Jaws. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Raiders of the Lost Ark., Empire of the Son. Jurassic Park. Amistad. Saving Private Ryan. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Minority Report. War of the Worlds. Munich. War Horse. Lincoln. The Post. Ready Player One. West Side Story. This massive list of Steven Spielberg-directed movies can be rattled off easily by anyone over 35 who grew up in America. Spielberg could be a synonym for the term “movie director.” However, with 30 full-length featured directing credits already to his name, 2022’s The Fabelmans is the one that is being called, if not semi-biographical, at least his most personal. If that’s true, we get a pretty neat, though not overly sentimental, look at Spielberg’s early influences and how he began honing his craft before becoming the most distinguished director of the last 50 years.
Category Archives: Steven Spielberg
The Post (2017)
I was able to preview Steven Spielberg’s (Jaws, Saving Private Ryan) The Post two years before it was released to the public and even a year before it went into production. It was called Spotlight, and it won the Oscar for Best Picture. It was a fantastic movie. I wish I was more than kidding, and with that, I could be more positive about my viewing of, what I hoped could be, one of the best movies of the year. That was months ago when I only knew of the movie title and that it starred Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep. In my head, I envisioned a movie about an army outpost and was very intrigued. But then I saw the preview, and I wished the movie would have been about a post office instead. Then, when I was halfway through the movie, I wish I had been watching a movie about a bedpost, a fence post, or any other post that would have represented something far less predictable and boring than the waste of talent and time that was being projected on the screen in front of me. It was one of those times (I’ve had many recently) where I have been more than grateful for having a MoviePass. The thought of actually paying for some of these 2017 movies is even more terrifying than the disappointing IT, a movie that was neither scary nor good. And, except a couple of non-Oscar nominated movies that I am still looking forward to but have yet to see (Hostiles, The Florida Project), The Post successfully ends 2017, the worst year for movies so far this century.
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Bridge of Spies (2015)
Bridge of Spies. The ultimate cure for insomnia. Okay, okay, it wasn’t that bad. It actually started great. It was also based upon a true story, so it had that going for it. But Lincoln, War Horse, and Munich were all Steven Spielberg-directed movies, and I found all three of those to be incredibly dull. I’m a huge Spielberg fan, but after doing a quick scan of his filmography, he hasn’t directed a movie I’ve liked in a decade (2005’s War of the Worlds). And I get wanting to branch off from the science-fiction/action-adventure genre that really defined him, but he seems to be missing something when it comes to these dramas. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Saving Private Ryan was one of the greatest movies ever made. So while I appreciate his desire to recapture the glory he achieved in a movie like that or a movie like Amistad or a film like Schindler’s List, I must then wonder why he’s wasting his time on a film like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Worse, based on how poor that movie was, why was he set to direct a fifth installment of the series? Long story short, this isn’t the same Steven Spielberg of the 1980s and 1990s. There will be fans of the style of films he seems to be mainly concentrating on now (heck, Munich, War Horse, and Lincoln were all nominated for best picture), but all three of these movies (as well as Bridge of Spies) just felt long and tedious to me.
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