Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

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.

erin brokovich sold itself on the cleavage and i think its a valid reason to seinfeld pass altogether tbf

They're called boobs, Ed.

Ebert, who famously didn't award many negative reviews, embarrassed himself with that Erin Brockovich review, which I watched live on their show. Of course he fawned over the crap Traffic because it was An Important Film.

theres room for both to be bad but the important point stands that the reviews were in and of themselves bad also i guess

what did he make of americas sweethearts

Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a pile of shit
CGI makes me sick

theres room for both to be bad but the important point stands that the reviews were in and of themselves bad also i guess

what did he make of americas sweethearts

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

ftr Erin Brockovich is top Soderbergh and almost a great movie.

i may well yet watch it based on that good word

Julia Roberts-Albert Finney chemistry is tops imo

Just watched EB for the first time a couple weeks ago. It's good. Finney is great.

Soderbergh at his best. The legal conundrum is clear. He doesn't condescend to the working-class characters. He enables a star to give her best performance to date.

ftr in addition to being a masterpiece jurassic park is in its treatment of desire/obsession/art/movies a direct spiritual sequel to close encounters: equally beautiful but less childish

alfred otm about ebert review of brokovich: "the costume design sinks this movie"

Would watch a movie of Finney and Roberts in crap clothes and eating worse fast food as they debate legal strategy:

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

Soderbergh is the best genre director working today, I think. His thrillers and crime movies are frequently amazing and never fail to get the job done.

Someone mentioned Fuller upthread; The Big Red One (the restored version that's available on DVD) is better than Saving Private Ryan. I haven't seen The Thin Red Line. The only Malick movies I've seen are Badlands and The New World.

ftr Erin Brockovich is top Soderbergh and almost a great movie.

I had never gotten around to it but watched it on a transatlantic flight this summer and found it entirely satisfying. All a bit Hollywoodized of course, but with that light Soderbergh touch that his good stuff has. I agree about the Roberts-Finney chemistry, very likable on both sides.

there was an amusing cut scene where Brockovich had just gotten fired and was taking her stuff out and said "any of you cunts want to help me carry this shit?", but they cut it cos it was 'too much'

Erin Brockovich was by a considerable length the best movie up for the best picture Oscar that year

And if we're to the point of saying Flags of Our Fathers is superior to Saving Private Ryan, sorry, disembarking this train