The Fabelmans

 

Arguably, the most important film director of the last fifty years, Steven Spielberg has created on origin story for himself. This autobiographical, but supposedly fictional story, shows us the inspirations and the learning curve that Spielberg encountered on his journey to fame and cinema excellence. The frequent theme in his movies of an absent father or parents divided, shows up in his own narrative, and at times it is inspiring while being simultaneously frustrating. Oh yeah, you get to enjoy the hypnotic effect that movies can have on you both by watching the Spielberg stand in, but also by simply being in a theater to experience this. 

Let's begin by complimenting the performers in this film. The main young actor playing the Spielberg based Sam Fabelman, is Gabriel LaBelle, and he sure looks like a doppelganger for a young Steven. Every time he has the camera in front of his face, making one of those childhood created movies, you can see the future creator of "Jaws", "Saving Private Ryan" and Jurassic Park" at work. Casting is everything for a part like this and whoever found this young man deserves a bonus. We may not have the same secure visual references for his parents, but Paul Dano as the father and Michelle Williams as the mother, are completely believable. Williams has the meatier role and she runs with it. There has been talk that she would walk away with the Academy Award if she was being promoted as a supporting actress, but that would be such a misclassification of her contribution to the film, that it would be the equivalent of saying Brando was a supporting actor in "The Godfather". Regardless of screen time, this is the central character in the film. Even the Spielberg character plays second fiddle to the mother in most of the story. Judd Hirsh arrives for one extended sequence and walks off with the picture in five minutes of screen time. Seth Rogan plays it straight as a dramatic actor, although the character has light moments, and he also is quite good. In the final moments of the film, we get one more great performance from an actor in a single scene, but I won't spoil it for you. When the identity of the actor dawns on you, you will laugh and be amazed.

For most film buffs, the key parts of the story will center around young Sammy's movies. The montage of his sisters and friend, role playing in his pre-teen and teen productions is almost enough to satisfy, but then we get extended moments in the making of his war epic, the filming of a family picnic and his film project presented at the prom, that also add to the juice that we movie fans crave. The editing, special effects and camera tricks show us that he is a great story teller, but as we see him making his film about his Mom, we get to see how he learns to put heart into his stories. Sammy (Spielberg) learns that it is not just technique that makes a movie work. The audience needs an emotional investment, and we actually see him learning that as the movie unwinds.

Things in the film get a little tricky when confronting the Jewish heritage of our hero. No doubt there were times in his life when bigots swarmed but given the experiences of his earlier schools, boy scouts and neighbors, these Aryan idiots in Northern California seem like bad guys issued by Central Casting. The fact that a cute Christian girl takes a distinct interest in him also belies the notion that anti-Semitism ruled the school.  That one of his antagonists has a moment of moral crisis after being presented as the equivalent of a Greek God at their High School in Sammy's film, is confusing. The closest explanation I could come up with in my own head was that this High School Star is being confronted by his apex moment, and it simply underlines that it is all downhill from here on. I sort of like the idea that the film of student activities will alter people's perspectives, but it was a little fuzzy how this ended up benefitting Sammy. It does end up with a pretty funny punchline however, which works because we are watching this movie when it gets delivered.

Not to give anything away, but the film ends on a promising note and a terrific scene. The brusque advice Sammy gets from a legendary film director, is quickly applied in a manner that allows the audience to laugh and see a technique at work. Director Spielberg playfully lets us in on the fact that he is still influenced by the films he saw in his youth and the lessons he was taught as a teen. The last sequence is where we get that surprise I mentioned earlier and it is a great five minutes of film. Maybe this will not rank with his great adventure films, but when the list of dramas made by Spielberg is presented, "The Fabelmans" will probably be somewhere near the top.

Jurassic World: Dominion

 

In preparation for the latest Dinosaur extravaganza, I recently watched all the other films in this series. There is a reason that Steven Spielberg is the most celebrated director of our times and Colin Trevorrow is a journeyman with only bits of occasional inspiration. Two suspense scenes in the first two Jurassic Park films show you what a master Spielberg is. The initial T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park is one of the most tense, frightening and well directed scenes in a movie ever. In The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the attack on the trailers adds on tension in each moment that Spielberg makes work so much longer and more effectively than anyone else has managed to do. Trevorrow, for all his gifts, simply does not have the instinct that Spielberg does. His tension building scenes are too abrupt, too frequent, and sometimes over the top in a way that he can't quite pull off.  It's not meant as an insult to say he is no Spielberg, it is simply an acknowledgement that his films have not been able to work at the same level.

Jurassic World Dominion is not a failure because of the action scenes, the problem is actually the opposite, the action scenes fail because the rest of the movie cannot quite justify them, I was willing to go along with the revamped "Jurassic World" because it stemmed from a solid idea, that built on what came before it, and even though it stretched the concept a bit, it managed to work. "Fallen Kingdom" and "Dominion" don't have the right premise going for them, so the stringing together of solid action beats with bad story ideas and dumb characters, just won't cut it. I enjoyed the moments of action in the film that employed the main characters from the two sets of film groups, but the secondary characters are underwritten, somewhat unnecessary and disposed of either too soon for us to enjoy their comeuppance, or without much drama. 

These posts never give away spoilers and I try to refrain from simply recapping the film as part of the discussion, which is a good thing in this case because I'm not sure I could keep it all straight. Characters come in who start off as antagonists, then end up as allies and allies disappear after a few scenes and are never heard from again. There are genetically created murder locusts, that may threaten the world food supply, but then they may simply be a marketing tool for genetically modified crops, but then the geneticist who created them demurs and maybe we want to get rid of them. It simply depends on the scene as to which way the evil corporation is going at the moment. There is no logical consistency in the objectives of the antagonists and the heroes have mixed motives for their actions as well. There are a bunch of shady characters who are acting out of greed, but sometimes they just seem to be malevolent for the sake of being evil.

All of this is happening in a universe that is not vey well thought out. There are dinosaurs in the wild, dinosaurs nesting in urban areas, dinosaurs in nature preserves, dinosaurs in illegal breeding factories, and dinosaurs in private possession. Despite all of the potential dino death surrounding everyone, the culture moves on as if the threat does not exist, until it is in your face. Are the velociraptors creatures to be feared and potential rivals to our dominance of the planet? Or are they creatures to be pitied because they are hunted, and misunderstood?  The film makers do their best to get as many different dinosaurs into the story as they can, and sometimes they come across as teddy bears, and other times as venomous snakes from the outback. 

As dangerous as a dinosaur might be, the human characters are the ones that present the biggest menace because they all offer a moment of pontification and exposition that just might kill...your interest in what is happening. Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Laura Dern, Sam Neil, Jeff Goldblum, B.D. Wong, and Campbell Scott all have a moment when they provide exposition and supposed philosophical insight into the events that are happening. Remember the scene where Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil are warning John Hammond at the dinner table in Jurassic Park? Well it feels like that happens every ten minutes in this film. It's as if TED Talks become the standard way that people communicate with one another. The most human and realistic moment comes when Ellie Stadler voices exactly what the audience is thinking after listening to a guru like Steve Jobs monologue from Dodgson. "What?"  It drew a laugh, but even such meta awareness doesn't stop it from continuing. Everyone sounds like Jeremy Rifkin or Al Gore at some point, and it just gets to be too much.

Aside from the schizophrenic story telling, cartoon characters, implausible technology and unexplained political realities, the movie was fun to watch for two and a half hours. If you want high tech thriller mixed with old school adventure, just drop down to the subterranean hyper loop of Elon Musk, I mean Lewis Dodgson, and follow Sam Neil's Dr. Grant as he plays 'Indiana Jones in the Tunnel of Dinosaurs".  Just don't get distracted by the flaming killer locusts who will distract you until it is time for the two apex predators to face off in a climax that means nothing. If you put some Raisinettes  in your popcorn, along with some Hot Tamales, you will have done a more logical job of gene splicing than this movie, and you will enjoy consuming that a lot more than the film.

West Side Story (2021)

I've been waiting for Steven Spielberg to do a full fledged musical since I saw the opening of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" back in 1984. I think his sensibility and eye are right for musical sequences and that he could stage  some pretty energetic numbers and make them look engaging and not static, well it turns out I was right. I'm not sure why he chose this material, but once he committed to it I think he did a solid job justifying a new version of the award winning classic. I think I still prefer the Robert Wise version of the movie, mostly because everything was fresh but Spielberg found some ways to fill out the story, rearrange to songs and change some of the characters delivering the songs, in a way that is satisfying. 

The screenplay by Tony Kushner, with whom Spielberg collaborated on with "Munich" and "Lincoln", adds some details to the backgrounds of our characters to flesh them out. Riff has a story that is spelled out rather than implied as it was before, Bernardo has been transformed into a professional boxer, and Tony is provided with some background that adds resonance to his character that maybe wasn't there before. In some ways, the transition for Bernardo's character is the most problematic, because he seems less sympathetic as a professional fighter, engaging in a street fight. The character of Chino is also built up and it provides some additional pathos to the final outcome of the plot. 

In moving around the order of the songs and changing the characters who perform them, Spielberg and Kushner help the character of Tony in one case and weaken him in the second. The decision to give the "Cool" number to Tony and Riff, works well giving Ansel Elgort and Mike Faist, an additional chance to show the gap between them, even as friends, and to make a stronger impact on the audience. While I appreciate the desire to include Rita Moreno more in the story, giving her the "Somewhere" moment robs Tony and Maria of a poignant moment that would make their tragedy more emotional at the end. 

So what else has changed? Well, the fight scenes are more brutal from the get go. Baby John doesn't just get beat up, he is mutilated by a piercing of his ear done with a nail. Bernardo and Tony fight and the punches Bernardo lands when Tony is trying to hold his temper and let things chill, are hard and to the face as well as the gut. You can almost feel them and they look more realistic than most fight scenes, even those you might see in a boxing film. Both groups of opponents are struggling with the idea of losing their territory, not to each other but to the progress of NYC itself. That fuels a bit of the anger so that it does not feel entirely based in ethnic hatred. 

Some people have complained that Spielberg has reimagined the story as a "woke" parable on immigration. There has also been some defensiveness on the part of traditionalists that all the Spanish dialogue in not subtitled. The immigration issue is not any more prevalent than it was in 1961, so that seems foolish to jump on. The Spanish issue is a non issue since almost all those important lines are repeated bak in some form in English, and even a non-Spanish speaker like me could understand most of what is said by context, tone and the few words of Spanish that I know. Maybe the strongest argument against calling this film "woke" is that Officer Krupke, goes from being an overt racist in the 1961 film, to a fairly sympathetic character in this one.   Lieutenant Schrank is also not taking sides in the conflict, but seems more interested in avoiding kids being killed. 

Two great visual moments that clearly show that Spielberg was thinking about how the movie could look different yet still be familiar, come in the Gang confrontation and in the "America" number. The long shadows approaching each other from opposite directions in the salt warehouse, builds the confrontation moment nicely and being shot from above makes it feel more ominous. The girls dancing down the street in the daylight, pursued by the boys, instead of remaining on the rooftop at night, keeps the excitement and cleverness of Sondheim's lyrics, but transposes it to a setting that feels even more joyful.

The bad news here is that the film has flamed out. It did not live up to expectations at the box office, and the critical hype , while strong, seems unlikely to sustain it for long in the onslaught of so many other films at the end of the year. I think it will mirror another great film that hid similar reviews and expectations but did no business. In 1983, "The Right Stuff" arrived with a thud at the box office. Oscar Nominations gave it a slight boost during awards season, but in the long run, it was passed by too often by too many people. I see the same pattern emerging here. I hope I am wrong and some holiday time results in more people seeing this worthy remake of a great musical. 

Young Sherlock Holmes

Inspired by a post from one of my on-line friends, I revisited this film today and decided to include it in the summer look back project, "films lost in time". This really should not be a lost film but given it's lack of box office success and the the fact that it is not yet available on blu ray, I suspect that most of today's audience is only vaguely familiar with it. 

This should have been a smashing success given it's pedigree and release. Steve Spielberg is one of the Executive Producers and his team made up the rest of those responsible for bringing this to the screen. The Director was Barry Levinson, who had directed "The Natural" the year before and would go on to direct and win the Academy Award for "Rain Man" three years later. The script comes from Chris Columbus who had written "Gremlins" and "The Goonies" before this and who would go on to make a few films that will feel very familiar after seeing this (more on that later). This was released in the U.S. during the holiday season of 1985 and it basically tanked. The box office was mild to low and barely matched the production cost. So what went wrong, again, I'll delay that for a few paragraphs. Let's talk about the movie first.

The idea of retconning Sherlock Holmes into a youthful action character is not a bad one. In the original books, we learn of Holmes and Watson meeting as they take up rooms together on Baker Street, but this scenario makes them schoolmates at a posh academic institution in Victorian England. Holmes has already mastered the art of deduction as he calls it [frankly it is mostly inductive sign reasoning and a little hard to believe at times]. 

As the two young future archetypes are meeting, a series of deaths are taking place in London. We witness a mysterious figure using a small blow gun to shoot darts at several older gentlemen. Those men begin to have fantastic hallucinations which result in deaths that appear to be suicides. From the start of the film, it is clear that the film makers want to dazzle us with special effects as part of the excitement of the movie. Articulated puppets and stop motion animation are used early on to bring horrific images to life. 

 

The most likely reason this film would be historically significant is that it contains one of the earliest CGI effects on screen to achieve the images the film makers wanted. A priest is attacked by a figure that climbs out of a stained glass window. This sequence explains why the films lone Academy Award Nomination was for Visual Effects. The Knight becomes a three dimensional image which strikes terror into the elderly man who runs into the street and is mowed down by a carriage. 

Although primitive by today's standards, it was jaw dropping at the time and I remember Siskel and Ebert talking about it and one of them picking it as their choice in their annual Oscar handicapping show. 

The story centers around the two well known characters and a third one invented for this enterprise.  A confirmed bachelor like Holmes is during most of his film history, must have a woman in his past to explain his predilection. So Columbus creates Elizabeth, the niece of a character in the story and Holmes love interest. This will require that Watson and Holmes have to rescue Elizabeth on more than one occasion. That's right, she is a damsel in distress for most of the last third of the film. The development of Holmes as a character is pretty good in the story. He is interested in unique subjects, he has an eccentric mentor, and he is admired by many and despised by a few elitists. His friendship with the new boy does not help him win the affection of either his belligerent teacher or the light blond future MP that he makes an enemy. Does any of this sound familiar to you? It should because it is likely that Harry Potter and friends grew out of this kind of stew. The fact that Chris Columbus who directed the first two Harry Potter films also wrote the screenplay here, seems like a lot more than just coincidence.

Let's add another interesting parallel, young future Dr. Watson looks like a chubbier version of you know who.

With so many things going for it, what caused this film to fail with a broad audience? Speaking simply as a movie fan I think I can point to two things. The most criticized parts of the previous year's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" are resurrected to provide the villain and motives here. There is virtually no surprise when the antagonist is revealed, so the suspense is missing for the most part. When to secret society perpetrating the crimes is revealed, it is a moment right out of the very dark Indiana Jones movie. 

 Acolytes surround a hapless victim overseen by an evil priest of an alien religious cult and a towering figure of the spirit that they worship. In a true "what the hell" moment, we discover that there are other murders connected to this story and suddenly the plot shifts to a completely different issue. Foreshadowing his future emotionally stunted growth, Holmes cries out and alerts everyone there to his presence. And none of this seems to be well connected to the logical procedural method Holmes supposedly follows. Instead, a series of chance insights leads to the discovery of an underground temple. 

Holmes and Watson have to become Butch and Sundance and it is just not as credible at this point as it needs to be. The action points start driving the plot instead of the character points. 

Holmes and Watson have to become the Wright Bothers at one point, and although the scene is fun, it feels tacked on rather than organic to the Holmes tradition of investigation. 

One other thing that I think sabotages the film, and this is a spoiler so if you haven'y yet viewed the movie and don't want to be ticked off before doing so, stop now and come back later.

Holmes fails. 

All the build up and eventual destruction and the outcome is depressing and undermines the spirit of the film. Someone must have thought it was creatively challenging to finish on this note. Here is the way it came across to me. "Ho,ho, ho, your [character not to be identified by me] dies, Merry Christmas. Hope you and the family enjoyed this." If you did the same thing to any of the other successful Spielbergian type movies at the time, you would get the same dismal box office result. "Goonies" would not be a beloved 80s touchstone, "Cocoon" would have stalled Ron Howard's career, and "Raiders" would be an experiment that failed. 

Despite the dramatic faults of the movie, it had a lot of other things to recommend it. The setting and sets were very nicely utilized and they look great. The costumes and the actors fit into the world that was created very effectively. 

Bruce Broughton was nominated for the Academy Award for his music in "Silverado" from earlier in the year, and his work here is alo excellent. The theme tune will be a pretty simple earworm that will remind you every time you hear it of this film. 

For those of you who think the Marvel Films invented the post title credit scene, stick around for the end of this movie. Clearly there were hopes of a sequel, but when a movie under-performs like this, you are not going to get Part II. Although Nicolas Rowe does reprise the character in a brief cameo in the far superior "Mr. Holmes" which I guess we can call "Old Sherlock Holmes". 

Ready Player One

We got a Spielberg film just last December (although for most it was just a couple of months ago in January), but "The Post" despite clearly being made by Spielberg, doesn't need to be a Spielberg film. "ready Player One" on the other hand, seems to demand the hand of the master on the controller. This is a meta exercise in nostalgia, both for the period of time and for the kinds of films that Spielberg used to make. Lucky for us, it mostly works and the reason is Spielberg himself.

The book that the film is based on is a pastiche of ideas and images and memories from a million minds of gamers. It was primarily a tool for reliving the joy that comes from mastering a new game and solving a puzzle. Since the gaming industry was born and thrived in the 1980s, it also is rich in the music and films of the times. The conceit is simple, this movie is a race between lonely souls who have moved out of the real world and a mega corporation that wants to control the environment that they have all moved to. The competitions are laden with the kinds of pop references this generation of geeks will appreciate.

Ernest Cline's novel is much darker than this popcorn fueled entertainment. A pop culture geek himself (he wrote the movie"Fanboys"), Cline saw the limitations on social interactions that living in virtual reality held. The specter of a new form of debtors prison, hovers over an environment where fantasy role playing has replaced real intimacy. The villain in the book is much less cartoonish than the ultimately feckless Ben Mendelsohn of the film.   The problems faced by the competitors were often mundane and repetitive, as many of the games being saluted were. It takes someone with a lot of patience and time to master some of the ideas that hardly seem worth mastering in the first place. Spielberg with the help of co-screenwriter Zak Penn, has refocused the story to celebrate the pop culture more than the dark under current in the story.

In the first chase in the story, we are introduced to the three main characters as they dash madly through a race that looks like a combination of Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto. The motorcycle from "Akira" and the DeLoren from "Back to the Future" are driven by the future romantic couple and each has their own way of challenging the game. The chase though is typical Spielberg, it is frenetic but still comprehensible.  As usual, there is always one more piece of dramatic business to stretch out the tension of a scene. The events are so meta that he even lampoons himself with a reference to Jurassic Park as well as a few films he had a hand in as producer.

How could it not be a Spielberg film when the cinematography was done by the artist that Spielberg has worked with 18! times over the last thirty years. Janusz Kaminski is responsible for the look of so many Spielberg films that he might just be his shadow. The one thing that is missing that would put the nail in the coffin is a John Williams score. We get a vigorous but clearly 80s style theme from Alan Silvestri, veteran of "Back to the Future", "Amazing Stories" and a couple of upcoming films in the MCU. Oh, he also scored the "Super Mario Bros. Movie".

The changes lead to a more audience friendly experience. There are more movie references than video game Easter Eggs (although there are plenty of those). A 70s guy like me appreciated the music selection for the nightclub scene and if you like "The Shining" it replaces "War Games" as the main film sequence with a completely different take on the process. Also, there are fewer deaths of heroes in the movie. It is a cinematic stew of epic proportions.

Characterization and subtext are mostly lost with this film interpretation but it makes up for those points by always being visually stimulating. It does not have the resonance of an Indiana Jones or E.T., but it will entertain you for two plus hours and that time goes by quickly. The presence of Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance as secondary figures also adds to the depth of the film, but if deep is what you are looking for, go back and watch "Lincoln". Until the next Indiana Jones film, this is as close to classic Spielberg as you are likely to get, and that is pretty darn close.

My Slate of Films from the Spielberg Draft on the Lambcast

OK, tell me that getting Spielberg's Biggest Blockbuster of the 1970s AND his Biggest Blockbuster of the 1980s isn't going to help me win this draft. Plus I have the sequel to his biggest Blockbuster of the 1990s to go along with it. This should be in the bag, but only if you do your part and vote for my slate in the Draft.

Jaws

There are plenty of posts on this site for this film. Here is a list:

40th Anniversary Jaws Week Posts

My Original Post on the 70s Summer Movie Project

Book Signing with Carl Gottlieb

Last Years Great Screening in a Great Theater

Others:

The Lost World: Jurassic Park


Spielberg Blogathon Entry

While I don't want to support Heather's Team of films, I do have a link to my vigorous defense of
Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom.



Vote at this link.

When you look at the choices, you'll know the right thing to do.

UPDATE!   Victory!

Thanks everyone who voted.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: 40th Anniversary

In 1977, Star Wars was the big film in the science fiction genre. It dominated the Summer season and took off as a cultural artifact that continues to resonate today. The likelihood that another science fiction film would come on the scene and impress in the same ways seemed remote, but Steven Spielberg was just at the start of his career and the third major motion picture he directed was going to wow us in ways that were very similar to his pal George Lucas' little space opera. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is grounded in the everyday reality of audiences at that time. It was not set on a distant planet with space battles, it was taking place in our backyards, in Mexico, India and at a National Monument in Wyoming. The special effects were very different from "Star Wars" but equally compelling. When the Mothership shows up for the climax of the film, it almost makes you forget the space battles around the Death Star.

The film opened in December so it was a Holiday release and it did gangbusters business. It made more than a $100 million with maybe 300 screens during it's opening run. In 1977/78, that was real money. Three years later in a re-release in a "Special Edition" it added another $16 million. This week's run will add a smaller amount to the total but I think it is impressive that a 40 year old film still draws in enough customers to make a mark on the contemporary charts. The reason is simple, it was a great film in 1977 and it is still a great film, 40 years later.

Steven Spielberg is the consummate film director of the last fifty years. He may be rivaled creatively by directors such as Martin Scorsese or the Coen Brothers, but his track record of film success plus creativity is unparalleled. "Close Encounters" is entirely his baby. Although he has contributed to a few other film scripts that he directed, this is a solo credit, his only one. The inventiveness of the story and the odd way that it plays out building suspense as to what is happening to our sad hero is a testament to Spielberg's creativity with story. Of course his directorial choices are outstanding as well. From the start of the movie, when a black screen is accompanied by an otherworldly note, held for a moment but increasing in volume until a crash and then the screen fills with a desert sandstorm image, we are hooked. The mundane but complicated work of air traffic controllers, talking on a radio with the flight crews of airlines, depicted on a black and green screen as a set of numbers, comes across like a tense mystery with just enough humor to make it memorable. Finally in the opening sequence we meet the Neary family, who are like all of us. Their home is average, cluttered, and filled with loud kids and distracted parents. The floor of the boys bedroom may be one of the most accurate pieces of set design ever. At the heart of this story is Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfess, his second time in a row playing the Spielberg persona on screen in a Spielberg movie.

What happens to Roy on this night changes everything. His relationship with his wife and kids will be damaged in ways that look beyond repair, but it happens slowly. If Quint was obsessive about the Great White, well he had nothing on Roy Neary and the vague form that he keeps seeing in his food, bed and bathroom. At the start of the film he is a well meaning father who kiddingly threatens one son while trying to help the other one figure out fractions in an interesting way. He wants his kids to share the magic of his own childhood experiences and the recurring theme of Pinocchio is introduced. It is only a few days later that he indifferently trashes the house where they all live in a quest to figure out the symbol in his head. His oldest son is embarrassed and lashes out when Roy can't control his frustration and desperation. His wife, the wonderful Terri Garr, is mildly supportive but is also trying to protect him from himself. As much as there is to celebrate at the end of the film, there is plenty of tragedy to get us there. Roy's actual encounter is brilliantly shown with practical effects in the truck he drives for work and the fantastic conceptualization of the UFOs he chases that first night.  Spielberg then allows him to undercut his own experience with a clever second encounter that is not at all what it seems. This is another writers touch that is well realized by the most sympathetic of directors.

There are a few moments that will leave modern audiences a bit bewildered. Roy trying to navigate using folded maps and not GPS is a pretty good example. At a official inquiry, a newsman points out that the absence of photos of UFOs is not proof of their non-existence any more than the absence of  pictures of planes or cars crashing denies that those things happen [these days, that kind of film fills the evening news]. There is a great humorous sequence when the investigation team needs to read some map coordinates and instead of going on-line, they have to roll a giant globe from a government office to their workspace. So the technology might be dated but the story hold up well. Can we trust the government to tell us the truth? Do we know all there is to know about space? Are some crazy people maybe not crazy?  Roy gets lumped in with a guy who believes in Bigfoot and that's enough to discredit him in a lot of eyes. He does discover an ally in Jillian, who has lost her son Barry to the visitors. Barry's disappearance is one of the sequences in the film that is iconic and it was really frightening. It was a moment that made you think this film could go anywhere and any point. 

Melinda Dillon was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the distraught mother who also had the same kinds of obsessions as Roy. When the two of them finally work together as they arrive in Wyoming, you can feel the us versus them bonding between the two characters. Director François Truffaut was cast as the main scientific leader of the UFO team, and he works mostly because of his language barrier. Bob Balaban as the cartographer drafted as Truffaut's interpreter also acts as a surrogate for the audience on the inside of the plot. This dual approach to the story might give away too much but because Jillian and Roy don't connect till late in the film, and Balaban is sometimes unclear on what is happening, the suspense is maintained.

The climax of the movie is correctly remembered for the technical proficiency of the special effects and design teams and the outstanding score by John Williams. Williams has a huge number of Oscar nominations but probably fewer wins than he deserves because he was frequently matched against himself. This was one of those years. While most of the time he probably cancelled his competing nominations out, the classical score for Star Wars was not likely to ever be forgotten. His work in this film however is equally sublime and used in such a creative way in the story that maybe he should have received a co-screenwriting credit with Spielberg.   Vilmos Zsigmond won the Academy Award for the cinematography of the film, but there were several other photographic geniuses that made contributions as well including: John Alonzo (Chinatown), William Fraker (Wargames),
László Kovács (Paper Moon), Douglas Slocombe (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Allen Daviau (E.T.), and a half dozen others.

There are many themes that you can pull out of this film and all of them feel like that could be the central focus. In the first part, mystery is at hand, in the second act it is obsession and the third transfers to both paranoia and hope. I always see this as a film that is ultimately about how the world can potentially be brought together by an event of this magnitude, or conversely how it could tear us apart. That dichotomy is the script again by the director himself. There are a hundred little moments that deserve more attention, and I hope that despite the fact that this is the first time I have written about this film, it won't be the last and those moments will have some light shined on them as well. 

Addendum:

My friend Eric on the East Coast took his son to see this for the first time, while I was taking my daughter to see it today. Eric is a fine writer and he put together a nice post with a heartfelt message to Mr. Spielberg at the end. You might want to look at it here.

Jurassic Park/The Lost World/Jurassic Park III

Take a little trip with us through the park. It's forty-five minutes of Dino-mite conversation Here is a link to a previous post on the first film.

The Obligatory July 4th Post on JAWS

Don't let the title fool you, it is not just an obligation it is a pleasure to see and write about the greatest adventure movie of the second half of the last century [and so far, the first Sixteen years of the current one.]

No film has been covered as in depth on this blog site as the original Steven Spielberg classic. If you go back a year to the 40th anniversary, you will see that I saw the movie on the big screen four times in 10 days and did a different post on each one of those visits. You will also be able to find an extensive collection of posts at the following: Jaws Week.

It is late however, and I have some obligations in the next few hours so I will keep this years comments short.

First, I think this may be the first time I saw the movie at the Egyptian Theater, a spot that has become my go to cinema for classic films, including several events each year at the TCM Classic Movie Film Festival. The popcorn is good, the butter flavor rich and they have Coke Zero. Oh yeah, they also have the coolest old school design on the Boulevard.

In introducing the program and telling everyone the rules of conduct, our host tonight asked how many people were seeing the movie for the first time. I was flabbergasted to see nearly a third of the packed house raise their hands. While it surprised this veteran of at least a hundred trips to Amity over the years, it also created a great expectation on my part. I had to ask myself if the film would still work on a fresh audience that is jaded by the speed and CGI of today's films. I can safely report that when Ben Gardner makes his final appearance in the movie, the screams were loud and people again levitated out of their seats.

When the shark first shows up in profile, there is another jump, and everyone still nervously laughs at Roy Scheider's ad-libbed classic line. There are two more great scares, a dozen moments of levity that all break the tension in glorious ways and you can tell they were all working tonight. Finally, there was a loud outburst of cheers and applause when the hero solves the problem of the shark in a most satisfying conclusion.

As always, I picked up a couple more tidbits of information during the screening. In the hundred times I've seen the movie, this was the first time I noticed the timeline continuity error in the police report for Chrissy's death and the date of the attack on Alex Kitner. Why I had not worried about it before is beyond me, but I think I'd go crazy if I worried about all those kinds of things. A movie is made up of a million moving parts and sometimes the cog in one section is out of synch with the gears in another section.

Something that bothers me a little more because it seems like it should be obvious. At dinner, when Quint is telling the story of the Indianapolis, I suddenly realize that he and Hooper have finished their meals and that Brody hasn't even touched his food. It may be the framing on the big screen that makes this more noticeable, or maybe because Shaw is so compelling when he does the monologue, you don't really take tour eyes off him much. So the Chief has a queasy stomach on the ocean with the more experienced sailors. That's one more small detail that is so brilliant in making these characters real and representative of their types in the story.

I also think that different prints or sound systems may emphasize some parts of the music or the dialogue a bit more from one screening location to another. After forty years, it's great to say the movie still succeeds and there are still small moments to discover.
 

Jurassic World

The world is a different place than it was twenty two years ago when the original "Jurassic Park" stormed onto screens, made CGI the standard by which special effects would be measured from then on, and crowned the king of Hollywood with his greatest commercial success the same year he achieved his greatest artistic success with "Schindler's List". Spielberg's dinosaur movie was the start of freeing our imaginations with digital images and the story was fresh. Here we are all those years later, and everyone knows that the dinosaurs are going to be spectacular, and the setting is going to be lush and the action intense. Even if it is the first time you see any of the Jurassic Park films, "Jurassic World" can never repeat the magic of that 1993 event picture. 

Having said that, and giving anybody with bloated expectations a way to let a little air out of the bubble, "Jurassic World" is a terrific summer film that should fill the pockets of everyone involved because it does exactly what the times call for. It entertains us with spectacle, danger and action. There is one important element missing from this film that was much more abundant in it's three precursors, humor. Other than that, you will have a great time at the movies as long as you are not really expecting a science lesson.

The park has been open for a while now. It is still unclear to me after the events of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park", how "i-gen", the company founded by John Hammond can still exist. They must have had their assets sold off to pay for the lawsuits that would have followed the company after the T-Rex eats half of San Diego. They could not even afford security to keep people off of site B in the third Jurassic Park film. That is all just nit picking however, the point of this movie is to give us something to marvel at and be frightened of. The real monsters continue to be the scientists who play with genetic power and don't consider the consequences. These films must have inspired a lot of the Monsanto hate out there, because the researchers come across as indifferent to the work they are doing and it's consequence, they simply see it as something to exploit.  B.D. Wong as Dr. Henry Wu is older but not wiser, making all new mistakes with the current endeavor. Vincent D'Onofrio has the Paul Reiser role as a corporate hack who has visions of defense contracts dancing through his head. It's Bryce Dallas-Howard who ultimately has to redeem herself as a cold fish of an executive, looking at marketing before she considers the ethical and responsible things to do. She does get to the point where we do root for her, but in the beginning, she is as guilty as anyone for what happens.

If you were worried that the velociraptors of the early films had turned into trained house pets, be assured that is not the case. Chris Pratt, channeling Harrison Ford, is working with the deadly pack hunters, but the story is much more realistic than the trailer would lead you to believe. He needed to have more of "Star Lords" one liners and facial ticks, to make the movie sing more. The fault is not in the performance but the script. Jeff Goldblum owned the first two movies with his sardonic sense of humor and his well timed jabs at the corporation and scientific processes. Pratt only gets one or two moments to show off his comic chops, and then once the story takes off, there are no moments of levity at all.

There are several thrill moments in the film, but nothing to match that T-Rex attack from "Jurassic Park". The sequence with the gyroglobes is meant to stand in for the attack on the jeep in the first film, and it does have a few great elements to it, but it is not as sustained as that first brilliant sequence that Spielberg used all of his skills to put together. Director Colin Trevorrow copies the master but can't quite match the terror achieved in that sequence. His strongest effort is in the final fight sequence which does manage to use the characters , both real and digital, to their best effect. Composer Michael Giacchino has done a good job in building a soundtrack for the movie but his work will always be overshadowed here by the theme from the first film, composed by John Williams. That motif is repeated in several sections and at the end of the picture it is as if Williams himself did the score for this. It may be an unfair thing for me to say, but it was the way I felt about it.

The movie succeeds in creating a monster to chase the characters that really is scary. The park looks fantastic and reasonably crowed, at least until the climax. I would want to do several of the rides and attractions we saw in the build up. Kayaking with dinosaurs, riding a Triceratops, or traveling by monorail through a forest are all attractions that would made me want to go through the turnstile. Some times the themes get a little big for the movie. Asset management and investment are certainly important, but a guy who manages to make it to being the eighth richest man on the planet can surely see that losing a $26 million project is small potatoes next to the disaster staring him in the face. Of course if people did not make some stupid choices, there would be no movie for us to thrill to, so ignore some of the improbable s, and sit back for what will surely be the thrill ride of the summer.
 

Steven Spielberg Blogathon: Directing Actors

Steven Spielberg is rightly credited with being the most effective visualizer of stories working in the last forty years. He took a liability like a non-functioning mechanical shark and managed to create an extremely visceral film out of it. That "Jaws" works is largely a function of his ability to feel how a movie will play to an audience. He took the extra step when making that film, of shooting additional material in the pool of one of his collaborators, to get the audience reaction right. The opening of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a litany of visual and emotional elements from the Saturday serialized films of the Golden Age, but updated and intensified as only Spielberg has been able to manage. The brutality and honesty of the first half hour of "Saving Private Ryan" is a testament to being able to connect with an audience's emotions in the strongest possible ways. Plenty of horror films have been as graphic and disturbing, but none have carried the power of those horrifying images the way that this World War II film managed to do.

Many have criticized his sentimentality in visual language. "Warhorse" although successful has been savaged by some for the Spielberg palate of color, lighting and cinematography. Had the film been made by someone other than Spielberg, it would be seen as a piece of artistic achievement rather than a three handkerchief cash grab. Some pretty picky elements of "War of the Worlds" earned that film scorn from some, even as it delivers the kind of frenzied panic and fear that audiences had not experienced since "Jaws" thirty years before it. He was hammered again for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" for letting CGI and Shia LeBeof come between the fans of the series and the story being told. The same creative elements in "Minority Report", at least the visual ones, become a source of strife in other pictures. Like all artists, he cannot please every audience every time. There is one skill that he has managed to use consistently, without the same kind of criticism his visualization of a story sometimes gets. That talent is the directing of actors to excellence on the screen. Some of the finest performances over the last four decades have come from actors working with Steven Spielberg.

It is true that a talented actor can pull the weight of a movie on their shoulders and carry it for the audience, but they can only do that with a supportive director who knows what the story counts on. With young actors or inexperienced film actors, the role of the director is even more important. George Lucas has a great instinct for what looks good on screen. He can tell a story that will pull the audience in most of the time, but he does not seem to have the right touch with actors in the same way that Spielberg does. Martin Scorsese develops a troop of actors to work with and as they tune into him, they become more and more reflective of his sensibility. Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DeCaprio have worked with Scorsese on multiple projects. Spielberg has only one actor that he has featured in more than three films (Unless you are pretending that Crystal Skull does not exist). People may not realize it but Tom Hanks has only been directed by Spielberg three times in a starring part. To get a great performance out of a great actor is still difficult. There are plenty of pairings that did not pan out, but Spielberg manages to get actors in the right frame of mind, to give them the space to do their best work or maybe he just exerts enough control to stifle the actors excesses.

Casting and script are part of the process as well. I don't mean to suggest that Spielberg can magically turn a marginal performer into an Olivier, but he can make sure that the right actor is in the part and that their strengths are played to. A good example is Christopher Walken.

Walken is an actor loved for his eccentricities and quirks in delivery. He may be the most imitated actor around because his voice and mannerisms are so distinctive and therefore more easy to imitate. In "Catch Me If You Can" he gives an Academy Award nominated performance that is largely successful because the usual quirks are held to a minimum. Instead of being a cartoon, which is how he is usually used in movies, Walken is given a chance to be a real human being. His flaws are not overplayed and the natural way in which he interacts with the other performers is far different than, oh let's say, his three minutes in "Pulp Fiction". Spielberg knows what he wants from his actors and it appears from the product that he knows how to get it.

He is perhaps best known as a director of actors for his work with children. The main child performances in "E.T." are the source of this reputation. Henry Thomas is the lead, and he carries the movie, but he could not have done it without the help of a patient director. I recently watched Thomas's next film, "Cloak and Dagger" and while he is a good screen presence, he lacks the depth and naturalness that came from working with a knowledgeable actors director. It had to have helped the kids immensely to have shot the film in continuity so the kids always knew where they were in the story for their performances.  Christian Bale delivers an amazing child performance in "Empire of the Sun". Both of these young men are talented performers but it took Bale almost twenty more years to break thorough as a widely recognized acting powerhouse. Both of these films depend on the child performer to carry the picture. Unless you are cast because you are cute, hot or a well known commodity, it is hard to imagine a kid without a strong director being able to hold an audience in their hands.  

His one obvious failure in this area was with "Hook" which was filled with so many kids that most of them don't get a chance to have personality and those that do are burdened with the broadest kinds of direction possible. Maybe Charlie Korsmo was adequate in his role but the other kids ran over Spielberg with their quirks. On the other hand, the kids in "Jurassic Park" are excellent, and you will believe Haley Joel Osment is an android.


Spielberg has had the advantage of working with many established stars but it is the first time or novice performers that he has been able to get the most out of. First time stars Oprah Winfrey, Whoopie Goldberg, and journeyman actress Margaret Avery were nominated for the Academy Award in their first major roles. Directors get credit for so many things on the set that they may have little input on but the one thing they have the most control over is the casting and performance of the actors. Sometimes the director does get lucky. In the movie "Lincoln", Spielberg had had his heart set on Liam Neeson for the title role at first, but as time went on, minor differences emerged in how the two saw the character being portrayed. After the project was repeatedly put on hold Nesson bowed out. I have no doubt that he would have given a towering performance but when Daniel Day-Lewis is your fallback casting, and he is driven to make the character come to life, fortune has smiled on you.

I've not read enough to know how important Spielberg was to Day-Lewis' performance, but I do know they kept late hours and shared information and inspiration even in the middle of the night. It is an interesting piece of trivia to note that of the dozen actors Spielberg directed to Academy nominations, Daniel Day-Lewis is the only one to have actually won.

Tom Cruise made two appearances in Spielberg films as distraught fathers. He has to sell the characters demons and weaknesses in both films while also handling an incredibly physical performance in front of green screens and doing stunt work. If you compare his performances in "Minority Report" and "War of the Worlds" to other roles in action films, there is a level of quality to those performances that certainly was enhanced by working with Spielberg. Nothing in "Oblivion" comes close to the anguish that Cruise displays when confronting the pre-crime scenario that John Anderson goes through as he confronts the man he believes took his child. Because this performance is buried in an action film it is easy to overlook the quality of work that the two of them achieved here.

 While all three leads in the movie "Jaws" were excellent, there are two performances that stand out. The flashy role and the greatest match of actor to part I can think of is the pairing of Robert Shaw with the character Quint. At least four sets of hands were on the script for the famous monologue, Spielberg knew what words mattered and enhanced the performance with camera work and sound design that makes that moment one of the essential film scenes ever.  The second performance is one that is often overlooked, Roy Scheider as Chief Brody is subtle and sometimes heartbreaking. Spielberg knows how long to let some of those moments linger in time. The dinner table scene is a wonderful example of the creativity that can come out when the director and the actor work together.

"...as an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.”--Steven Spielberg