A Steven Spielberg Poll (1974-1993)

Most inclined to vote for:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
The Color Purple (1985)
Jurassic Park (1993)

Jurassic Park or Jaws for me. With Raiders and Close Encounters close behind.

Three of these movies are good and I like another one

SUGARLAND!

Actually, it's been a while. I should rewatch.

why is duel not here, the only film of his I like

TV movie i guess

Ya, that's quite an omission. Would've liked to see some TV stuff thrown in here (his Amazing Stories episode with Costner is A+).

I suppose Duel deserves to be in here. I'll see if a mod can fix that.

can't mod poll options, you'd have to start a new one

Not terribly saddened about that. Anyone who'd vote Duel over E.T. deserves disenfranchisement.

my favourite bits of ET are before ET appears tbh

the only good part of E.T. is when he washes up on the rocks and you think maybe they killed E.T. with half an hour to go

Maybe we can do a separate TV poll. I'm curious to see how his Night Gallery installment ranks against the Columbo pilot.

the first 3 movies are basically the only truly good stuff he's ever done. (I am voting Sugarland)

Same.

the first 3 movies are basically the only truly good stuff you've ever done, Le Bateau Ivre?

-_-

gonna vote for jaws bc i'm boring

Probably gonna vote for jaws bc it's perfect.

yeah it's also that

although i'm really due for a rewatch of close encounters

Raiders

might vote for 1941 just out of badness and because 14 year-old me was badly lied to by the front cover of the VHS

I don't like his mawkish, feelgood holocaust movie at all these days. It has really aged worse than any of these imo.

Voldemort is good value imo

1941 is so underrated, love that film. However, probably will go with Raiders.

Recently watched the remastered Close Encounters. It still doesn't quite hang together as a film but it is absolutely gorgeous to look at.

Raiders is probably the one film of his that front-to-back i wouldn't change a single thing.

dismissing post-'81 Spielberg = arrested cultural development

tbh i've only seen about half of these

prob raiders

i actually like hook

i actually like hook

i watched hook on repeat when i was like 5-6 years old and obsessed with peter pan so i have no ability to determine whether it's good

I remember liking the half hour or so of 1941 I caught on TV when I was 10. Maybe I should revisit.

many xps
had to google that, yeah he usually delivers. Neeson is so dull and lacking in the obvious moral complexity his character required, by the end I want him to get ratted to the Gestapo ffs!

are you sure you're not thinking of The Sound of Music?

Pia Zadora playing Anne Frank iirc

I was of course being facetious--you can guess which half of his career I count as more artistic--but glad Eric started this. I do consider Schindler's List as the obvious beginning of the other phase; no big deal, especially if it doesn't win. 1. The Sugarland Express, 2. Jaws, 3. Close Encounters of the First Kind. I think they're all amazing, and the first two especially are among my favourite films ever. Not sure if I'll vote in the concurrent poll--just don't feel that strongly about anything on there.

I don't see how Schindler's List is feelgood and I think it's aged very well.

i can't choose between:

Jaws (1975)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Hook is the worst spielberg movie. that much i know.

Neeson is so dull and lacking in the obvious moral complexity his character required, by the end I want him to get ratted to the Gestapo ffs!

idk I though the point of the movie is his motives are inscrutable until the end.

Neeson is great, i think. his emergence as an iconic actor too.

Fiennes is incredible though...i kinda want to say he gives the best performance in any Spielberg film but i don't want to commit to that statement. there's plenty of competition.

Raiders over E.T., Close Encounters, Jurassic Park and the other two Indys.

Haven't seen: The Sugarland Express, 1941, The Color Purple

i'm not going to say hook is great exactly but i do think it's better than its reputation, w/ some good performances, and it is definitely way better than a movie with that concept would be likely to be now. it's telling that when spielberg says he doesn't like it his take is "too bad i didn't wait two decades so i could have done it all in cgi."

Raiders: Taut, suspenseful, fun and funny and beautifully produced. CE3K a close second though the middle sags a bit and Dreyfuss can get grating. But Truffaut is in it so it has my heart, though Raiders is a better constructed film.

"i'm not going to say hook is great exactly but i do think it's better than its reputation..."

no.

Hook is like if THE GOONIES sucked and had Acting

Bangarang!

The four I haven't seen are all bunched together: The Color Purple, Always, Indiana Jones sequel, and Hook. No interest in any of them. 1941 and Empire of the Sun I saw so long ago, I don't remember anything.

Why are all the ILX boys and girls attacking cinema tonight.

Voted Raiders. Although Empire of the Sun is the first film I ever saw in the cinema.

One reason I like, for different reasons, his sci-fi resurgence with AI, Minority Report, and War of the Worlds is that a lot of them flashback to his early days of wide eyed wonder, at spectacle, at technology, at just something that warrants the trademark look of his characters, slack-jawed and staring. The irony of many of his more recent works is that they seem very much indebted to backroom 70s paranoia thrillers, like All the President's Men or the Conversation or something like that. When in the 70s of course he was making movies that largely went in the opposite direction.

His filmography is so diverse at this point, it's really hard to pinpoint what makes a Spielberg movie a Spielberg movie, not in the way you can do the same with, say, a Scorsese film.

JP is absolutely one of spielberg's best, what's special about it seems more and more clear when you compare it to the fx blockbusters that followed it (including a couple made by spielberg himself).

yeah JP probably changed blockbusters filmmaking more than anything here except jaws but including raiders. there are soooooo many wannabe-JP movies from that point on and almost nobody has any idea what they're doing.

OK, voting E.T..

Voted Close Encounters

Me: 1) The Sugarland Express, 2) Jaws, 3) Close Encounters, 4) E.T.

Prediction: 1) E.T., 2) Raiders, 3) Close Encounters, 4) Jaws or Jurassic Park.

Without having seen them all, my vague sense is that the Spielbergs are very much of their eras, with the '70s expressive of an unconventional individual, the long '80s of someone serving a conventional audience in personal fashion, the '90s of someone seeking to nudge it marginally in a positive direction, and much of what followed more explicitly political/philosophical while remaining in a fairly conventional mode. I like the '70s films best, especially Jaws and its more transitional follow-up, but that may also have something to do with the fact that I regard Wyoming as the most spectacular thing he's put in a movie.

I'd say his '70s are the same as Altman's and Scorsese's: they've got more energy and ideas than they know what to do with. Not everything worked--Altman really misfired sometimes--but they regularly amazed.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Well, at least Jaws didn’t win.

I was waiting for this result like

https://i.imgur.com/hUrf67F.gif

Yay on Close Encounters doing so well :)

wow at ET so low! that was my pick in the end. i didn't have a super strong relationship with it as a kid, probably only saw it once, but it's really spoken to me as an adult. absolutely wrecked me and my stepmom, watching it a few days after my father passed away. i remember hugging her, both of us crying, and just saying "he goes home. he goes home." maybe of all his films it has the most to say, in a small story of a child and his friend, about the big and fundamental things - life, death, loss, watching someone you love go, and carrying on with the things they left you still in your heart. it's able to get there because all the everydayness works, because the movie magic of things like the bicycle flight have us totally wide-eyed and accepting in our hearts that elliott and e.t.'s connection is important. "this means something," one might say.

speaking of which, close encounters gets really, well, close. what ultimately proves to be the throwawayness of melinda dillon's character is a real achilles's heel tho imo. there are also a few sequences that drag on a little long. but this one, too, moved and affected me in recent times. raiders and jaws are fantastic entertainments, probably pinnacles of the medium in certain ways, but i'm more interested in and compelled by the things e.t. and close encounters have their minds on.

ilx went mindless

I would've gone:

E.T.
Temple of Doom
Jaws
Empire of the Sun
Raiders of the Lost Ark

Except for something like this thread, I doubt I've thought of Raiders of the Lost Ark once the past 35 years. I remember the snakes and the big rock.

Nice to see three other Sugarland votes, though.

ilx went mindless

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Thursday, March 15, 2018 10:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark

wait weren't you stanning for Temple of Doom over Raiders?

I love that there were actually two votes for Hook. Hook!

The Sugarland Express (1974) 4
1941 (1979) 4
Schindler's List (1993) 3

never change ILX.

The Sugarland Express is a great, underseen film--according to Kael, "one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of the movies."

Having said that, I can see where that would be hard to stomach for anyone who loves Schindler's List. Which is why I thought it more properly belonged in the other poll.

TBH, while I do greatly appreciate and enjoy most of the big Spielbergian cultural depth charges from this era, none of them aside from maybe Raiders really rocks my world the way Sugarland did when I first saw it.

who voted for Always?

i think i forgot to vote. but any of the first four up there is fine.

xpost the only thing I remember about that movie was a nebbish confused man at the movie theatre box office trying to buy a ticket to the 3:15 showing of Always and having to be told repeatedly that the showing was cancelled, Stuwall style.

Assuming that both Hook voters haven't seen it since they were 10.

Hook voters need to be watched VERY closely. there is something wrong there. unless it was some sort of post-modern Andy Kaufman kind of vote.

Hook is every bad maudlin idea/thought/memory SS ever had made into a movie.

RUFI

I voted for CE3K.

Thudbutt is one of cinema's great characters

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)	2
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)	1

It has all been worth it.

watched "Empire of the Sun" last night. it was really good! wonderful on a technical level -- those scenes with massive crowds brought to mind Grand Old Hollywood. great use of light/shadow throughout, with some nice shots of silhouettes against the sunrise or a shower of sparks from nearby plane mechanics.

the class dynamics were very interesting. it starts out with a spoiled British imperialist youth frightened of the teeming masses living at the edge of his privilege. soon enough they are ransacking his abandoned house (the scene where his former servant goes right up and slaps him before moving on was hilarious & devastating). soon enough, he is banging a dish pan in an internment camp, a nice callback to the homeless man camped out near the driveway of his mansion from the start of the film.

there is so much to dig into here. just thinking back on it, so many themes and motifs are bubbling up for me. the little toy plane he starts off with, taken on this journey, seen in all these different contexts, later taken a more grown up form in the larger toy plane that he and his Japanese counterpart take joy in flinging back and forth across the lines. that scene where he is trying to bring back someone to life and they turn into... well not gonna give it away for those who haven't seen it. the moment is a little on the nose but the movie is very good at show not tell so it's an earned moment.

beautiful movie. John Malcovich is even tolerable! the scene with all the discarded pianos, china sets, luxury lounges, crystal chandaliers, etc. all the trappings of wealth in the abandoned stadium littered with the bodies of the dying ruling class was eerie and surreal (perhaps like something he would do later in AI). i feel like this is a film you could watch over and over again and even use to teach a class, it is really well put together on every level.

finally watched Sugarland Express last night. the most "of its time" spielberg that i've seen - we get slight variations on the many-cops-chasing-one-car formula rather than a total overhaul into streamlined blockbuster. zsigmond's photography is the biggest reason to see it imo, i was stoked for a spielberg movie starring goldie hawn but she's rapidly demoted to just one of several people yelling at each other. it's also too long and there are times i genuinely couldn't tell what was happening to who (too many similar-looking cars and hats). but other times you can see exactly where spielberg's injecting some energy and drama through the storyboarding....
idk it's more fun and certainly better looking than Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. still need to see Badlands and Thieves Like Us tho.

The biggest blind spot for me has always been “Hook”. I tried to watch it last night. Didn’t make it past the kid’s baseball game. The treacly John Hughes-ness of the thing made me stop watching. Please convince me to sit through it and that I will be rewarded.

nope

it gets worse rather than better. i guess if you're really into lavishly expensive but pretty ugly 90s set/production design, there'd be things to look at.

I have a real affection for Hook because it was one of a handful of movies we had on VCR when I worked in the electronics dept of a K-Mart in the early 90s and I've seen it dozens of times in bits and pieces (others: 2001, The Fugitive, Mrs. Doubtfire). It's also one of the only Robin Williams movies I like, probably because he is playing against type most of the movie. It's the ultimate of the Spielberg missing father movies and kind of hits you over the head with that. I guess I like the recontextualizing/updating of the Peter Pan story and how you get to gradually uncover those elements. I wouldn't argue for it being good.

Hook is such a 1991/1992 film in an intangible way, just switching it on you can instantly tell that it's not from 1989 or 1994

Down to the score.

Yeah, that's a weird score. Otm. Not gonna revisit. Nope.

The England-set scenes in Hook are actually quite lovely. Shame about the rest of it.