A Steven Spielberg Poll (1994-2018)

Voting for either Munich or A.I..

you've seen the final cut of Ready Player One?

Munich
A.I.
War of the Worlds
Lincoln

Minority Report winning this last time around was a travesty. Let's do better this time, ILX.

Soto about right! but i'd squeeze Bridge of Spies in, possibly 3rd. Ryan and Amistad get too much flak (around here).

Probably Catch Me If You Can. It's one of those movies that I'm always in the mood to watch. Pure entertainment!

If they didn't ultimately fizzle out after jaw-dropping opening salvos, Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds would be two of the greatest films of all time.

Maybe I should endeavor to see Munich before I vote. And The BFG of course.

Seen three of these: one blanded out a book, one was so dull I can't remember anything about it except some birdy num num shit, the third was one of two movies I've ever walked out of & snuck into something else

Munich by a fair distance, not sure how SPR can get too much flak, it's a terrible misuse of technical facility

Seen three of these: one blanded out a book, one was so dull I can't remember anything about it except some birdy num num shit, the third was one of two movies I've ever walked out of & snuck into something else

Yeah, so which one gets your vote?

They're all terrible - Spielberg butchering AI taking the fucking cake - but voting Munich. That one's sort of ok.

AI or Lincoln.

i rewatched minority report recently, it's fun and feels about 20 minutes too long

would prob vote for war of the worlds or a.i. here (i've never seen munich)

Saving Private Ryan probably had the biggest impact on filmmaking out of any of these. The first hour of War of the Worlds is very intense and disturbing, but it kind of falls apart after that.

Catch Me If You Can is always an enjoyable watch. Rest of them I could easily live without seeing again.

The ending of A.I. is unforgivably bad

WotW might get my vote but it really does lag in that second half, occasional beautifully apocalyptic imagery aside.

Munich is outstanding almost throughout but he sure botched a couple of those scenes in a major way and i think his handling of a pair of the assassination scenes was a bit too studied somehow, they just felt wrong.

End of AI is one of my favorites. Ends of War of the Worlds and SPR really mess things up. End of Minority Report likewise a letdown.

Spielberg butchering AI taking the fucking cake

i'm not going here again, but what you think is wrong

ok IT'S STANLEY'S ENDING bye

Not sure I understand how SPR's ending is out of line with the rest of the movie.

Good man speech is lame (iirc) and misleading face morph.

so easy. war of the worlds in a landslide.

Good directors judge if an ending is working or not then change it if they need to.

SPR is basically if The Dirty Dozen was a violent Lifetime movie but i like it.

as far as the rest go:

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) nice if you are ten.
Amistad (1997) boring.
Saving Private Ryan (1998) cool first scene. its no big red one.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) zzzzzz....
Minority Report (2002) stupid.
Catch Me If You Can (2002) would have been better if an adult had played the lead.
The Terminal (2004) dumb.
War of the Worlds (2005) best movie of 2005.
Munich (2005) never saw it but i'm sure it's riveting. as riveting as david mamet's The Unit? time will tell. if i ever watch the movie.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) great if you are nine.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011) horrible and endless.
War Horse (2011) whatever.
Lincoln (2012) yeah, no, it's 8 hours long, right?
Bridge of Spies (2015) can't remember what this is.
The BFG (2016) no way in hell i am watching robin williams robot terrorize children. i already had to live through Hook.
The Post (2017) have no idea.
Ready Player One (2018) no.

munich is a brilliant film, hard to vote for others.

Also enjoyed:
catch me if you can
minority report
SPR
Lincoln

Looking over the complete list, I've still never seen Always, Amistad, The Terminal, War Horse, Bridge of Spies or BFG.

as riveting as david mamet's The Unit?

unfamiliar with this, but usu the creator being a crazed Zionist isn't productive

Mark Rylance was the BFG

Mark Rylance is ...

"The BFG"

1) A.I.
2) Bridge of Spies
3) Munich

Haven’t seen Terminal or Lincoln, and Post looks too drab to even MoviePass

I still feel annoyed at not being properly warned about how long and how boring Lincoln was.

i'm not going here again, but what you think is wrong

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, February 1, 2018 8:34 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Tbf I was mostly baiting you. Your show of restraint is impressive.

as is, speaking of Hook, your refusal to age

C-

i'd like to see the terminal again.

Catch Me If You Can, if only because it is by far the most fun I've had watching a new Spielberg movie since the original JP.

my inclination's to go straight for the munich/wotw decision point but: i haven't seen a.i. since the theater and suspect i like it, catch me if you can is a good movie that seems to me only to benefit from its 10-year-old lead (same way the much worse django unchained uses him), and tbh i rly loved amistad when they made us watch it in 9th grade.

had somehow forgotten about literally all his post-munich stuff that isn't Annals Of The Republic even tho it is the majority, but man it is not v good imo. indy4 was dreadful and tintin was a tech demo that's hopefully v inspirational to someone. possibly i'd like the bfg.

I liked Tintin. iirc.

Tintin had some great action sequences! Some of his best since the first JP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mVpZTGCikM?t=55

yr not wrong, it was weird, i was absolutely conscious of such while watching and also incredibly bored.

Tintin had some great action sequences! Some of his best since the first JP

made it 42 seconds in before the grossness, the uncanny valley, the cutscene-level motion, the "foley", the absolute failure to understand anything at all about what makes Herge worthwhile, let alone great, and most of all: the repugnantly busy over-scoring (Williams) made me lunge for the pause button

as dlh knows I'm a sucker for presidential hooey, and Anthony Hopkins' turn in Amistad as JQA is irresistible (and he's experiencing a comeback at the moment).

AI with Lincoln second ( but not a close one ).

AI with Lincoln a not-very-close runner up

sorry for the double post

Though I love WotW until that garbage end

should have been a question mark after Williams

just googled and yes

Minority Report winning this last time around was a travesty. Let's do better this time, ILX.

― Tarr Yang Preminger Argento Carpenter (Eric H.), Thursday, 1 February 2018 20:08 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wrong

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)- ?
Amistad (1997)- vg tbh
Saving Private Ryan (1998)- neither as good nor as had as they say
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)-?
Minority Report (2002)- excellent genre exercise
Catch Me If You Can (2002)- great fun
The Terminal (2004)-?
War of the Worlds (2005)- got a bit into this once it was ungripping
Munich (2005)- sufficiently weighty themes do not save a dull and heavy effort
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)- fucking travesty
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)-?
War Horse (2011)-?
Lincoln (2012)-?
Bridge of Spies (2015) my review of this lazy mess in the thread for this lazy mess is the best thing about this lazy mess
The BFG (2016)- you have to be kidding
The Post (2017)- fool me ten times shame on me
Ready Player One (2018)- ?

? signifies 'this guy makes more bad movies than good I skipped this it looked shit'

Like morbs will have something to say here obviously but morbs thinks that ppl who didn't like eg bridge of spies needed -get this- *more* DO YOU SEE moments and I just cant

uh no Lincoln is not shit.

BOS is mostly expendable but Lincoln is not, thanks to Kushner.

I'll consider Lincoln ty

I walked into Lincoln with trepidation expecting the Magic Kingdom's Hall of Presidents experience but I was surprised Spielberg and Kushner concentrated on Lincoln as conniving, wily politician. It has obvious moments, but so does John Ford. Deal with it.

Just clarifying: the ending everyone hates in WotW is the son being alive, right?

Wow spoiler

No, it's Spielberg losing interest one Tim Robbins enters the frame. Everything up to that point is amaaaaaaaazing, to the same extent that everything after is boooooooring.

one = once

alfred otm, lincoln is good, its limited scope (like the ford movie it covers one case) is used v well and not too violated by all spielberg's endings, ddl and tlj both excellent, strathairn too.

haven't seen bridge of spies but i saw a clip from it the other day of alan alda like CAN'T YOU JUST DROP IT WITH THIS CONSTITUTION STUFF? and i was like man idk

It was good enough to make me crave a sequel: Seward.

sally field also terrific iirc.

Yeah! Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce McGill too. A fully inhabited world.

i've only seen a few of these but adventures of tintin is the one i remember enjoying the most.

I like that Spielberg made a kind of historical atrocity trilogy in Schindler, Amistad and Ryan, and then made a kind of trilogy of followups in Munich, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies. Three films which is mainly about how we survivors are indebted to those who were killed, three films that studies how that debt was in actuality handled. I should write something about that someday. Anyways, the right answer is either Amistad or Ryan.

Minority Report needs a rewatch, I remember it being fine until it turned into a bad TV cop show (or a Blade Runner sequel) in the last 15 minutes.

Aside from the somewhat pedestrian courtroom stuff, Amistad is piercing.

i remember the middle passage stuff in amistad being fully as vivid and terrible as the opening of ryan. inevitably less celebrated.

Yeah, the middle passage stuff is what makes Amistad. Steven Spielberg is a good historical filmmaker because he fully believes in the power of cinema to describe the unimaginably horrific. Which is naive, and he's probably wrong, but there's a kinetic force to his best stuff, which a lot of other historical filmmakers won't even aspire to.

The courtroom stuff is fairly pedestrian, though, and he does sorta pull his punches. But I kinda think he does that in Schindler as well.

as riveting as david mamet's The Unit?

unfamiliar with this, but usu the creator being a crazed Zionist isn't productive

i'm standin' on a bridge of spies
i'm sick of hearin' all these goddamn lies

i haven't actually seen any of these except The Lost World

This is WOTW, Munich or Lincoln for me. I'm not bothered by the WOTW ending, it's a loose approximation of exactly what happens in the original novel regarding the narrator and his wife. They're separated relatively early on, he believes she's been killed in an attack, he finds her alive at the end of the novel. NBD.

shocked to realize i've only sat through lost world, AI, CMIYC, crystal skull, and tintin. a range of competencies and errors on display there. and several things to like a lot. but nothing that gets me like the big hitters in the earlier period. if i were voting just on those five it'd be CMIYC eeeeeeeasy, that movie rules, but clearly i'm out of my depth here. somehow most of these have always felt like it'd be Work to sit down and watch them, even tom cruise waving his hands around and hiding from aliens.

i did not sit thru Lost World bz i did sit thru JP

I got off the boat with Munich, which I thought was just horrendous. Ponderous, politically a lot of liberal zionist drivel, with some terribly filmed "action" sequences. The scene were Bana has overwrought movie sex with his wife interspersed with images of the massacre on the airfield is just abominable.

Catch me if you can is the only one of these I would watch again.

What morbs you love Spielberg but not jp?!

no, fuck dinosaurs too

politically a lot of liberal zionist drivel

hmmm not sure about this

Posts very much out of character - I thought you only liked a bunch of dinosaur movies

War of the Worlds. saw it twice in theaters, the initial escape sequence made me bawl both times. the best post-9/11 movie. by far the best adaptation of the source material

Yeah isn't Eric Bana pretty much off the Zionist boat by the end of the movie? He's more or less, "Fuck an Israel, this shit gets us nowhere, I just want my wife and kids safe." And I mean the closing shot is pretty much "Backing the hardcore Zionists is going to get us 9/11."

a mossad agent who signs up to do wet-work but is impossibly conflicted over killing palestinians who are members of the black september organization is just a huge stretch.

the moral of the story really seems to be something along the lines of israel is great but loses moral authority if it resorts to bad violence like the palestinians and so should be nicer.

he scene were Bana has overwrought movie sex with his wife interspersed with images of the massacre on the airfield is just abominable.

eh you're just jealous Bana isn't having sex with you

Eric Bana is a huge stretch alright

More like Eric Banal am I right

https://cdn3.whatculture.com/images/2015/06/sTFkKdLw.jpg

Either saving private ryan or ai for me

that's pretty good! one in a row. xxp

morbz, i share yr general admiration for spielberg but yr selective snobbery is a little hard for me to fathom, i can't say i can identify any sensible reason to snort at the subject matter of jurassic park and then turn around and praise ET or close encounters. are aliens somehow more "serious" than dinosaurs?

Go below the surface. They're just better films. (fwiw i like King Kong (1933), which has dinosaurs)

and stop taking me soooo seriously

the 33 king kong is better, i'll grant you that

btw the silent lost world, which i watched recently, feels in some ways like more of a spielberg movie than the actual lost world he directed

i don't recall seeing that one either

It occurs to me that in Jaws he treats the shark, which is just an animal ("a miracle of nature, really . . .") as a monster; in JP he treats the dinosaurs, which we would consider "monsters," as just animals. The 'raptors are plenty scary, and smart, but they're just doing what nature intended. The shark appears to genuinely have it in for people.

(And of course the Quint story arc, dramatic irony, etc. If Spielberg had kept the more cynical Crichton JP ending with Hammond dying and the island being bombed to smithereens, it might be considered his best film!)

yeah, JP is def an advance over jaws in that respect. there's not really any attempt in jaws to depict the shark as a real animal or anything but a projection of pure fear. it may be the only great monster movie where you never get close to identifying w/ the monster.

there's not really any attempt in jaws to depict the shark as a real animal or anything but a projection of pure fear

I prefer this. So did Fidel Castro, apparently.

http://www.critical-theory.com/watch-zizek-jaws-fascism/

I think Spielberg "Land Before Timing" up the innocent herbivores early on in JP was probably narratively ok for the purposes of lulling the characters into complacency but I think the real-life monster hiding in the depths in Jaws is handled better. It's also a much funnier and scarier film w/better characters. There's probably an argument one could make against the Mayor being the Dwayne T. Robinson of the film, just there to get in the way, but Murray Hamilton is great in that part.

jurassic park is not as good a movie as king kong it's true, but that's about it. (the allusion to one in the other is sublime. a snob might want goldblum's line dropped and the gates left to do the work themselves but... "whaddathey got in there?" is a fertile phrase, like someone approaching a tent, or a nickelodeon)

Watched me some Bridge of Spies tonight. Plenty of good value to make up for the inevitable eye-roll-y schmaltz. I've just come to accept Spielbergia as a magic realist world at this point, where folks on the train collectively scowl at you from behind eighteen different newspapers detailing your shameful exploits and subsequently gaze upon you wonderingly once they realize they had you all wrong, friend. I don't look to him for ambiguous nuance and unanswerable questions and I thusly remain rarely disappointed.

That's just writing a blank cheque

The thing about Munich is that it's supposed to be about the bad things that Mossad did, but it leaves out the worst thing they did, the murder of the completely innocent Ahmed Bouchiki. That's where it kinda becomes drivel. It's depiction of sex is awful as well, both the intercut scene mentioned above, but also the whole thing with the assassin. It's a film about historical trauma that is awful about actually depicting that trauma.

Munich or Lincoln. Minority Report is the best action one he's done since the 80s, but let down by a rubbish third act.

Catch Me If You Can is always an enjoyable watch. Rest of them I could easily live without seeing again.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, February 1, 2018 8:30 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

lest anybody forget, The Lost World is the movie where a pre-teen gymnast somersaults and kicks over a dinosaur that weighs several tons.

Catch Me If You Can is always an enjoyable watch. Rest of them I could easily live without seeing again.

It might be the only one of these I have seen twice - and the drop off in my appreciation the second time was massive.

Catch Me If You Can is such a great small movie, and perhaps the last time Christopher Walken has or will ever be cast as anything but a weirdo.

I've wondered how recognizable later Spielberg would be if had a different DP. It's amazing that they have worked on almost 20 movies together, but I'd argue Kaminski is still a controversial choice, or at the very least, for such a frequent collaboration they hardly have a reputation as some sort of classic movie team. Vs., say, Deakins and the Coen Brothers, say.

I do say that Spielberg's '90s/'00s productive streak is pretty mind-boggling. About 11 movies between '93 and 2004, with Jurassic Park and Schindler's the same year, Lost World and Amistad the same year, Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can the same year, and War of the Worlds and Munich the same year. That's pretty nuts.

and Tintin and War Horse!

Does Munich have the most explicit sex scene in a Spielberg movie?

I’ve always felt it was 100% Kushner’s idea and Spielberg just filmed it exactly as written. Just not an idea I can associate with him. (I’m agnostic on the value of the scene.)

The one in ET nearly garnered an X-rating iirc.

sorry thought the Munich sex scene was entirely fitting and thematically sound

Fred, movies leave things out all the time, that's why they're not TV series, you git

Sooo ... who's voting Ready Player One?! Nick Pinkerton, perhaps.

Unconflictedly loving Ready Player One is my heel turn.

— BANDZ STACKHAGE (@NickPinkerton) April 3, 2018

"But you have to admit the hot-girl-with-a-minor-physical-flaw thing is pretty cliché?" "NO I DON'T IT'S PURE AND BEAUTIFUL SORRY A NARCISSISTIC CULTURE OF FALSE AFFIRMATION HAS MADE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT VULNERABILITY AND INSECURITY EVEN EXIST FUCK YOU."

— BANDZ STACKHAGE (@NickPinkerton) April 3, 2018

Tough choice between AI and Lincoln. The kid won.

Tough call between AI and Lincoln for me. The kid won.

sorry - first post didn't go through hence the repost

Holy shit I already voted/posted/reposted to this thread back in February. Awful deja vu.

Pinkerton's twitter is consistently embarrassing.

I intend on giving RPO a shot at some point, Spielberg elevated a weak novel to classic status once, I imagine he can elevate a shitty one to "good."

of those I've seen, after scott:

Saving Private Ryan - an expert gilding of midcentury ball hairs w/ embossed face of hanks
A.I. Artificial Intelligence - okay when the kid is not visible, idea totally stolen off kubrick
Minority Report - stupid oopid
Catch Me If You Can - good enough to justify leo
War of the Worlds - not good enough to justify tom
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - odysseus arrives home after a long absence to find a small turd on his pillow
The Adventures of Tintin - ...to find america's greatest living director modeling trousers fashioned from the skin of argos
Lincoln - aside from that, how was the play?

war of the worlds. saw it twice in theaters & cried both times when they're escaping the city

A.I. Artificial Intelligence - okay when the kid is not visible, idea totally stolen off kubrick

huh?

We have to go thru the AI story a lot on ilx huh?

p sure that was a gag post

Sorry contendo

p sure that was a gag post

― explosion from DOOM courtesy of id software (Doctor Casino)

I thought so at first until I read the rest of the dismissals.

Did it pass the Turing test?

Prep work, Alfred. I got internet dickhole finals tomorrow.

And you're still boning up on Spielberg Bashing 101? Better pull an all-nighter.

For students who get a 70 or below, I got a velociraptor waiting.

A.I. is one of the handful of movies I will defend to the death (precisely because of the ways it seems to get away from its director?) but that I cannot stomach sitting down to watch again.

(I guess it's also the kind of work where "intention" doesn't seem to matter...)

tbf, I haven't seen most of these, so I won't vote.

I will say that the D-Day landing scene of Saving Private Ryan was some of the most brilliant filmmaking I've ever seen. Spielberg also indulged in some scenes that were so thickly sentimental and schmaltzy that they nearly ruined the movie for me.

Have you seen a lot of WW2 films from the '40s and the '50s? Many of them are more "sentimental."

Yes. That is so. But the existence of worse doesn't elevate what is bad.

D Day scene in '..Ryan' must surely be one of the most influential sequences of all time. I wish i could vote for that by itself.

Only saw WOTW recently and the effects looked dated as all hell.

the D-Day scene is really something else. unlike a lot of battle scenes which are gory and thrilling and not especially a tough watch, this one is extremely tough viewing. definitely pioneered the use of the "editing out every other frame" technique to create a more jarring sense of reality, and it made sense with the industrial terror of that kind of battle. actually a very good signifier of Gladiator being shit is when Ridley Scott used that same technique in that film's battle scenes, just trying to make the film and its boring story more dynamic and deciding to use a technique that simply didn't belong or make sense.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oh right, this one.

Well, it ain't Ready Player One, in any case.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow!

I think the top 3 are otm (tho I'd flip 1 & 2)

Given the twaddle written about Spielberg on this board, that top three astonishes me.

a loud minority perhaps (or they don't vote)

Don’t see how a better version of what Lincoln is could exist, it is a heist movie where the heist is the 13th Amendment, and I love a good heist.

Yes. I saw it again three months ago and every time I cringed at an indelicacy I wonder who else could have commissioned this script and these performances -- how the fuck else could this have been made?

I approve of Minority Report's swan dive from 25 votes to 2.

And the top 4 is the right 4, regardless of order.

Who on earth would vote for the BFG?

2 votes for crystal skull = you dont wanna base much on these results, ppl are fuckin with you

The opening scene of Crystal Skull is really good.

the fridge

youre talking about the fridge

https://gottalovethemmovies.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/img_2342.jpg

a.i. is on hulu rn btw

i tried rewatching it last night and... it's a great movie but also one of the most emotionally traumatic things i've ever seen

Still as fine a set of poll results as this board ever produced.

Comic I respect: Ugh, BernieBros.
Me: Sure, whatever.

Comic I respect: AI is the 14th best Spielberg movie.
Me: Who the fuck do you think you are?

— 🎃 Jake-o'-lantern 🎃 (@FilmBart) October 22, 2018

God the results on this one are so much better than the first time.