A Steven Spielberg Poll (1994-2018)

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.