Hey,
After seeing the bridge of spies trailer , which i'm sure will have a lot of "how did he shoot that?" moments , and having had some memories of jurassic park and schindler's list, i've been trying to distinguish what is the artistic component of his films, specifically if he's been able to achieve subtlety and silence and things like that in a consistent manner, and not as isolated moments in his films, films that are easy to praise for their high end production and craft.
spielberg is unquestionably a master. but he's usually in your face and loud and fucks things up with sentimentality. even intimate films of his like Munich or Lincoln have to be 3+ hours long. or AI, which starts with the promise of being the very best film in history and then becomes a very decent long film.
there is a TED talk given by JJ Abrams where he shows the scene in jaws with the father and the son having dinner, explaining that to him that is the core of any story, which in other words is : give the audience some sentimental bullshit for 5 seconds and then you get to shoot explosions and shit.
after having this piece of information, seeing a film by jj Abrams feels like a numbers game, where the script is more like an excel sheet where emotions and actions are plotted and administered. granted, the same can be said about any film with a coherent structure, but the illusion of cinema is lost when these tearjerker moments pop out in the midst of an alien invasion or whatever the shit, like in Super 8.
Colin Trevorow also did it with Jurassic World, with the brothers and the parents going through the divorce, a plot part that amounts to three minutes of the movie. it's the spielberg trademark, and i understand that these examples refer to blockbusters and not intimate films, but i think there's now been a lot of good examples on how to handle entertainment and art in a more balanced manner.
anyways, after this digression,
what i want to know is , what film do you think has been the most consistently subtle and concise effort of Spielberg ? is it amistad, a film i've never seen?
i made a spielberg topic and said nice things about jurassic park and i think my paragraph's ending is strange and this thread is already better hre's the other http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=12983.0
I just scrolled through his filmography to remind myself of all the movies he's directed, and decided the answer to your question is "never".
He's a master filmmaker of his craft, but he's a sentimentalist at heart in the same vein of Frank Capra. Subtlety isn't necessary, but for me occasional downfall is making films that either retread on emotional payoffs of films he already made or so many other films it feels giving into cliche or easy solutions. For me, not doing that is his challenge.
The Terminal
whatever dude.
a "subtle" filmmaker could never achieve the last 30 minutes of E.T.
that's pure feeling, unsubtle, beautiful, improbable, almost mute yet feels like an emotional scream.
spielberg bashing is old and boring at least since 1998.