Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

sorry for multiple posts

it is rattling around in my brain still, i found it quite emotional

for one, carrying such a heavy burden for so long as such a young kid … and then confronting it all to unravel it and reform it into a movie seems beyond challenging but maybe the kind of emotional work finally needed after so long.

but also on a personal level, i grew up in a house where a marriage was in an unacknowledged freefall (far different circumstances & this one is still in freefall to this day) - but god, the ways spielberg shows how that can feel so much worse than a calamitous collapse, especially over a long period of time, the way it slowly poisons everyone, the tiny cynicisms that infect the children forced to watch.

and judd hirsch is pure ineffable magic.

loved this – judd hirsch was incredible

A dissenting opinion: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2022/11/the-fabelmans.html

Let us anticipate Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film "The Fabelmans"

xp I find WC absolutely useless anymore as a barometer

I love Chaw as a writer, but this statement is not unfair.

Finally saw and mostly loved "Fabelmans," a movie so personal it borders on the indulgent and/or painful, right down to casting Michelle Williams, who, god help us, we do not deserve.

Regardless, like "West Side Story," I was just in awe of Spielberg's virtuosity. The script can be on the nose sometimes, maybe too much, but the camera - where it is, what it is doing, and why - practically left me breathless. And speaking of "West Side Story," there were moments I half expected the cast to break out in song and dance, but that may just be a byproduct of its "love letter to the cinema"-ness.

Watched this last night and loved it way more than I was expecting to. It's not gloopy or overly sentimental at all.

It's the only major American movie I saw all year that had any semblance of humanism, outside of Jackass Forever.

<3

The trailer really made this look like a huge piece of shit and it ended up being really good

It opened wide around here on Xmas weekend. Who knows if it'll do well :/

I think we all know it won't

apparently it's his worst box office return ever, not surprising given they put it on streaming for rent at the same time it hit theaters (a process he talks about a bit in that NYT article).

Also not surprising given movies in America are dead

I really loved this film as well. A gem.

extremely likeable film with a couple of tremendous cameos from the elders on-set. the sisters were fun on first encounter but maybe needed a tiny bit more work later on?

in general lacked stakes also a little maybe: after all we know where the little film-maker's story ended up, plus the director chose to view the family thru a hindsight gloze of affectionate forgiveness (which is excellent news for IRL family relations but possibly honeys up the potential drama a touch too much)

(one of my co-viewers -- who knows an insane amount abt cinema and insists always on doing his homework before watching anything -- said that spielberg and his dad were actually on p hostile terms for much of SS's early adult life and only properly reconciled many years later) (= sad and tough for them IRL but maybe better for the drama? but w/evs, what we got was totally watcheable and this was only an afterthought inspired by my co-viewer blurting out his homework)

some of the school stuff was a bit pat i felt, except it then ended in an unexpected place that the patness didn't quite set up? and given that we saw the film that took it there, a bit of an opaque place also? till then that guy was the least interesting character and merely a cypher

Yeah, with Spielberg there's always in his good movies (and some of his not-so-good ones) the sense that the material attempts to extricate itself from his grip.

yeah the gloze extended to his reconstructions of his own kid-made movies maybe?

I loved this.

spielberg and his dad were actually on p hostile terms for much of SS's early adult life and only properly reconciled many years later)

The Spielberg doc on HBO gets into this a bit (including real home movie footage of Spielberg’s mom gazing lovingly at dad’s friend on a family camping trip). According to the doc (iirc), the true reasons for the split were largely withheld from the kids. Spielberg's father allowed them to think it was him dumping the mother instead of the other way around, out of fear that she was too fragile to deal with the anger the kids might have for her if they knew the whole truth, so Spielberg & dad became estranged before he learned the whole truth of the situation many years later. The parents each outlived their second spouses and eventually got back together later in life.

The high school stuff - which annoyed a lot of other viewers, it seems! - struck me as a send up of high school remembrance stuff in other movies.

The Christian girlfriend stuff had me and most of the theater howling with laughter

Which is to say: I’ll assume that it all happened, and more or less that way, but the bullies were such arch caricatures of high school bullies in that era that while I was grossed out by the anti-semitism (and who wouldn’t be), there was an embedded wink.

Yeah. His girlfriend, while also too-good-to-be-true, reminded me of the self-mocking Cuban-American Catholic girls I grew up.

The Christian girlfriend arrived at just the right point in the movie, giving it the lift it needed to carry it through the last hour

the Senior Ditch Day film looked exactly like an 80's Spielberg film, and the scenes in the hallways, though set in 64, really looked like they were straight out of the 80's as well. Pretty masterful self-reference, I thought.

i liked the sensitivity with which he treated Christian girlfriend as well; she could have been just absurd, it could have been mean, but she and the relationship are really sweet; even the breakup is sweet.

Which tbf isn't to say that Spielberg and Kushner didn't get their digs in at her character's expense, but they walked a fine line as deftly as I can imagine anyone doing circa 2022.

rewatched Fabelmans on a flight today & it still is pretty magic imo

really cannot get over how good the actor playing teen steve is at giving spielbergness … and at straddling being an actual annoying teen + being wise beyond his years bc forced to grow up fast

also Monica is luminous even on a small screen. such a fun, great performance

scene report: Duel is still awesome

Jurassic park is a pile of shit

rmde

i’ll go to the duel thread & see if anyone actually wants to interact abt duel

googles rmde

xxp otm (and not just because there's a literal pile of shit in the movie)

JP2 is the only movie I've walked out on at the theater (but Duel is still awesome).

My daughter was looking for something sad to watch, so I recommended "A.I.", which was on Criterion. I got home just in time for the last 25 minutes or so, and my god, that remains the most heart wrenching movie of all time. I could barely keep it together. What a special film, such an outlier in a catalog of amazing films that are all amazing for reasons different from the reasons that make this particular film so remarkable.

yeah i love that one, has v deep feels for me

A.I. is unquestionably the best film he’s made post-1993, although I certainly like others that he’s done. I think Osment’s performance in the film is up with Christian Bale’s in Empire of the Sun as the best he’s ever directed.

There is an incredible book on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut by Robert K. Polker and Nathan Abrams which delves into how Kubrick used said film as a little incubator to test some of the CG tech he intended to employ with A.I. He also really fucked over Brian Aldiss, who wrote multiple treatments/drafts for virtually no money (and subsequently got no screen credit).

A.I. is also the only Spielberg film where I think that Janusz Kaminski’s photography actually enhances it, as opposed to being unbearably oversaturated and distractingly plastic

Same here. I remember a lot of people hating on that movie for every conceivable reason, but a few critics championed it as a masterpiece and I think they’re right - it’s the only Spielberg film I still like, and even with repeated viewing there’s more to discover.

AI is great, salty critics were probably angry at the potential of what a Kubrick version could’ve been but Ian Watson - who wrote the story - worked with both of them so in the end it worked out as intended. Yeah Kubrick probably would have made a great thing with it, but Spielberg ultimately had the adequate pizzazz for what the movie needed.

As flawed as they are Spielberg has some of the best blockbusters of all time. Without him 80’s and 90’s cinema would have been radically different.

I saw AI in San Jose, on a road trip with my girlfriend to scout out a place to live. I was moving away from her, my hometown, my friends, and my mom who I was close to. After the movie we walked ro the car and when I got inside I totally lost it, I was a sloppy sobbing mess for a while. That movie really found the combination to unlock all of the feelings and they gushed out.

Jude Law's performance is very underrated

My college kid wanted to watch "war movies," which is why we watched "The Thin Red Line" the other night, and why we watched "Saving Private Ryan" this weekend. I don't know when I last saw "Ryan," but it was even more years before I last saw "Thin Red Line," so long ago that I barely remembered much about it except for the opening battle. As I watched it again, though, it occurred to me that there really isn't much *to* remember about it. It's just not particularly remarkable, imo, and really has nothing new or interesting to say. Visually, of course, the action sequences are air-tight as expected, but the under-cranked camera stuff, sort of radical at the time, has been ripped off and imitated so much that much of the movie plays out like an episode of TV these days. It's also often pretty corny, sort of intentionally, in a really old fashioned way, like a boilerplate 1940s war film shot through with modern touches (and undersold by Williams' generic and relentlessly invasive score), but the solemn/stodgy vibe doesn't work for me. It just constantly hedges in a way that plays to Spielberg's worst instincts. Fleeting unconvincing comedy, say, and of course the distractingly sentimental bookends.

Basically, "Thin Red Line" still contains multitudes, but "Saving Private Ryan" plays it so safe it's often downright stultifying. Credit my watching companion for recognizing that the Malick is a lot better. Just for a baseline I brushed up on Ebert's review of both films, four stars for "Ryan," three stars for "Thin Red Line." It's strange to me what he praises about the former and criticizes about the latter; in a lot of instances what he calls positives about "Ryan" I consider negatives, and where he says "Thin Red Line" fails I feel it succeeds.

The whole concept of Saving Private Ryan is ??? in its sentimentality, this no man left behind nonsense is not how war works, v hard to take the film seriously from thereon.

I went to see both films at the cinema when they came out. I wrote off Thin Red Line as pretentious tosh at the time but liked Saving Private Ryan a lot more. Mainly down to the opening scene. I've watched it again since and like Josh says its basically an old fashioned 40s war movie featuring all the stereotypes and tropes from those movies. It even got a bit A-Team with the scene where they are fighting the tanks. Joe Queenan's takedown of the movie is pretty hilarious actually. I must watch Thin Red Line again. I havent seen it since and I bet it works as a genuine anti-war movie.

xpost I think the movie thinks is its/a profound point it's making - what is the value of one man, etc. - but imo it just comes off pat.

SPR has good to great scenes, Adam Golberg's getting compassionately stabbed by the German soldier, for example.

Compassionately?