Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

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?

I meant it ironically, but, yeah, the movie shows far worse ways to die at the hands of one's enemy.

Neither film are among their respective director's best but it's been a lot longer since I've watched Thin Red Line

I don't think there is a single Spielberg movie without several striking scenes and set pieces. I think it's his less successful films that are remembered mostly *for* those specific scenes. So, like, "Saving Private Ryan," everyone remembers and talks about the opening battle, or the action sequences, but no one really talks about the meat of the movie as much more than mere connective tissue. But, like, "Close Encounters," "Jaws," "ET," et al., they can't be reduced to their set pieces, imo. Though I guess a case could be made that a movie like "Raiders" is *all* amazing set pieces, lol.

I've seen TTRL recently enough to admit I admire it as a war film, and it's better realized than SPR, but no way do I think Malick's as interesting and frustrating a director in toto as Spielberg, who still gets patronized.

(I wonder what Morbz would've thought about The Fabelmans).

I bet he would have liked it.

I think Spielberg is in a class by himself, but Malick's prolonged second act has proved him to be a pretty interesting and frustrating director himself. Has any other filmmaker explicitly cited, or revealed through their filmmaking, Malick as a big influence *before* his '90s return? I'm sure, but maybe one of you can think of a specific example.

Just rewatched A.I., maybe for the first time since it was in theaters. Still takes some adjustment when the pace and mood changes again after they leave Rouge City for Man-hattan, but overall the whole thing is pretty great from beginning to end.

https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/6/29/22553929/ai-artificial-intelligence-steven-spielberg-stanley-kubrick

What led me to that was seeing that Ian Watson got a story credit. Bob Shaw worked on it was well- at the same time! - although neither one knew about the other.
http://www.ianwatson.info/plumbing-stanley-kubrick/

Okay that link says something slightly different but still

The Thin Red Line was, for me, age 18-22, "my favourite film ever made", and I must've seen it on VHS some 20 times

That’s basically the same for me (I also saw it in the theater around 4 times)…except now in my 40s I’ve come around to thinking it’s my favorite film again! It’s special even with Malick’s oeuvre.

I need to rewatch SPR again since I’ve been on a WW2 jag lately, but the last time it just felt extra plodding bathetic.

And, to be fair, I might have cited A.I. as my favorite movie from 22-25…not a Spielberg hater by any means.

I really didn't like Saving Private Ryan. It means well, but it really is bathetic. They actually drew inspiration from The Seven Samurai, something Spielberg enthusiastically admitted when Tribune critic Michael Wilmington brought it up in an old interview, but it ends up failing in a way that seems characteristic of his "serious" films - he sets up a compelling idea and instead of coming up with any meaningful in exploring that idea, he falls back into an easy, stereotypically Hollywood conclusion. Both films try to explore the idea of heroism, but Kurosawa's comes off far more bold, honest and complex, both on a sociopolitical level (interrogating the culture surrounding war, the myriad class conflicts and moral hypocrisies surrounding every aspect of war) as well as philosophical (if one believes in true heroism, if one believes the samurai ultimately prove themselves to be heroic figures, it's not because of the outcome as they wholly recognized they could only come out on the losing end, likely dead, and were being exploited by people who will never welcome them with open arms unless they needed to use them). On that last point, imagine if a similar ending had happened in Ryan - if he didn't end up raising this idyllic looking family, then the sacrifices of those men would have been nothing but a waste. On a lot of levels, it just feels more and more insipid and a shallow consideration of what it means to be at war, moreso when you think of the complexities Kurosawa's film never shies away from.

Also, the opening that everyone swoons over? I grew to dislike that as well. It gets praised as being some technical marvel, but I found it numbing, like how many ways can we maim and dismember people on-screen? It really proved Sam Fuller's original point about depicting war - you can re-enact all the horrors you want, but on balance it feels more exploitive than really edifying people about what it means to send people into combat. It's kind of disgusting the film eventually inspired a first-person video game. (I believe from DreamWorks, was it not?)

Yup: https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-gaming/saving-private-ryan-call-of-duty/

"Using the video developer that he helped establish, DreamWorks Interactive, Spielberg sought to create a WWII video game that was both entertaining and educational."

I know he means well, but I think it's thoroughly naive and misguided to think an interactive game will somehow make people grow up to be less hawkish.

The opening onscreen carnage mostly reminds me of "Starship Troopers" these days. I wonder if anyone made the comparison at the time, given "Troopers" came out the year before.

i find Saving Pvt Ryan to be really well-done and the opening battle truly is something else, but Spielberg and Hanks pulled it off a lot better in Band of Brothers. It doesn't shy away from the cornpone on occasion but has an improved narrative flow, manages its digressions from the main narrative well, and ultimately grapples better with the morality of combat soldiers. It better shows the terror of the less-epic, less-cinematic battles. Plus the mission/dilemma presented to the squad in SPR just rings so false to me. I just didn't believe it would be done.

i also preferred how BOB certainly didn't really romanticize the soldiers nearly as much, even though they were depicting actual people, many of whom were still alive at the time.

I think by far the best work to come out of Dreamworks' WWII productions was Eastwood's diptych in 2006. They need to be seen together, ideally Letters from Iwo Jima first (though it was released the other way around). It was fashionable to knock Flags of Our Fathers as being the lesser of the two and uneven, but conceptually it's brilliant and a necessary film as it addresses one potential issue with Iwo Jima (it had been criticized in some circles for watering down the atrocities of the Japanese - I personally disagree but it does bring up the power images/cinema has of potentially re-writing history, the core idea of Flags of Our Fathers).

Jurassic park is a pile of shit

Nah, it's a competent film with flashes of brilliance, and fun to watch with kids of a certain age (say 13-21).

omar otm

Plus the mission/dilemma presented to the squad in SPR just rings so false to me. I just didn't believe it would be done

It's also so unbelievably compressed. They get their mission, and then the next scene are already all "screw this Ryan guy," and then with annoying regularity interrupt things with further surface deep debates about Ryan, like he's this mythic Kurtz figure or something. It's so phony and pro forma. So are the many scenes of Hanks' hands shaking. Like, we get it, and it's effective, but not when you have a scene that is literally his hand shaking, then a reaction from one of his men, then his hand shaking, then a different man, then his hand, then another man, and so on. Just to show that they all see his hand, you know? And then they get to Ryan, and Ryan sees his hand shaking, too. Did you notice his hand was shaking? Because war.

Also hate how Jeremy Davies is handled in it. In the final battle he's depicted as a full-on frozen-in-place coward, which is fine, but there's been no indication of this tendency before this. He's been in battle and killing, he's been in tough spots before. Like, you know, D-Day. He's been a participant, and then suddenly, nope, shaking in his boots. Same with Matt Damon, who gets his own silent breakdown shot at the end. These are people that have been in midst of things for weeks and months, brave dudes that have already displayed their bravery. But for the sake of the movie's phoniness we need some breakdowns to balance out the overt bravery of Hanks, Sizemore, Pepper and I guess most of the rest.

Ebert, in his review, singles out Davies as "the key performance," but that's bullshit. Just as he (imo) misses the point when he says of "Thin Red Line" that "John Travolta and George Clooney are onscreen so briefly they don't have time to seem like anything other than guest stars," or that "the soldiers are not well-developed as individual characters. Covered in grime and blood, they look much alike, and we strain to hear their names, barked out mostly in one syllable (Welsh, Fife, Tall, Witt, Gaff, Bosche, Bell, Keck, Staros). Sometimes during an action we are not sure who we are watching, and have to piece it together afterward." He admits war is probably like that, but chalks it up to Malick's disinterest in the characters, rather than, as the movie itself often asserts, his hypothesis of humanity as an almost interchangeable collective that shares a single soul.

Also hate how Jeremy Davies is handled in it. In the final battle he's depicted as a full-on frozen-in-place coward, which is fine, but there's been no indication of this tendency before this. He's been in battle and killing, he's been in tough spots before. Like, you know, D-Day. He's been a participant, and then suddenly, nope, shaking in his boots.

Yes. But at the end of the movie his sole job is running ammo to the people who are handling the weapons. At least until he finally, belatedly picks one up for his "war is hell, do you see?" moment.

xxp The film even quotes John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath ("A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody" or in the case of The Thin Red Line, "Maybe all men got one big soul everybody's a part of, all faces are the same man. One big self.") Hell, it's in the TRAILER. I liked Ebert as a person, he writes well about other things in life, but his film reviews could be pretty awful, especially when it seemed like he was looking for one and only one reason to dismiss a whole film. There's an interview with Steven Soderbergh where Ebert tells him point blank he didn't like Erin Brockovich and Soderbergh, who doesn't get worked up and is genuinely curious, asks why. Ebert's response is simply "there's too much cleavage." And Soderbergh is just waiting for more, but when that's clearly all Ebert as to offer, he's like "okay...."

I just watched again, I guess he stresses that he's never been in combat before, but I took that to mean he's never shot a gun since basic training, though he's certainly been *around* combat. I suppose the distinction can be made that being in the midst of things is different from being on the periphery, but I think if he was an actual freeze in place coward we would have seen it foreshadowed earlier in the film. You know, like Hanks' hands shaking. Though iirc that hand shaking has no payoff at all.

The weird thing about Ebert is that he often really gets a lot of things that other people miss, but when he himself misses things, he misses big.

im confused as to how frustrating is being used almost as praise for spielberg above

agreed that SPR has always been competent (the very high end of competent) but hugely uninspired, BOB beats it in every way bar the big opening sequence (which wouldn't fit into the BOB approach anyway).

TTRL is otoh a masterpiece imo

Excellent point, JiC.