A Steven Spielberg Poll (1994-2018)

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."