A Steven Spielberg Poll (1994-2018)

C-

i'd like to see the terminal again.

Catch Me If You Can, if only because it is by far the most fun I've had watching a new Spielberg movie since the original JP.

my inclination's to go straight for the munich/wotw decision point but: i haven't seen a.i. since the theater and suspect i like it, catch me if you can is a good movie that seems to me only to benefit from its 10-year-old lead (same way the much worse django unchained uses him), and tbh i rly loved amistad when they made us watch it in 9th grade.

had somehow forgotten about literally all his post-munich stuff that isn't Annals Of The Republic even tho it is the majority, but man it is not v good imo. indy4 was dreadful and tintin was a tech demo that's hopefully v inspirational to someone. possibly i'd like the bfg.

I liked Tintin. iirc.

Tintin had some great action sequences! Some of his best since the first JP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mVpZTGCikM?t=55

yr not wrong, it was weird, i was absolutely conscious of such while watching and also incredibly bored.

Tintin had some great action sequences! Some of his best since the first JP

made it 42 seconds in before the grossness, the uncanny valley, the cutscene-level motion, the "foley", the absolute failure to understand anything at all about what makes Herge worthwhile, let alone great, and most of all: the repugnantly busy over-scoring (Williams) made me lunge for the pause button

as dlh knows I'm a sucker for presidential hooey, and Anthony Hopkins' turn in Amistad as JQA is irresistible (and he's experiencing a comeback at the moment).

AI with Lincoln second ( but not a close one ).

AI with Lincoln a not-very-close runner up

sorry for the double post

Though I love WotW until that garbage end

should have been a question mark after Williams

just googled and yes

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.

Given the twaddle written about Spielberg on this board, that top three astonishes me.

a loud minority perhaps (or they don't vote)

Don’t see how a better version of what Lincoln is could exist, it is a heist movie where the heist is the 13th Amendment, and I love a good heist.

Yes. I saw it again three months ago and every time I cringed at an indelicacy I wonder who else could have commissioned this script and these performances -- how the fuck else could this have been made?

I approve of Minority Report's swan dive from 25 votes to 2.

And the top 4 is the right 4, regardless of order.

Who on earth would vote for the BFG?

2 votes for crystal skull = you dont wanna base much on these results, ppl are fuckin with you

The opening scene of Crystal Skull is really good.

the fridge

youre talking about the fridge

https://gottalovethemmovies.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/img_2342.jpg

a.i. is on hulu rn btw

i tried rewatching it last night and... it's a great movie but also one of the most emotionally traumatic things i've ever seen

Still as fine a set of poll results as this board ever produced.

Comic I respect: Ugh, BernieBros.
Me: Sure, whatever.

Comic I respect: AI is the 14th best Spielberg movie.
Me: Who the fuck do you think you are?

— 🎃 Jake-o'-lantern 🎃 (@FilmBart) October 22, 2018

God the results on this one are so much better than the first time.