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

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

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