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.

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