Spielberg's BRIDGE OF SPIES, a Cold War drama starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance

also with the Coens as two of three credited writers.

Peter Lazuba tweets:

Light is not truth but blindness. Anti-Capra parable of valuing human portraits against mirrored information. A great film about the presence and power dynamics created by sitting, and using the camera to convey such presence.

I've heard good things. Am wary, but think I'll go and see.

so... people sit in this movie

there are good films where they do. Hunger?

also it seems sitting/standing dynamic v important in Paths of Glory

all those dull sitting scenes in Rear Window.

75% of mad max fury road is just people sitting in cars

sounds cool though i tend to bristle at anti-capra sentiment

Very excited about this. Pretty long gap between movies for him, no? He's remarkably prolific; back to a movie a year for the next few. Anyway, "Lincoln" underscored his people-talking-in-a-room skills, and he and Hanks make a good team.

It is good see Rylance in a bigtime role, he deserved it after Wolf Hall. Not too excited about this but at least expect it will be decent.

there are good films where they do. Hunger?

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, October 13, 2015 4:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sitting vs shitting

contracapracorn?

video:
hourlong chat btwn Scorsese and Spielberg

http://www.dga.org/Events/2015/Dec2015/BridgeofSpies_QnA_1015.aspx

Very bummed that this movie apparently has nothing to do with the T'Pau album.

Will def see this

I keep imagining Bryan Ferry going "AND THE BRIDGE...IT..........SPIES"

gah that Scorsese/Spirlberg convo is so good, i love seeing them together. thanks for posting Morbs!

youre welcome, i can't wait til i have time to watch it

they reminisce! it's p cool

man based on that NYT interview, Spielberg has terrible taste in TV

Not bad, and naughty Spielberg will piss off NRO types by showing the extent to which the Justice Department wanted to railroad Abel. I especially liked how comfortable he's become with intrigue in well-upholstered rooms. But concentrating on noble Constitution-loving Hanks taxed my patience.

btw except for Abel's laconic mien and "Would that matter?" mantra, I couldn't tell the Coens wrote this.

well they rewrote it

Austin Stowell as Francis Gary Powers = rowr. Had I been Khrushchev, I would've insisted on keeping him.

Thanks Morbs! Great interview - spoilers of course - but I couldn't resist watching :)

man based on that NYT interview, Spielberg has terrible taste in TV

1) you mighta linked the interview

2) Maybe so -- i've never seen a minute of any of them -- but he left out at least one show he co-owns and apparently does a little work on, "The Americans."

man it would be amazing if he'd direct an ep or two of The Americans (not that they're not doing just fine)

This was really good. The one big action" sequence (plane) was tremendous. More thoughts later -- a few too many post-movie beers :)

I had problems with it. He can be chickenshit.

lol everytime i see this thread i see 'a cold war drama starring tom hanks and meg ryan'

Spielberg in a Q&A hosted by Paul Thomas Anderson:

https://youtu.be/ZcoHzt-zHSw

Kristin Thompson surveys Mark Rylance's career (BoS spoilers)

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/10/30/mark-rylance-man-of-mystery/

(I had forgotten he's the guy in Chereau's Intimacy)

He was effective and rather good eye candy in Angels and Insects. I saw him '97 in a Globe production of Henry V.

a triumph

Gonna have to accept that you and der Spiel are like Bowsley Crowther and Susan Hayward.

a lapse: interior of subway car in opening scene was all wrong for '57

a lapse: Austin Stowell wasn't nude in it.

quite a mountain of vanilla rock

Surprised you bought the ennoblement of Donovan. I don't dislike it, and like I wrote above Spiel's become an expert in drawing room comedy.

it was a mixed bag, like most contemporary spielberg. a lot of very confident and gripping storytelling, with a few scenes that delivered something more complex and puzzling -- from which spielberg would periodically pull back for moments of cheap audience gratification.

the subplot w/ the east germans was probably the least effectively handled

Spielberg seemed frightened by the possibility of releasing a picture with scenes critical of jingoism.

i don't know about that....

scenes critical of jingoism.

were you in the men's room?

I couldn't tell the Coens wrote this.

"I lost my coat."

"How?"

"You know, spy stuff."

Like I wrote last month: to conceive yet another movie about the conformist, paranoid fifties after demonstrating his command of the subtleties of political power in Munich and Lincoln strikes me as futile. Exiling Abel to federal prison unaware of the machinations transpiring on his behalf essentially sidelines the story’s most fascinating personality. Perhaps Spielberg assumed this reticent man repelled drama. The result is a second half starring the selfless lawyer thrown into a Stasi jail for the sake of American constitutionalism (glimpses of the imprisoned Abel get paired with Powers’ torture in Soviet hands — or is it enhanced interrogation?). Once again in a Spielberg movie an obstinate man bucks the system by affirming that the system is worth preserving. Despite Red scares, as long as upright dudes like Tom Hanks can still be wry under pressure, America will be OK.

yeah i mean i wish that spielberg made a movie dealing with a guantanamo prisoner (which would allow him to raise a lot of the same issues, but in a way that might actually matter); and of all people in h'w'd he could get such a movie into the multiplexes. i think one can lament the absence of such a film without necessarily holding it against the film that did get made.

i mean it's easy at a comfortable half-century remove to show a soviet spy who demonstrates admirable qualities of reserve, principle, courage.... but it is almost unthinkable that any mainstream feature film could use a taliban to illustrate the corrupt of american justice, much less depict that taliban with the nobility of rudolf abel. only after the ideological conflict is fought and won can spielberg feel comfortable with "moral ambiguity".

i mean i could imagine a feature film about an innocent afghan accidentally swept up in a raid and sent to guantanamo, only to be 'rescued' by a selfless, perservering american lawyer. but the idea that the miscarriage of justice might apply equally to an enemy combatant, and that such a combatant could actually embody some admirable personal characteristics.... i just can't see it.

anyway, i guess this is wandering off topic. just my ruminations on the ideological limitations of popular culture i guess.

and you're right: Spielberg can make any of those movies (with Kushner scripting).

S.S. made three films about 9/11, but the bar keeps getting raised for him. smdh

to conceive yet another movie about the conformist, paranoid fifties

So you thought this was too similar to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? ... Well he's just like that damn John Ford, always making those cavalry pictures that had nothing to do with the 20th century....

rumor has it he's doing Montezuma and Cortés next, I'm sure it will really be about us as it usually is.

S.S. made three films about 9/11,

i'm afraid to answer this, since your hostility to me seems to be such that you won't engage me except by proxy or with childish insults.... but... i'm curious which films you're referring to as being "about" 9/11 (i assume you mean that loosely).

FWIW minority report was written/mostly made before 9/11, and certainly before the bush admin's approach to the "war on terror" manifested itself.

Munich
War of the Worlds
The Terminal

perhaps you mean "the terminal" (which i have to admit i haven't seen!) and "munich"? even though it's a historical piece, i don't think it hides behind that--it definitely raises some issues that are still thorny. it's not my favorite of his films (i'm not a huge fan of its studied grimness) but it's definitely the one that best earns the praise for "moral ambiguity" that spielberg's late films pick up fairly often.

xpost

aha!

how do you see WotW as being "about" 9/11?

http://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/files/2012/04/3.-WW-Wall.png

War of the Worlds is almost explicitly about 9/11. C'mon.

worst spielberg since Always, which i respect more b.c of its manic filmmaking

rylance is amazing... i wish kushner wrote this

wait, what? Worse than Hook? Really?

https://cinematicvisions.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/screenshot-100.png

War of the Worlds is almost explicitly about 9/11. C'mon.

― thread of getting sw0le and lena jokes (Eric H.), Saturday, November 28, 2015 10:35 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hadn't seen it in a long while, i forgot about all the obvious 9/11 references.

still not sure if that makes it "about" 9/11... though often i'm not sure what makes a film "about" anything.

It's more accurate to write, I think, that the movie's "infused with" or "evokes" what 9-11-as-synedoche means -- the same way in his book J. Hoberman marshals a couple dozen films and traces how the politics of law and order, civil rights, paranoia about communism, and so on coalesce into something called "the sixties film."

When we get hung up on "about," we get nothing but Spotlights.

I don't remember Michael Keaton saying that.

is marisa tomei in spotlight?

says something sad about the demographic this was aimed at that they called it BRIDGE OF SPIES standing man wldve been fine, no? not enough soviets, too much corny tom hanks marmalade shite.

the marmalade is a totem of Western consumer society, chum.

Manohla Dargis otm (putting Bridge at #3 on her year-end list):

Years ago, Steven Spielberg entered the ranks of Pantheon Directors, to borrow the most exalted category in Andrew Sarris’s taxonomic “The American Cinema” — and there he remains.

Saw this last week & really enjoyed it. Rylance so mesmerizing.

I know that Spielberg hews to folksy values at the detriment of complex shading. But the the heart of this story, Donovan's kindness & sense of justice & courage suited Spielberg's humanism so well..., I don't think it does any disservice to those involved to hone in on that and turn up the volume a little. idk, maybe that's naive? dunno, but it worked for me anyway

It's a v Spielberg detail but the scene after Donovan's house gets shot at: the family are gathered together consoling each other in the living room, but as the camera pulls back, the son lingers by the window tracing the bullet holes with his finger
also the kid's panic over the a-bomb was v relatable, that was pretty much me after seeing The Day After :/

I had either forgotten or not know about the 'fill the tub with water' thing.

home in on btw

ty :)

xpost i had heard of it wrt hurricane prep, didn't realize it had been around as long as that

apparently Spielberg himself did this as a teenager because of the cuban missile crisis

standing man wldve been fine, no

Sitting Man or gtfo

Years ago, Steven Spielberg entered the ranks of Pantheon Directors, to borrow the most exalted category in Andrew Sarris’s taxonomic “The American Cinema” — and there he remains.

it does seem like fewer film snobs are doing the knee-jerk anti-spielberg thing, and people have sort of accepted him as part of the canon. i guess time heals all wounds, or wounds all heels as the case may be.

i remember sitting in a theater (about to watch "moonfleet" of all things) and overhearing a gaggle of university of chicago professors sound like teenagers in their smug dismissals of spielberg (i can't recall which of his films had been out recently; might have been "minority report"). i'm not the world's biggest spielberg fan but it was easy to resolve to never be like those folks, in this regard at least.

everybody's snobby about something though, i suppose.

These are the people Sarris included his Pantheon Directors - Chaplin, Flaherty, Ford, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Keaton, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Ophuls, Renoir, Von Sternberg, Welles - and there is no fucking way Spielberg is in that kind of company. I mean, Spielberg wld be lucky to make 'Less Than Meets Than Eye', alongside Lean, Huston, Kazan, Wyler and Wilder, or even 'Strained Seriousness' (Kubrick, Lumet, Rossen, Dassin).

But looking just now at my dusty copy of American Cinema I'm struck by how wack Sarris' categories and judgements are, how this kind of canon-building seems like another form of detrius. Manohla Dargis is making an appeal to a supposed classic of film criticism to bolster her own Spielberg-love; fair enough, but I'm highly sceptical that Sarris himself would've allowed Spielberg into that part of his wonky pantheon.

Sarris upgraded Huston in later years w/ an apology.

you are never going to get people Ward to put S.S. in the company of filmmakers who pioneered the medium. (For that matter, who from the last 50 years wouldn't provoke indignation from some Golden Agers if you placed them next to Ford or Murnau?

In his dwindling days, Sarris would've placed Edward Zwick and Stephen Daldry in the pantheon.

the Pantheon of the Overrated?

the Academy, Ike

Gagh

anyway WF, just to blow your mind there are a number of things Spielberg does better than most of those filmmakers.

Michael Sragow panned BoS for Film Comment, pointing out that it distorts history (like every fact-based studio film ever), eg Donovan was a spook, p much. And I don't care.

Pantheon of Naps

Trying to be a fair-minded European cinephile, I agree that Spielberg certainly has things in common with other directors in the top-tier pantheon - Chaplin, Murnau, Hitchcock - but - not being a fan - that's more to do with a certain shared entrepreneurial and technological mastery than with the films themselves, imho. I don't (entirely) mean it as an insult to say that Spielberg's work in total feels emotionally and aesthetically much closer to the work of a David Lean or a John Huston (or, less canonically acceptable, a John Sturges) than to a Lang or a Renoir.

re Sragow's review, you'd think Spielberg kicked his dog too. I like Greengrass fine but comparing Captain Phillips to Bridge of Spies was a bit much

Spielberg has too many ~feelings~ for the fancy pantheon (j/k)

LOL I think amateurist's strawmen film snobs wld say they are the WRONG feelings - or the right feelings wrongly expressed

"ugh he's so EARNEST" *spits*

how is a viewer supposed to feel when seeing the woman on the train with her newspaper who had been frowning at tom hanks but now smiles admiringly

it could have been better conveyed with an emoji

perhaps a spoon to feed the audience with or just a pat on the head, there you go kiddo

warning to directors: plz don't feed the audience, it is disgusting and low

depends what they're serving but no more marmalade plz

btw i usta know one of the actors in those train scenes, he starred in Frankenhooker

(no doubt the kind of ruthless entertainment ogmor prefers!)

the fact that I really enjoyed some of it made me more annoyed with those bits

previously I'd got the mark rylance voice down and enjoyed speaking to myself in his soft enchanted tones but now I've lost it

he sounded like Ivor Cutler!

otm

definitely, another one of my favourite voices

LOL I think amateurist's strawmen film snobs wld say they are the WRONG feelings - or the right feelings wrongly expressed

― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Monday, December 14, 2015 3:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wish they had been strawmen, and not otherwise-intelligent film professors saying very dumb things about a popular filmmaker to impress one another.

i'm not sure if spielberg compares himself to anyone these days, but back in the 1980s and 1990s, he charmingly dismissed efforts to place him in the pantheon by likening himself to victor fleming -- a very successful filmmaker, who worked in many genres, who had no critical profile to speak of. obviously it's kind of an apples/oranges affair (spielberg is successful beyond fleming's wildest imaginings, more influential too; and certainly much more of a household name; and anyway the historical contexts are profoundly different) -- but in some sense i'm not so sure he's wrong. he's certainly more of a fleming than a von sterberg, much less a ford. maybe more of a curtiz.

where was the rylance character supposed to be from? northumberland? ivor cutler is scottish--just over the border. so the similarity would make sense....

Rylance's character was born and grew up in in Newcastle-upon-Tyne before emigrating to the USSR, so pretty close!

s.s. controls what he makes in ways Fleming never did; that comparison is out the window. He's also a much greater artist than Victor motherfucking Fleming.

also, after Dietrich, von Sternberg made quite a lot of shit.

back TO THE TOPIC, i did find the East German fake family gag-scene clumsy.

Yeah it kinda felt like a different movie there

In the Powers interrogation scene I was waiting for JK Simmons to show up

s.s. controls what he makes in ways Fleming never did; that comparison is out the window. He's also a much greater artist than Victor motherfucking Fleming.

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Monday, December 14, 2015 10:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was just repeating something that spielberg had said; i wasn't agreeing with it 100% or even 50%. the comparison to fleming -- which spielberg himself made numerous times -- is more telling of how spielberg wished to deflect a certain kind of critical attention than of any actual likeness. but it's a comparison that also belongs to a particular point in his career, when he was getting as much criticism as appreciation. that seems to be gone now.

back TO THE TOPIC, i did find the East German fake family gag-scene clumsy.

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Monday, December 14, 2015 10:05 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i liked this scene. it was one of the moments of genuine confusion, and it kept me on my toes. (even if it was played a bit broadly.)

in general i wish we had been kept in a state of confusion re. characters' motives a bit more. i like the scenes when people are prevaricating or dissembling. that's the stuff of a good spy story, which i'll admit this isn't really supposed to be at its heart. i feel like spielberg is sometimes too quick to clarify things that might be better left uncertain for a few more scenes.

anyway WF, just to blow your mind there are a number of things Spielberg does better than most of those filmmakers.

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Monday, December 14, 2015 9:20 PM (Yesterday)

i like a lot of spielberg's films, but tbh this prob belongs in "controversial opinions" thread

my mind has, somehow, failed to blow

yet, anyway

i feel like spielberg is sometimes too quick to clarify things that might be better left uncertain for a few more scenes.

which is why the last fifteen minutes had me wishing I was a G-man who could read Spielberg his rights and frog march out.

at least it didn't end 14 times, a la lincoln

shooting blanks

While Joshua Giddings sighed and rolled over in bed

i actually really like lincoln's drawn-out conclusion but i admit i'm prob alone there

I don't mind the ending(s) without the clumsy way in which the Stevens and wife bedroom scene is staged.

valuable comment from Glenn Kenny

I was one of a relative few people who thought it was hilarious that Eve Hewson had a part in a movie in which Francis Gary Powers was a character.

the Berlin Wall reconstruction was done in Wroclaw btw

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/how-steven-spielbergs-cold-war-840896

The shooting down of the plane part and the recreation of bombed out East Germany were both done brilliantly I thought

Bloated self-satisfied saccharine dumb and completely devoid of tension.and there's an hour left of this shit yet

smdh

Finished. Some nice wallpaper. Rubbish besides, totally worthless exercise.

maybe you shoulda watched it sans interrupshun, u know like a movie

maybe it was just shite tho

If it was a movie worth my not being on the phone during then don't worry I'd have contained myself.

i have nothing to say to u

snipers shoulda opened up on the bridge, Tarantella-style

Perhaps if you skipped Spielberg's films henceforth, you could wave your hard-on around where it's more useful.

yeah

and stay out

Sorry to brake harts with my wavy hardon guys.

I will skip Spielberg in future tho, cos of this shit movie.

Thanks: I love America, but not that America this America
Scottish guy: you stand guy
Thanks: remember Kevin Costner in the untouchables? That.
Bad americans: boo us
Thanks: well certainly boo youse. My isnt Germany rotten what
Germany: rooms and furniture and walking around.
All: parallels and contrasts
Bridge: I'm bored and this is a terrible soundtrack.
Scottish guy: you stand guy.
Thanks: *stands*
All: FIN

are you having a stroke

Of genius

rmde

find it hard to understand ppl who check their phones during movies, even bad ones, instead of treating movies as a much-welcome escape from an existence that increasingly consists of staring at different things on your phone

obv i just mean for at-home watching, since ppl who check their phones in the theater are worse than stalin

Agreed on latter. Phone checking in this instance was a much-welcome escape from staring at this movie tho.

ps yr a monster

lol Morbs on fire with the zings itt

dmac also with the nice Producers ref

Sorry to brake harts with my wavy hardon guys.

I will skip Spielberg in future tho, cos of this shit movie.

― The difficult earlier reichs (darraghmac), Wednesday, December 30, 2015 9:03 PM

would it help?

Ha

I would absolutely watch the coens movie about that guy tbf he was great. Focusing the second half of the story on everyone else- and particularly the kid nobody but nobody cares about- was a terrible decision .

it's v obvious you are not AN AMERICAN.

Aw thank you x

Thanks: I love America, but not that America this America
Scottish guy: you stand guy
Thanks: remember Kevin Costner in the untouchables? That.
Bad americans: boo us
Thanks: well certainly boo youse. My isnt Germany rotten what
Germany: rooms and furniture and walking around.
All: parallels and contrasts
Bridge: I'm bored and this is a terrible soundtrack.
Scottish guy: you stand guy.
Thanks: *stands*
All: FIN

― The difficult earlier reichs (darraghmac), Thursday, 31 December 2015 02:08 Bookmark

A+ almost made this inane fluff pos movie worth existing

Realised this morning that I would rather have seen any of these movies:

Thanks' insurance law career courtroom corporate thriller
Scottish guy spy movie, prison gritty drama or post-soviet integration family drama
Domestic 50s slice-of-life about the wife n kids during thanks' absence
Romance between cutprice armie hammer and miss bono jr
East Berlin carchase compilation, with Vogel and Burt Reynolds.

genius draws such blind hatred

i can see why Granny and Gramps left Eire (and there weren't even many flickers back then)

is there something u could point us towards that expands upon ur bewildering esteem for this thing

bitingly ironic meta, great american genre pantheon, both, what

betting on the latter

"what"

lol

bridge over troubled whatters

this is such a piece of shit

is this guy allergic to subtlety

do we really need everything to happen in the brashest film language possible, is there even a moment of hesitation before just cycling through just every available default orchestra-drenched inspirational speech cliche, endless boring period chrome car bumper pornography, long overcoat-clad moody floodlit inscrutable standing, the loving fan-made road to perdition cosplay reenactment nobody needed. so many moments just crammed down your throat: the wild happenstance of the young man being assigned extra evening work being the same guy standing up hanks' daughter!, multiple brutal foreshadowings of this before its flaccid reveal, kids jumping over fences in the name of apparent mid-century american freedom, the family are eating fucking meatloaf because that was the only dinnertime food available until microwaves were invented. also receives 10000 extra bonus points for using the transparently-meaningful-glances-from-strangers-on-trains bookending device most recently lazily used by fellow-awful-film-filmmaker steve mcqueen in shame. so bad! so surprisingly bad! such a piece of shit!

i feel like spielberg is sometimes too quick to clarify things that might be better left uncertain for a few more scenes.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Tuesday, December 15, 2015 1:31 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually watched a screener of this & it's weird but at the bottom it didn't have the standard PROPERTY OF SONY PICTURES or whatever disclaimer it just said DO U SEE ??? in caps lock

i remember seeing nick james introduce in the mood for love, once, years ago, having chosen it - actually having originally chosen yi yi, which couldn't be screened because there wasn't a circulating print - as part of a series in which each year of the first decade of this century was represented by a film. explaining why he picked it he said he felt like it represented the end of the kind of filmmaking it so clearly demonstrates, this very classical kind of photochemically-golden & luscious & transportive & immersive romantic storytelling buttressed by sweeping orchestral scores & perfectly weighted meaningful glances & this kind of 'original' film language; the things that were made after this needed a different language. i really think this film is a meaningful illustration in support of its thesis; it's so utterly straightforward & comes off as uncanny instead of convincing, too many degrees removed from a kind of classical, believable refraction of reality that we could have seen in an old drama. it just looks like bizarre expensive dress up, hanks stately language mannered and unconvincing, the dinnertime scenes stiff and cartoonish, everything so incredibly broadbrush and awkwardly stitched together, telling a story so boringly through this montage of incredibly direct expressions of what's happening with no spare life or fat or spillover into anything beyond a tight narrative. just so lifeless and dull. i would be interested if anybody had an idea of something like this that has worked, recently; it's a different period but i think i could get behind lincoln!, in this respect, in being dress up & so potentially eligible to feel as stifling & buttoned down as this did, but actually coming out weirdly fresh as a kind of old-timey legal procedural lit by performances that broke their molds.

Like Lincoln, Bridge of Spies plays a lively game of hide-and-seek with the American present, sometimes by means of parallels (between the inflamed anti-Communist rhetoric of the late Fifties and the inflamed anti-immigrant/anti-Obama rhetoric of today) and contrasts: neither Donovan nor Abel trumpet, advertise, or “brand” what they do—they simply do it. However, Steven Spielberg’s film is also an excavation of a dowdier, plainer, and visually darker moment in time, peopled by soft-bodied but iron-willed men in shades of blue and gray who meet in oak-floored wallpapered rooms darkened by cigarette and pipe smoke, men possessed of a weariness that, I suppose, also stands in contrast to the current obsession with sleek, youthful verve....

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/essential-films-bridge-of-spies/

i liked that, thx morbs

Skill and craft, and as ‘70s auteurs go, a thousand times preferable to the hysterical self-parody of The Wolf of Wall Street or Femme Fatale. And there’s some playfulness--it didn’t feel suffocating like J. Edgar. Ruffalo’s the only other Supporting Actor performance I’ve seen, and I’d much rather see Rylance win. Came up short for me as a procedural and as a period piece. If you like Hanks, I guess he’s fine; I’m indifferent, so he was a bit of a distraction. (As was trying to remember Jesse Plemons’ name in Friday Night Lights--I couldn’t get past Landry.) The guy getting shot at the Berlin Wall made me think of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a film I like much better.

Everything that happens is telegraphed from a mile off, and the kids jumping the fence after you've seen the attempted defectors getting shot trying to go over the wall was a gigantic eyeroll moment, but I really liked this movie.

Best Spielberg since Catch Me if you Can (I haven't seen Lincoln.

or closed my parentheses.

"So don't tell me there's no rule book, and don't nod at me like that you son of a bitch."

I found this rather slow paced tbh. But the Cohenesque touches like "would it help?" were good, if way too few (in fact, the very few moments of levity almost jarred, in contrast to the rest).

The ending dragged on a bit once he got back home. Was that over long end scene really needed?

would it have helped?

this is the only trailer i get out of the booth to watch, every night

no lol. sorry. forget me. thought i was in the hail caesar thread.

i will watch this tho! sucker for the period if nothing else.

The ending dragged on a bit once he got back home. Was that over long end scene really needed?

you could say this about most of spielberg's films.

that would be why I didn't bother to even point it out

Ha yes that did occur to me.

Like I honestly got up and left the room after he fell asleep on the bed (we were watching a d/l copy), then my dick bf yells OMG HES DEAD and I fell for it :(

Something about that ending ever-so-slightly bugged me. Hanks spends much of the film wandering around an icy Berlin with a bad cold, complaining that he just wants to be wrapped up warm in bed. Then, at the very end, he's seen lying fully clothed, conked out on the bed. Except that... he wasn't pining for his bed because he was tired, was he? It was because he was ill and just wanted to lie in bed. But it's as if he's collapsed on the bed from exhaustion, without even bothering to climb under the covers like he was craving to... A whole star docked off the rating for me.

microcomplaint

Christ

That's what I thought.

you could say this about most of spielberg's films.

― wizzz! (amateurist), Wednesday, March 16, 2016 12:37 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that would be why I didn't bother to even point it out

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, March 16, 2016 12:42 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark

i thought this last time i watched Close Encounters

which version? dont need that starship interior, but he was kinda forced there. Otherwise the whole Devils Tower sequence is a high point of mersh Hollywood cinema.

i thought the starship interior stuff was in the "director's" cut!!

this thread is v depressing

wrongo as usual xp

ah, i see, he did add some stuff, but took out most of the starship interior.

wrongo as usual xp

pleasant as usual! i can only assume you are only like this on ILX, b/c if you took these needless potshots every time you interact with another human IRL, your nose would have been folded over on your face so many times that your reconstructive surgery bills would rival those of michael jackson.

i'm closer to dying btw buddy

ok, i'll stop bugging you then, i don't follow your health travails closely.

Why would you punch someone after saying "wrong as usual"? Don't act like a hardman amt - because you aren't one.

dnftasshole

Best Spielberg since Catch Me if you Can

i'm not a "hard man" -- i was just imagining that if after every utterance made in his (real) presence, morbius were to return with a snarky rejoinder or insult (as he does here, with increasing consistency; the "...as usual" was just one instance of dozens yesterday alone), eventually someone would be inspired to punch him. it's the sort of behavior that for some reason people feel OK indulging online but wouldn't tolerate IRL.

that said, if he's suffering, then he's suffering, and i don't want to add to it.

Saw trailer for this

Drove home what it is.

The shit parts of jfk

I enjoyed watching this well enough, the tense bits were tense, but not long after I watched an episode of The Americans and was like "fuck off, Stephen Spielberg".

BoS > JFK

it's all of JFK, dmac?

hey chap you don't read credits real well