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

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