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Directors - Steven Spielberg (1 Viewer)

Pete-D

Screenwriter
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My Spielberg list

Top Five

1.) Close Encounters
2.) Schindler's List
3.) Raiders of the Lost Ark
4.) E.T.
5.) Catch Me If You Can


Bottom Five:

1.) 1941
2.) Always
3.) A.I.
4.) The Terminal
5.) The Lost World

I might be the only person on the planet, but I can actually enjoy Hook. Dustin Hoffman as a suicidal Captain Hook just cracks me up.
 

Kain_C

Screenwriter
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Nov 17, 2002
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No one is NOT supporting Spielberg. Just because we think his best work is in his past does not mean we are bashing him.

And most of his older work is far from popcorn movies. E.T., Close Encounters, Jaws and a few others had real genuine emotion in it, unlike alot of his recent stuff. You saw the vulnerabilities in theses characters as well as an emerging strength as things became rough for them.

I object to people that say they're 'popcorn' movies, and they say that ONLY because they did so well. Bruckheimer, Bay, PWS Anderson and a few other hacks make true popcorn movies albeit bad ones.

Just for the record. My top Spielberg films are the first two Indy films, E.T., Close Encounter, Jaws, Duel, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and Catch Me If You Can, but not in that order really.

His worse films are Hook, Lost World, Terminal, A.I., and Amistad.
 

GuruAskew

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I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people would rank "The Lost World" considerably lower than "Jurassic Park". They're practically identical quality-wise, with the shred of originality giving the first film a slight edge. "Jurassic Park III" is even worthy of the original film. The "Jurassic Park" films were always beneath Spielberg and even Joe Johnston. I think both directors pretty much phoned their films in and the films themselves don't suffer because of it. Spielberg's own "Jaws" is a perfect example of why "Jurassic Park" is beneath him. "Jaws" has strong characters that are compelling enough to support a film without a fake shark, and the shark itself is mysterious and as such is a much more effective threat. The characters in all 3 "Jurassic Park" movies aren't half as interesting as the ones in "Jaws" and the dinosaurs were treated more like an ILM demo reel than an organic part of the story. I can enjoy all three movies on the level on which they all succeed pretty much equally: special-effects films with dinosaurs eating poorly-crafted characters.
 

george kaplan

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I don't really find myself drawn to any specific Spielberg period. I like and dislike films from both his early and later career. Of course there's still a number I haven't seen, so I can't comment on those.

Among the best (in no particular order):

Minority Report
Jurassic Park
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade
E.T.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
1941
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Jaws
Duel
Schindler's List
Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom

Among the not so good IMO:

Hook
AI
The Sugarland Express
 

Jake Gove

Second Unit
Joined
Dec 8, 1998
Messages
326
My opinions:

Great:

Jaws
Schindler's List
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Saving Private Ryan
Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Catch Me If You Can
Duel

Good:

Jurassic Park
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
Minority Report

OK:

A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Amistad

Terrible:

Empire of the Sun
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
1941

Haven't Seen:

Sugarland Express
The Color Purple
The Terminal
Hook
Always
 

todd stone

Screenwriter
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Dec 1, 2000
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is my favorite Indy movie. This goes against most what everyone states and that brings me to this point...

what IS the point in this debate? Everyone has an opinion and they will all vary. Saying one is better then the other is just foolish and a waste of time. Why? Because even Steven himself will probably disagree with us.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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I want to say right off the bat that from what I've seen there's a good bet that War of the Worlds will end up on my top five list for this year. Everything about that film looks fantastic. Moving on.

The Terminal is probably Spielberg's worst film since The Lost World. Even so, there were stretches in it that I found powerful, and stretches in it that I found enormously likable. I thought the stretch of the film with Hanks living in the airport could be the basis of a great modern sitcom. The problem was the ending. It all seemed to fall apart when he left the airport for me. I just didn't buy the motivation once it was all revealed.

Catch Me If You Can was stupendous in it's mix of comedy and drama. I've never seen a move that could make me laugh so hard and then leave me feeling so very lonely.

Minority Report was flawed by the whole eyeball scenerio if you take the ending literally, but even so I thought it was an amazing film, a fully realized and finally plausible vision of the future with a science fiction story that lived up to the name science fiction. What an epic choice to return to the scope format with. Not a forgettable movie by any means.

And then there's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Had Kubrick lived to make it, it surely would have been my favorite of his films. As it is, it serves as one of my favorite Spielberg films. There's is an utterly electric tension in the film, the clash between two very different voices, both clearly at work. Sometimes one will seem to dominate, but then the other will check it. The end which appears to be so contentious is the epitomy of that for me. It is by it's very nature a very Spielberg-ian ending, but it's overall meaning is almost soul-crushingly dark. I can watch films that bring the external darkness and tragedies of our species until the cows come home without severe difficulty. This remains a difficult film to return to, because it takes me to places inside of myself that I don't want to ever, ever explore.

Saving Private Ryan has one of the most momentous openings (once you get past the cemetery) that I've ever seen. That sequence alone places this one in a special place in Spielberg's filmography. I found the remainder of the film merely adequete, but with a sequence like that on the beach, it's perfectly alright for the rest to be merely adequete.

Amistad might well seem like a retread on his other "serious" works, but to me it stands out for the excellent work by Djimon Hounsou and Anthony Hopkins. The former is the glue that holds this film together in spectacular fashion, the human voice throughout the period drama. And I'm not sure if Hopkins's portrayal of John Quincy Adams is at all accurate to the personality of the actual man, but the result is one of my absolute favorite characters of 1997. An Atticus Finch for more complicated audiences.

The Lost World is the kind of film that some studio hack should have directed to cash in on the original. It is sad when the subsequent sequel from a far less prolific filmmaker manages to prove more successful.

Jurassic Park is still remembered more for what it did with those CG dinos than what it was, but aside from that there is remains a very worthwhile film under all of the hype and publicity. Of particular note is Richard Attenborough's character, who is utterly convinced that his position is correct and who we follow as it increasingly becomes clear that his position is very much the wrong one.

Hook was the last dying gasp of Old Spielberg, the one who made Jaws, Indy, and yes 1941. There are trascendent moments of just utter crowd-rousing joy, such as the moment when the adult Peter flies for the first time. It is a film that never fails to engage me each and every time. Spielberg's kow towing to the political correctness police throughout severely cripples the film however, as does the mistake of stuntcasting Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell. It remains a film that I cannot help but like and enjoy, however, in spite of its faults.

I will dive into his early career most likely tomorrow night.
 

GuruAskew

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I completely disagree with this. I feel that "Jurassic Park" fails in all the same ways "The Lost World" fails, and Spielberg's own "Jaws" is the perfect example of what he failed to accomplish with his "Jurassic Park" films. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned that Spielberg's worst films are his sequels. I would have to agree in an abstract way. The "Jurassic Park" films very much attempt to succeed in the same ways "Jaws" succeeded but they never manage to make the characters compelling enough on their own merits. You mention the character of John Hammond as an example of the suppodedly compelling nature of the film's characters. I found the character to be nothing more than a one-dimensional combination of Walt Disney and Santa Claus. I enjoy all three "Jurassic Park" films as special effects extravaganzas, but they fall apart when I start looking for something more.
 

Bren_Chris

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I've always found Spielberg's films far too manipulative, no matter what sort of story he's doing. As a child, this didn't really bother me (Close Encounters), but the more I became a film buff when I was older, the less and less I could stand Spielberg movies. After Saving Private Ryan, I pretty much swore him off.
 

Bren_Chris

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Visually, Spielberg is a master craftsman - there's no denying that. And if you want someone to shoot a beach invasion, he's the guy. But to tell a war story - I dunno. In an article in Premiere magazine back in the film's day, William Goldman took Saving Private Ryan to task for a few narrative failures, including the fact that Matt Damon's character cannot be the one having the flashback at the cemetary. But the thing about SPR to me is that it is two movies - one which depicts the random horror of combat, and one that becomes a shiny morality play with manipulative characterization, etc. The situation is not gripping enough for Spielberg - he needs to have Hanks get plugged by the very enemy he let go, he needs Sizemore to come to a suicidal realization of how saving Damon would be the only good thing they do in this war, etc. Death has ceased to become the random horror and instead falls into poetic justice and/or irony. Whether or not all the story's details were "true" or not, this doesn't matter, as we all know that the fantastical in life doesn't always ring true onscreen.

Or Schindler's List - the corpses littering the roads and fields are not horrifying enough, so we have to be taken on the ultimate manipulative trip: are these women going to be gassed, or showered? In a movie that already triggers the emotions, this was a vulgar, cruel, exploitive scene. Spielberg is not above this sort of emotional blackmail, especially in these Serious movies, which do little but reinforce our moral superiority - "I knew that genocide/slavery was bad, and that women were people too." Well, of course.

I'm aware that all films manipulate the viewer, but there are subtle and not so subtle ways of doing this. Jaws, I think, was just an exercise in gut-level manipulation, and it worked. The only dash of personality in that movie came in the famous boat scene, with Robert Shaw telling the shark story. Of course, he has to die a poetic/ironic death later on. But if it's a kids' story (Jurassic Park, extremely dumbed down from the original novel), Spielberg will spare us the irony and let Dr. Hammond live to play with his grandkids. And teach them about political correctness.

Again, I think he's a master shooter, but he seems to go out of his way to toy with (or instruct) his audiences, and that's why I say he's "too manipulative."
 

Bryan Ri

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One element of Spielberg's career that has been relatively overlooked here but should be noted are his contributions to History (as a subjuect discipline).

Amistad: Spielberg donated props and helped produce the Amistad exhibit at the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. He also had a hand in creating a functional replica of the Amistad ship which I believe still sails today in conjunction with a lesson on the previously overlooked part of U.S. History.

Saving Private Ryan: After the completion of the film, Spielberg (along with Tom Hanks) helped their Historian consultant Stephen Ambrose finance the first National D-Day Memorial.

Schindler's List: Spielberg helped found the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994. Since then, the foundation has successfully obtained visual testimony of over 40,000 survivors, officers, and vigilantes of the Holocaust.

I recently completed a Senior Thesis on the effectiveness of film as tool of conveying History in a classroom. One of the filmmakers' careers I examined was Spielberg's (in addition to Oliver Stone and John Sayles) and while he does take liberties with History in his films, always making it History with a Happy Ending, he certainly makes up for it by giving back to the field.

In terms of his films, I really enjoyed The Terminal and still feel that Catch Me if You Can is one of the more entertaining films of the decade. Tom Hanks' performance in the ladder was also grossly overlooked and underappreciated.
 

Bren_Chris

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Ernest -

Thanks for your response, none of which changes any of my impressions of Spielberg’s methods, but viva le difference. I do not think Saving Private Ryan is a very unified presentation, noble message aside, and the cartoonish melodrama was something I disliked in the abstract. I never sneered at Schindler’s List, although I hold parts of it in contempt. Certainly my verdict of “too manipulative” is subjective; I have no desire to invent a negative feeling about any movie or artist – it’s simply that his sense of aesthetics rubs me the wrong way, in film after film. This goes against the common grain, considering how much of a crowd-pleaser Spielberg obviously is, but I’m just registering my personal distaste. And respect, at least for his technical abilities.

Also, regarding his historical films, whether or not something is true or really happened is not the question. The director has a choice of whether or not to include an event (real or embellished) in their story, and it seems to me that some of Spielberg’s choices are el cheapo, vis a vis their intended effect. And the way things are shot and edited has its role – sometimes subtle, sometimes Sesame Street. I stick to the opinion that he is not subtle.

Oliver Stone – no argument there. Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker of all, and it might be instructive to me to figure out why I can tolerate his manipulations (most of them, at any rate) as opposed to cringing at Spielberg’s.
 

JonZ

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IMHO Jaws,Close Encounters Of The Third Kind,Saving Private Ryan,Schindlers List and Raiders Of The Lost ark are all masterpieces and make him worth of any greatest director list.

Even though Jurassic Park isnt a great film it is a landmark one.
 

Steve Christou

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:emoji_thumbsup:

I personally prefer Spielberg's 1975-1989 output to his 1991-2004 efforts, the ol'magic has all but evaporated from his recent works, The Terminal? for chrissakes! I'm praying "War of the Worlds" is a return to greatness for my favorite living director.
 

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