Steven Spielberg

I feel like I have a love/hate relationship with the movies of Steven Spielberg. For a man whose movies have left an indelible mark on cinema in the last 30 years, I still can't seem to decide whether or not I like him as a director, or whether or not I like his movies. I guess one of the major problems I have with Spielberg movies, and this may sound trite, but it's how he idealizes things, turns moments into the warm and fuzzy feel-good scenes, which I feel is totally unrealistic. Having said that, though, Spielberg has made some absolutely brutal movies already, so while I say his feel-good moments are sappy and unrealistic, I can't ever accuse him of being completely out of touch with how terrible and how cruel real life can be.

But if I had to list some of the Spielberg movies I like, seated firmly at the top of the list would be Raiders of the Lost Ark, which introduced to the world the unforgettable character of Indiana Jones. I can't tell you how many Sundays I spent as a teenager watching Raiders and Last Crusade. (Temple of Doom I only rediscovered after buying the Indiana Jones DVD set.) Minority Report I absolutely loved! I don't know why, but I still find it hard to believe that it was a Spielberg-directed film. Maybe because sci-fi of this degree isn't what I would associate with Spielberg (E.T. notwithstanding), but I love the thinking element to Minority Report, how it challenges the viewer to not only accept what happens but to think about what it means on a larger scale. And what I can say about Jaws that hasn't been said already? (Hell, I think about it every time I hear Dvorăk's New World Symphony, thank you very much John Williams!) A story that gets circulated a lot in my family is how a distant cousin saw a TV special about the special effects in Jaws—in particular, the severed head that pops out of the bottom of the boat—and when he saw that scene in the theaters, he actually laughed while the audience cringed in terror.

Spielberg really hit his high-water mark in 1993, though, scoring back-to-back mega-hits with Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, the latter going on to win multiple Oscars, including Best Picture. Jurassic Park, while definitely having a dark element to it, was still more reminiscent of the feel-good Spielberg that we got to know in E.T. Schindler's List, however, was altogether a different story! Here Spielberg held nothing back in his depiction of how brutal and horrific the Holocaust was to the Jews during World War II—and I mean he held nothing back! I remember watching this movie very closely when I first saw it (at the tender age of 16), and while I was greatly impressed by it, what struck me the hardest wasn't any of the mass genocide that was depicted. It was the final scene of all the Schindler Jews who were still alive in 1993, all walking past Schindler's grave accompanied by the actors who portrayed them, and laying rocks on his grave . . . and that was the first time I ever felt myself tear up during a movie, because in that moment, Schindler's List went from being a movie to an actual (albeit brief) realization of real life, that these things we saw on screen actually happened in real life, and that these are the real people it happened to.

His brutal realism with Schindler's List was again evidenced 5 years later with his next World War II movie, Saving Private Ryan. The brutality, however, was limited to just the opening of the film, with the Allies storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Well before I'd even seen Saving Private Ryan, the opening D-Day scene had already made itself known to me; hell, by then it had practically become legendary! By the time I finally got around to seeing it, it had been built up so much that I kind of wondered if I'd be let down by what I saw. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype.

But therein lies the tragedy of Saving Private Ryan—for once D-Day passed, everything else felt like a two-and-a-half-hour anti-climax to me, and the story of finding the Private Ryan whose 4 or 5 brothers had all just died in the war became less interesting. More so, Saving Private Ryan felt like it gradually defaulted into your standard Hollywood war movie after D-Day. I will, however, say that Spielberg genuinely deserved his directing Oscar for Saving Private Ryan, but I would largely credit that to his D-Day recreation.

Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can fall under the neutral umbrella for me—meaning I didn't necessarily care for them, but I didn't dislike them either. Speaking of Catch Me If You Can, when it came out, I was somewhat puzzled by it, mostly because I actually didn't know what to make of it.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was one of my father's favorite movies while I was growing up, and when I last watched it, I felt that it alternated between a psychological alien movie and a feel-good first-contact movie. I had a hard time relating the whole broken home portrayed by Richard Dreyfus and Teri Garr, and their family's breakdown felt rather disjointed, like it somehow didn't make sense and connect right with the larger whole (even though it helped flesh out Richard Dreyfus's ultimate obsessive quest to Devil's Tower). The abduction of Barry, the little boy to Melinda Dillon, was filmed perfectly, with every angle and every lighting scene right on the money. It genuinely imparted the terror of an abduction and of having someone taken away from you. But at the end of Close Encounters, when contact is made with the huge mothership, it felt like we were moving away from the psychological and into the ideal. And the idealized, peace-loving first contact felt kind of unrealistic to me. (One too many X-Files episodes for me, I guess.)

I was 4 years old when E.T. came out in the theaters (boy, did I feel old when it was given a 20th anniversary theatrical release!), and I remember my father being so excited to take me to see it—in fact, he was more excited than I was! Because when I saw the trailers for E.T., I just shrugged and indifferently said, "Eh." My feelings didn't change after seeing the movie, either (even though I managed to acquire several E.T. promotional posters from McDonald's as a child). The Color Purple felt like something of a departure for Spielberg, for here he tackled serious personal drama and the finding of oneself, and actually didn't resort to the fuzzy feel-goodness that was seen in E.T. or Close Encounters. The Color Purple is another movie that I didn't dislike but didn't care for—though I must say, the acting was first-rate! Whoopi Goldberg, in her first acting role, has never been better. And I was even surprised to find myself impressed with Oprah Winfrey's acting!

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, however, was a totally different story . . . because this film I found spectacularly awful! I don't know if it was the overly fanciful story that didn't ring true with me, or if it was the acting and characters that left me at a loss (I mean, seriously, how many of us know robotic gigolos?), but I just couldn't sit through this movie easily, and in the end, seriously wondered why it was made. Munich, for all the praise it received, didn't strike me as anything special either, and I was somewhat puzzled when I saw it earning a lot of Oscar nominations last year.

I guess what it all boils down to is, when Spielberg has a hit, he has a hit. When he misses, he really misses—at least for me (and bear in mind that I haven't seen 1941, The Terminal, or his War of the Worlds remake yet—his most well-known theatrical bombs). I guess, given the precedent I've set for his other movies, I have to progress one Spielberg movie at a time, evaluate on a case-by-case basis. On one final note, I sure hope Indiana Jones 4 doesn't get made! The series ended perfectly at the end of Last Crusade, so I hope that franchise can rest on that film's high note.