Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

"Catch Me If You Can" was the last Spielberg I really enjoyed

i find CE3K strangely easy to resist, even though there's nothing actually wrong with it. my students seemed to largely feel the same way. i guess maybe compared to jaws certain set pieces feel slightly belabored? the emotional arc of the characters should be very moving, but it all seems somewhat remote.

but who knows, maybe i just need to see it in the right frame of mind. not spielberg of course, but after seeing and being unenthused by "american graffiti" possibly a dozen times, i saw it again last year and finally got it.

i guess maybe compared to jaws certain set pieces almost every other movie feels slightly belabored.

CE3K has been one of my fave movies since I was a kid -- it never seemed remote to me, but then I think I basically *was* Roy from the movie. I wanted to get on a spaceship too, and leave behind a world alternately boring/too hard/not friendly/not accessible. This is the *only* Spielberg movie I have that kind of connection to (tho I also love Raiders abt the same, just as a fun adventure ride kind of thing), and why it's easy for me to see it as an outlier.

i definitely remember being more moved by it as a kid than i have been as an adult, back when "getting on a spaceship" didn't seem all that much more fantastical than "going to high school"

Isn't there a Second City bit with Rick Moraines jazzing up the Close Encounters theme?

it's called loving America, you seditionist.

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 4 February 2016 21:47 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

I love Tarantino *and* Spielberg, and live a capable & happy life despite my terrible life choices

so unAmerican

tbh I find Morbz' eternal defense of Spielbergo kind of endearing, an achilles heel, a lone almost random populist chink in an otherwise impregnable armor of misanthropy

― Οὖτις, Thursday, February 4, 2016 3:31 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Somebody has to do it after this dudes "Bye Felicia"...

http://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/armondmain.jpg

probably essential to see on a theater screen for full impact anyway.

saw CE3K on VHS as a kid and found it super boring

saw a 35mm print of the remaster done for Blu-ray at Cinefamily in 2013, and fell asleep halfway through

it feels so endless

Jonathan Hellion Mumble: Glad you like The Sugarland Express. Whenever I mention how much I love it, here and elsewhere, there just doesn't seem to be much interest. I think Duel (which I still haven't seen), because of the novelty of it being made for TV, might be better known--Spielberg's Night Gallery episode might even be better known. (Did see that, ages ago.)

i notice people who viscerally hate religion generally dislike CE3K

I generally dislike religion, and love CE3K.

For real LOLZ re: Grisso's post, btw.

Like, I wanna get a t-shirt made with that picture of Armond and the caption "Bye Felicia."

1941
This just falls completely flat. I have no problem with Spielberg (or anyone else) making this type of film but nothing here works. Ok maybe except the ferris wheel rolling, that looked nice, but overall zzzzzz...

E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL
First time in like a quarter century I've watched this, hated it then, hated it now. Really this is where my lack of respect for Spielberg comes from, I just can't manage to care about any of these humans or that little hun. One thing I observed for the first time is that the elder brother is really good, that actor never went on to anything notable, did he? He should have.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
Love both of these. Raiders is like what I was saying about Jaws, every scene seems like a set piece. The monkey plays the Drew Barrymore role in this, ie the narc. This is a case of Spielberg's default tone actually suiting the material.
Temple Of Doom is almost as good, I know there's racism accusations but I don't really get that, the goofy knockabout stuff seems pretty much across the board regardless of skin tone. Not as good as Raiders because Karen Allen >>>>> Kate Capshaw, but there are so many immense sequences here.

THE COLOR PURPLE
This was a big film for My Mother, so I saw it in the background a number of times but this is maybe the first time I've properly watched it. And I can see how she relates to it, it's not about race really (that one Oprah sequence aside), it's about domestic abuse. But my problem is that with such a dark subject, why does he choose to film it as a 30's screwball comedy? Oh, Danny Glover can't find his socks! and when he does, there's a hole in them! Now he's trying to cook breakfast! This isn't gunna go well! The amount of mugging going on here gives me a pain behind my eyeballs. But in the parts where the actors are given free reign to be dramatic everyone is quite good, Whoopi especially. And the whole sequence with Danny Glover towards the end after she has left him I actually found quite powerful.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN
I really liked this one at the time, but I really couldn't see much craft in the directing this time around. Nice sets, nice acting (Christian Bale is a bit too theatre kid, but otherwise), great source material, but it's just like all the recent oscarbait shit. It is shot competently, nothing more.

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE
I never watched this much compared with the first two, which I assumed was due to The Connery Factor, but actually this is really bad on every level. Yes, Connery is bad, but everyone else is too, and the script is just appalling, every gag signposted, everything telegraphed and then the payoffs landing THUNK on the table. In a way this is more offensive than the films where he is trying and failing to do something, this is just laziness on everyone's part.

General Observation: WHY ARE ALL THESE FILMS SO LONG?

Anyway, that's where I'm up to, I was gunna watch some more today but there is a tubby cat on my legs so I didn't want to get up to change discs, instead I jut watched the whole of P'tit Quinquin, which was better than any of this. What's next up? oh, ALWAYS, that'll be a barrel of monkeys. Then fucken HOOK, then Schindler's List, then some dinosaur films. I never would have guessed I would look forward to the holocaust so much...

I put on Hook while babysitting my niece a year or so ago mostly as an excuse to give it a re-watch, and my god are those Lost Boys sequences painful. Hoffman and Hoskins have some fun scenery-chewy moments, and Charlie Korsmo (remember him from Dick Tracy and What About Bob? ) is actually quite affecting as Williams's son--he's like the Elliott's brother of this film, I guess ('cept I love E.T. and everyone in it)--but the film really is every awful thing that Spielberg's haters accuse him of being.

And The Lost World is even worse, though for different reasons. Probably the only Spielberg film that can honestly be called lazy.

Close Encounters is my favorite film of his after Raiders. Apparently he's slated to direct the film adaptation of Ready Player One??!

The BFG looks to be even more of a disaster than Tintin

General Observation: WHY ARE ALL THESE FILMS SO LONG?

and bad.

delete thread? just til you ppl learn to watch master filmmakers. Go pick on Zulawski.

Wrong again, bye.

One for the lovers and the haters: Spielberg in 30 shots

Spielberg so great that even the 3 seconds of "BFG" from the goddamn trailer seems worthy among those clips.

it's possible that some of the material shot for the trailer will be reused in the movie tho

"omg iconic amazing" dropoff about halfway through that thing is pretty decisive

tall hat, cgi tintin & pensive horse not quite holding up against scheider dolly zoom, etc

u mad, tintin chase sequence is as good as anything in the Raiders movies. Agreed that's a bad choice from War Horse, though. Better shot would be the British cavalry riding into the German machine guns and the riderless horses appearing in shot on the other side.

always loved that rise/pull-back as indy regards the idol

a man putting something in context

empire of the sun shot rly something too, almost too much something

btw somehow NYC is getting to see a new 35mm print of Close Encounters from the late '90s 'director's cut,' which is an amalgam of '77/80 but no goddamn starship interior, hooray.

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2016/04/22/detail/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind

Ian Freer on Spielberg and the Amblinification of modern movies:

But there is something in the films themselves beyond nostalgia that makes them resonate today. Unlike many modern films aimed at a family audience, Amblin – named after the 1968 short Spielberg made as a calling card – created genre flicks that didn’t pull their punches. Gremlins had a gleefully malicious streak – in one scene a gremlin is ground in a blender and exploded in a microwave – that lead to the creation of a new US rating, the PG-13, and felt edgy compared to the more anodyne feel of contemporary family films. But they also didn’t shy away from messy experience. Refusing to talk down to audiences, Spielberg created a whole sub-genre of sci-fi as autobiography, using fantasy as a means to smuggle in tough emotional truths delivered with finesse and telling detail.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/midnight-special/steven-spielberg-jeff-nichols-80s-movies/

Watched "Empire of the Sun" with my older daughter. Maybe goes overboard with the dramatic crane reveals, but what an immaculately crafted film.

In the top three Spielberg films, for me.

mine too

P51 MUSTANG CADILLAC OF THE SKY

There's a JG Ballard series coming up here where they're screening EotS, and the program notes say they're including it as a botched adaptation. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=05&year=2016#showing-45800

that's interesting -- from what i remember of both the book and the film there are some sizable tonal differences at times, but "botched" doesn't seem right. did ballard himself not like the movie?

here's what he wrote!

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: "But they're actors."

Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live - and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp - the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/04/fiction.film

ha, that is great

FWIW, for a director so closely associated with families, EotS - along with ET and AI - are his only three told more or less exclusively from the perspective of the child, right? Anyway, "Empire" has stuck with me since its release. Some truly incredible shots. (And a fleeting Ben Stiller.)

turned 70 three weeks ago

Molly Haskell has a book on his oeuvre out... including her commentary on 'the Shrieking Female' in the films.

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/molly-haskell-steven-spielberg

Tom Shone writes about the Molly Haskell book, and Spielberg's view of masculinity:

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/if-you-think-spielberg-cant-do-women-youre-missing-his-point-about-men

“Haskell is on to something, but only if you turn it 180 degrees. What is critiqued in Jaws is precisely the masculinity that she claims sets the film’s Robert Bly-ish ideological agenda. Refusing to cast Charlton Heston in his film because he seemed too heroic, Spielberg chose as his heroes a physical coward, afraid of the water, fretting over his appendectomy scar, and a Jewish intellectual, crushing his styrofoam cup in a sarcastic riposte to Robert Shaw’s bare-chested Hemingway act. Throughout the film and his career, Spielberg sets up machismo as a lumbering force to be outmanoeuvred by the nimble and quick-witted. His films are badminton, not tennis. Their signature mood is one of buoyancy; his jokes are as light as air. He’s a king of the drop shot.”

Rewatching Lincoln for the however-many-eth time.
The scene with the two telegraph operators, ruminating on equality while composing his telegram to Grant, it is still such a thing of beauty to me - so much crammed into that scene

Something Evil's good! I know I saw it as a kid when it originally aired (1972)--guarantee that I covered my eyes for half of it--and that Johnny Whitaker left some kind of a lasting impression that was reawakened the first time he appears. Watching it today, I honestly found it creepier than either It Follows or The Witch. Towards the end, amazing how much of a blueprint it was for The Exorcist a year later.

Was wondering what our Steve was up to, especially post BFG flop, and ... it's "The Post," a Pentagon Papers movie.

I got a shiver of anticipation when I read the announcement on Monday that Steven Spielberg would direct “The Post,” a drama about The Washington Post’s role in exposing the Pentagon Papers, starring Tom Hanks as the fabled Post editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham. Set in 1971, the movie will center on the paper’s war with the White House over whether the Post had the right to publish the top-secret military documents — first leaked to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg — that charted the escalation and futility of the Vietnam War. I have no idea if Spielberg has been mulling this movie over for a while (the rights were bought by producer Amy Pascal last fall), but everything about the timing suggests that it’s no coincidence the announcement was made 45 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump. “The Post” is clearly a film that Spielberg wants to make because he sees it as a parable of today: a high-stakes political drama of secrecy, lies, and leaks, and the rights and responsibilities of a free press. The parallels could hardly by more incendiary.

That’s why it’s a fast-track movie. “The Post” is scheduled to begin shooting in May and to be released later on this year, even as Spielberg is in the midst of post-production on his dystopian climate-change sci-fi epic, “Ready Player One,” and has had to push back another project he’s already at work on, “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” (starring Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance). Spielberg has a pattern of turning into a master juggler when he takes on a drama of historical import. He completed “Jurassic Park” the same year — 1993 — that he shot, edited, and released “Schindler’s List,” and he repeated the pattern, in 2005, with “The War of the Worlds” and “Munich.” It’s fascinating to think that Spielberg makes his topical-urgency movies on such a breakneck schedule, because that’s probably part of what gives them their history-written-with-lightning quality.

http://variety.com/2017/film/columns/steven-spielberg-the-post-pentagon-papers-1202006970/

Promising--I'd be content if it's 85% as good as All the President's Men..

From Lance Henriksen's "Random Roles" on The AV Club today:

AVC: How much interaction did you have with Francois Truffaut?

LH: A lot. I was on that movie almost six months!

AVC: I was wondering. It’s not a massive part, but it’s a sprawling film.

LH: Well, remember, I was very young as a movie actor, you know? [Snorts.] What the fuck is a movie actor? But, anyway, I was a young actor, and I was just happy to be there. I really was.

Truffaut was a funny guy. He was a really nice guy. And I was fumbling all over the fucking place, and nobody noticed. I remember I walked up to Spielberg and said, “Steven, I want to capture one of these little aliens and drag him into a Porta Potty. I’ll throw my coat over him and drag him in there, and we’ll have one.” And he looked at me like… He looked at me incredulously. Like, “What the fuck?” Finally he said to me, “That’s a different movie.” I said, “Oh…” [Laughs.] Good people on that film, man. I’ve been around a lot of talented people. And I didn’t know what talent was! But a little of the shit rubs off on you, and you start gaining your education.

I remember Spielberg wanted candy glass on all the modules on the big set that we were working on—you know, when the windows all blow out from the signal from the mother ship?—and he took the money out of his own pocket and bought it. It was thousands of dollars. These are passionate people who say, “I’ve got to have what I know will work.” So, yeah, that was a great experience. It really was.