is focused towards, like, reconciliation. because that's what dialectics is for me... i mean with all the DBT i do, i think of it in a very therapeutic sense now. i was telling the friend i saw disclosure day with, i was telling them i see a dialectic between lynch and spielberg, that they're approaching the same point from opposing directions - lynch sees the uncanny and alien within the mundane, and spielberg sees the human within the alien. that's, like, pure fucking dialectics, to me.

i do think spielberg's conception of empathy is flawed, is incomplete. there's been so much discourse online about empathy and spielberg has probably just been watching old movies on TCM instead which, like, he's not wrong lol. and i think of empathy, the term i use is _highly sensitive_. there are good things and bad things about it. and it's not about _how much_, for me, but _how_, how we express it. how i respond to my emotions.

the corporate overlords, it's pretty clear... it's personal. the film explicitly makes it personal. hugo, who's always addressed by his first name, says to noah - everyone else calls him "scanlon", hugo calls him "noah" - he says look, i lost you when your wife died. i can see making an argument that providing this sort of "explanation" for scanlon's paranoia might seem glib or pat. it's not to me. the political is personal. of course it matters that noah's wife died, that he's stuck in this personal sense of grief and loss and his moral compass has gone astray.

and it makes sense, that, at the end... i mean really, the only thing scanlon actually does is admit defeat. is give up on a lost cause. and that's more than a lot of people can do. in real life, i mean. spielberg makes the bar for redemption very, very simple. one of the things that comes up in the "rewatchables" podcast is this idea of a film, i can't remember which film, but a film which is stronger because there are no villains. and i definitely think "disclosure day" is like that. scanlon does some really evil shit but he's not, like, belloq.

i think a lot about things the way they are now, knowing that they will change, that they have to change. a lot of things have come out, i mean, pandora's box has been opened, for sure, and things have come to light...

that's the difference, i think, between spielberg and me. when i think of disclosure, i think of the horrors the people in power have perpetrated. it's a hard place for me to be in - things which are worse than my worst fears, things which are too dreadful for me to imagine, are, based on the evidence we have, literally true. i have had to learn to think the unthinkable, believe the unbelievable. it's a sort of... what elisabeth sandifer called "qlippothic enlightenment", finding something new in the ashes of tremendous loss, tremendous destruction. and that's not the place spielberg is coming from. my friend, the one i saw the movie with, was talking to me this morning about spielberg's film being based so much in _wonder_. and it is. you can look at the vastness of the universe and, like, "terrible" and "terrific", etymologically, have the same root. these feelings coexist in me. all of the things that have been opened are frightening and amazing at the same time.

right now it's hard to see past the fear. and for me, i feel like i _have_ to, i have a _compulsion_ to remind myself that there is more than this, more than what is happening now. that we have a future. that things _will_ get better, no, _are_ getting better, in ways that i'm probably not noticing right now. he's talking about 2001: a space odyssey on "the rewatchables" and one of the podcast hosts talks about how no, for him the movie doesn't evoke as much that sense of wonder as it does... he's afraid to know. he's afraid to know! and that, accidentally, is disclosure day in a nutshell. it's not, i don't see it as "redeeming" white midwesterners, because nobody can do that. i grew up with white midwestern values and i saw those people turn, curdle, go sour. it was always present in them, sure, and there is absolutely a sense of horror seeing that firsthand. kurt vonnegut talks about the same thing... he's not a midwesterner, and there were things, values, he saw growing up, the unitarians in indiana, that are... eclipsed right now. by other things. by bigotry and hatred and fear.

spielberg apparently literally believes in aliens, which i think is a generational thing, a mark of the time he grew up in. for me, i relate it back to the twinkeyz song "aliens in our midst". i see "alien" as "queer". i'm not _right_, that's just how i see it, that there's some common thing that has many expressions. it could be religion or the greys or queerness or any number of things.

what's real, for me, is how many of these terrible things right now are driven by the fear of the Other, wanting to imprison, torture the Other. watching the movie made me think of akira, the film, the generational trauma, the way the people in power, the military, the scientists, each in their own ways failed the next generation. call that espers or "homo superior" or just, you know, _kids_. it's frightening. did _we_ do that? is that what we _look_ like? or is this some awful mistake we made, something we have to fix?

i don't think spielberg is cynical. if anything he doesn't, i don't think, acknowledge the full depth of the awfulness that is being done, has been done, by people in power. he underplays it. that's just my perspective, though. scanlon, like i said, does some very evil shit.

and ultimately what spielberg _doesn't_ say is that scanlon must die for what he's done. to me the suggestion is that any new future _has_ to include people like scanlon, has to have a _place_ for them. sometimes, you know, i want to burn it all down, i want everyone who's hurt us to pay for what they've done. sure, i want retributive justice. i'd be tempted to back something like a Morgenthau Plan for the people, so many people, who have done these awful things, who have willingly contributed to these awful things. i don't think spielberg can even _imagine_ such a thing. i'm grateful for that. i admire him for that.

nah, spielberg, to me, he's a sentimentalist through and through. i mean i think of him as someone who wants you to cry when old yeller dies. and you know what? fair enough. fair enough. i really value... having that permission.

The creepy score alone, a kissing cousin to the same year's Poltergeist (which was released a month later) ...

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 19, 2026 8:41 AM (fifty-three minutes ago)

oh yeah, steven spielbergtobe hooper's poltergeist, great film

hugo, who's always addressed by his first name, says to noah - everyone else calls him "scanlon", hugo calls him "noah" - he says look, i lost you when your wife died.

you are goddamn right i ship these two btw

Kate otm x 1000

excellent post

I mean, saying he is not cynical because the government *shouldn't* be trusted is ... I mean, that's cynical! Fair, but cynical. I'm not saying that Spielberg is *exclusively* cynical, per se, but that there is an element of post-Vietnam etc. cynicism at odds or in conflict with his optimism/humanism, because he does straddle that generational gap. His sentimentality and optimism hearkens back to an idealized America of his youth (even if that America was an illusion). The movies he was watching as a kid, when the giant ants or aliens are attacking, you called in the army! But in many of his movies, the military or government is a an equal menace, or at least meddler. With some exceptions, of course, but aside from Saving Private Ryan, really, often when you want to get something done in his movies, whether in Jaws or Munich or even Raiders, you go rogue. Though obviously that is also a really common story trope to generate conflict.

who can live in this nation and not be subject to bouts of cynicism?

His sentimentality and optimism hearkens back to an idealized America of his youth (even if that America was an illusion). The movies he was watching as a kid, when the giant ants or aliens are attacking, you called in the army! But in many of his movies, the military or government is a an equal menace, or at least meddler. With some exceptions, of course, but aside from Saving Private Ryan, really, often when you want to get something done in his movies, whether in Jaws or Munich or even Raiders, you go rogue. Though obviously that is also a really common story trope to generate conflict.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 19, 2026 11:38 AM (nine minutes ago)

ok, i'll give, yeah, it is cynical! he does have a cynical streak! the ending of "raiders", for instance. it's a really funny movie, because indy is, like, serving colonialism, his whole "it belongs in a museum" thing. and of course what happens to the ark of the covenant, this enormously powerful magical artifact, is that we see it wind up in a warehouse. i don't think that's spielberg critiquing colonialism or anything, i think that's just him being wry.

the really funny thing, to me, was listening to this podcast where he's talking about having saved all his stuff and that he's donated it all _to_ a museum, a nonprofit museum. it's funny because i have to assume he still has the prop, the ark of the covenant from that film, and unless it's being displayed somewhere it maybe _is_ boxed up in some warehouse somewhere. very "life imitates art". you know, here's the ark of the covenant next to the holy grail and the alien mothership...

yeah i do i guess... because he's so much less cynical than me it's easy for me to say "well he's not cynical" and Munich, for instance, that's a cynical fucking movie. it's not like he's not cynical (rightly so) of "going rogue". that's actually... it's not spielberg but i consistently hear people saying that the casino planet is one of people's least favorite parts of the last jedi. and i think the sequence itself, the way it's made, it doesn't work in the context of the movie. i think there's that argument to be made. when i hear people saying, though, is "why do they even go there", because the point is that there is no point. it's part of poe's character arc, "going rogue" and not listening to your superior officer because she doesn't _explain herself adequately_ to you is really fucking stupid.

he does have a cynical streak, but at the same time he's not... he's not some sort of _anarchist_ lol. when spielberg's characters "go rogue" there's usually some reason, whether it's explicitly stated in the film or not. within the context of raiders, um, he goes rogue to fight nazis. him and captain america, the thing they have most in common, in my head, is all the time they're like "fuck you, i'm gonna punch nazis". i mean i don't disagree that steven spielberg is liberal but a lot of the time he's liberal in the wokest possible way.

i guess if there is a dialectic, if there is, tv tropes calls it the "sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism", that nearly always winds up resolving on the idealism side. i guess if there wasn't any cynicism, his movies wouldn't be very dramatic. the government agents come for ET and it's all a big misunderstanding, they just want to help him get home, that's the version of ET that fucking flops. there were so many imitations of ET and they were all fucking awful. star wars has been copied to death, a lot of times very well, but you try to copy ET and you wind up with, like, Mac and Me, or Pod People. just.... ET has inspired some of the most baffling, disturbing art. i fucking love it. the terrible ET video games (there are multiple, and they're ALL AWFUL), the terrible ET board game, fucking... have your ever heard Afrosound's "El Regreso de E.T."? Cooky Puss. ET inspired fucking Cooky Puss. My mom sewed me an ET costume for Halloween when I was in the first grade and God I wish I had those pictures. It was amazing. Legitimately amazing.

That's what I mean by finding the human inside the alien. Anybody else tries to do it, it comes out creepy and weird, but Spielberg, the fucking thing is adorable.

A little minor thing. There are so many minor little grace notes in this film. It's what TV Tropes calls "Fridge Brilliance". I read a review that calls out the fox as being extremely unconvincing. Which I noticed, and I ignored, until I read that review and went "Wait a minute, that makes sense. That's not actually a fox."

I ignored the fact that it didn't look like a real fox, when I saw it, because I was bawling my eyes out. I was bawling my eyes out because my favorite movie when I was four was "The Fox and the Hound", so yeah, the fox showed up and I felt like I was being sucker-punched right in the feels. God I hate that, feeling like I've been sucker-punched. But the thing is, I understood this at the time, it felt like a sucker-punch but he didn't actually sucker-punch me. Nah, he hit me in the feels fair and square. Did it so well that I didn't even mind that the fox was some pretty fakey CGI. And then, on top of that, realized two days later that there was a PERFECTLY GOOD IN-UNIVERSE REASON for the fox to be fake-looking CGI.

That's just the kind of thing Spielberg can _do_. With movies. He couldn't do that if he was a cynic.

Heh, I was thinking of "fridge logic" during/after this as well. During, it was like "wait a minute..." but then I was caught up in whatever the action led to next.

ftr "cynicism" and "sentimentality," as I've noted several times, are synonyms. Cynicism is curdled sentimentality, the reaction to the world not working out the way we expected.

Eh, cynicism and sentimentalism may be loosely related, especially as you frame it, but I would hardly call them synonyms. The Carlin quote about failed idealism seems more accurate to me, but I'm not sure I would consider Spielberg an idealist, either, failed or otherwise.

Anyway, I can totally see Spielberg as anarchist, lol. This is after all the guy who in his spare time not just protected but amplified Joe Dante's Looney Tunes voice. It's a latent trait that runs through a lot of his movies, right up to the new one, where O'Connor's goal is to release the footage and ... see what happens; the shark hunters, Indy, the literal or metaphorically "lawless" worlds of "Saving Private Ryan" or "War of the Worlds," what I termed characters "going rogue" could almost as easily had been "embraced anarchy." Malcolm might study chaos theory, but gleefully comports himself kinda like an anarchist (at least until he's in the food chain). Even Lincoln finds a way to work around the system, and he *is* the system!

Spielberg is not an anarchist. He honors his cinematic fathers too highly.

its the straightlaced rule-follower's suppressed urge to fuck around and find out, the release of being an outlaw and blowing it all up, someone who admires anarchists but knows himself well enough to know that's not actually who he is

Ha! Well, for sure he would never go full Gremlins 2. He's definitely no cinematic anarchist. Not sure he is entirely a formalist, either, for all he adheres to his predecessors. He's more of a hybrid ... I dunno, postmodern formalist? Is that a thing, lol?

Actually Brody (hah) said 1941 was his favorite Spielberg film because it's where he gave free rein to his anarchic inner child:

In “1941,” he lets his manic, movie-loving inner child loose and avows far more about his love of movies—and its connection to his fundamental worldview—than was prudent. It’s the film in which he lets himself go, in which he displays his cinematic id, and it’s perhaps the only one in which he suggests that he has an id at all. Yet the part of Spielberg that was unleashed proved unpopular. Critics panned “1941,” and, though it was neither a blockbuster nor a financial flop, it was a big disappointment after the smash hits of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Spielberg, chastened, never cut loose again.

Eh, cynicism and sentimentalism may be loosely related, especially as you frame it, but I would hardly call them synonyms. The Carlin quote about failed idealism seems more accurate to me, but I'm not sure I would consider Spielberg an idealist, either, failed or otherwise.

― Josh in Chicago

the man was born in 1946. i'm not sure that it was ever in the cards for him.

and no, absolutely, i wouldn't consider spielberg an idealist as a filmmaker. he's a _visionary_, but one of the things that defines him as filmmaker is his ability to _compromise_, to _adapt_. the stories about "jaws" are the most famous ones, but all through his career. it's... i don't really get brody's take, the idea that he never "cut loose" again. god, the sheer childlike glee with which he talks about _2001: a space odyssey_ on that podcast... he's not _unfettered_ id, sure. he's also very conspiciously _not_ unfettered ego. he's got vision, he's got drive - he talks about it in that podcast, being driven - and he's also just _very very able to adapt_ in ways that hardly any other "visionary" filmmaker is. it's a skill he had to develop early on, and he just... he never stopped developing it. he's talking in that podcast about working with actors and saying "you know, look, just because i say i like the cut doesn't mean we can't do another take, if you feel you have something more to give". ummm yeah when you got a reputation as the Greatest Living Director people are gonna tend to want to do things your way lol. and i also, like, i do get where spielberg is coming from with that, because he it seems like just, like, always, always collaborates, _listens_ to other people to hear where they're coming from.

idk, i was just...

you are goddamn right i ship these two btw

― Kate (rushomancy), Friday, June 19, 2026 9:41 AM (nine hours ago)

this is a shitpost, to be clear. i'm shitposting. i strongly support slash, i stan fujoshi, and that's not what's in the movie, this idea of a hugo/noah relationship is fan wish fulfillment. no of course hugo and noah weren't ever in a sexual or romantic relationship. what i actually see in that scene between hugo and noah, the extraordinary thing, is how spielberg responds to what colman domingo brings to the performance, to the character. there is a _great_ deal of depth in the relationship between hugo and noah. there's this stuff that is just strongly implicit in domingo's performance particularly.

there's a certain anxiety straight men have, when it comes to their friendships with other men. "no homo". they're often afraid that loving another man might be construed as queer love, might _be_ queer love. the openness, the vulnerability, with which hugo addresses noah... it's _not_ queer love. the way i see the film, i very much get the impression that hugo (the character) is confident that his love for noah isn't queer, because hugo (the character) is _gay_, because he knows what it's like to be homosexually or homoromantically attracted to someone, and _that's not the way he loves noah_. and he does still love noah, even though he feels hurt, betrayed, by "losing" noah. he doesn't mean that in a sexual or romantic sense, because that's not the world spielberg's movies are set in. sure, ok, you could postulate, oh, maybe scanlon is bi and poly and he's involved with both his wife and with hugo but no, c'mon, that's not something that happens in a spielberg film. that's just not what's going on there. hugo wouldn't be able, i don't think, to love noah like he does if hugo _wasn't_ a gay man, but hugo's actual love for noah isn't gay love.

and all of that is there _because_, i think, _because_ of domingo. the film doesn't say anywhere that hugo is gay. hugo is played by a gay actor, and of course domingo _could_ play a straight character just fine. i'm _pretty sure_ he knows how to act straight. that's not what i see in his performance. i see him performing a character whose homosexuality is invisible to most people, someone who's had for most of his life learn to make his queerness invisible, but which nevertheless strongly motivates him, is something that's deep at the core of his being. i can't really say if hugo's queerness is invisible to noah. my gut says that it's not, that noah knows, because that's how much hugo trusts noah, but that's a supposition on my part. i can't see that in the film itself.

knowing what i do about the way spielberg directs, about the way he goes out of his way to listen to and respond to his actors... _he_ couldn't make hugo a queer character. he has limitations. domingo _can_ make hugo's character gay, without any overt indication at all of the character's queerness. not just because domingo is gay, but because he's a good fucking actor, and because spielberg, as a director, knows when to let domingo play the scene in a way that works for him as an actor. i'm not sure it's something domingo would even have to explicitly _discuss_ with spielberg. that's the level of trust spielberg has in his actors.

the movie works just fine, just fine as a movie without there being any consideration of the question of "is hugo gay". it's not something one needs to consider to enjoy the film, it's not at all central to the film. i think to me, as a queer person, it's important, that i think it is... i think i can with some degree of confidence say that the character of hugo is gay without it being some kind of crass "dumbledore is gay" thing. that it can be something that's invisible but _real_, something that, i believe, is _actually present_ and not just artificially imposed on the character like some kind of fantasy hugo/noah slash pairing. and i think the ability to do this is something that spielberg has consciously worked at, developed, over the length of his career. it's not something he could have done 30 years ago. it's not something that comes naturally to him.

Ha, a friend remarked that Hugo and Daniel's relationship only makes sense if you regard them as ex-lovers.