The first thought I had when I saw the final one-sheet for this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Meth was: hasn't anything happened to me in the last eighteen years? It looks exactly like the other posters in the series, in the sense that it looks like it came off a template of eighties action movie poster design. I will repeat my grousing of last year. Harrison Ford is now older than Sean Connery was when he played his father in the last one. But Connery was supposed to be a senior in that film...I highly doubt Ford's role is to be that of the grumpy old man in this one. Please let there not be a shirtless scene. This seems to be a bit of a step back for Spielberg. I think it's a bit old-fashioned to continue to knock him for being Mr. Blockbuster, a non-risk-taking director who, to quote from an anti-Spielberg essay written by Crispin Glover (sic), “wafted his putrid stench upon our culture, a culture he helped homogenize and propagandize” (this from the guy who signed up for Like Mike and Charlie's Angels). I myself probably skip as many of his new releases as I see but I cannot take cheap shots at his body of work or his skills as a filmmaker. Minority Report was top-notch and his last film, Munich, even with the WTF sequence towards the end, is a masterpiece that time will be very kind to; maybe someday people will wish it had won Best Picture instead of fucking Crash. I know he pops between these lofty heights and The Terminal, but the career work is worthy of a Cinematheque series as much as that of Lynch or Scorsese... let the comments flamewar begin.
4 comments:
Not to mention "A.I." and "Catch Me If You Can". He's much more interesting these days than Scorsese (seriously, when was the last time Marty made something that didn't make you wince in pain?).
While I agree with a lot of points in Crispin Glover's essay even if he's a total hypocrite as you rightly pointed out, my love for Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun runs so damn deep that I always list it as one of my favorite films from the 80s.
Empire of the Sun was for me the beginning of me taking Spielberg seriously (I mean, not counting when I was 9 and took Close Encounters very seriously...)
From the first minute or so of Munich I felt like I was in very very good hands.
Spielberg's Terminal flaw is that his good films usually come in for a bumpy landing, as it were... he always wraps things up, even in his best films, as if there might be one or two people left in the audience who haven't figured out what the message is.
Post a Comment