Spielberg

Roy has some interesting thoughts about Spielberg and Munich. I’ve never hated Spielberg the way in which many people of similar tastes (I believe we’re called “pretentious wankers”) do. I certainly enjoyed his action movies as a kid, although I haven’t seen E.T. since I saw a sneak preview and wasn’t really crazy about Raiders when I screened it again as an undergrad. And he has made a lot of movies that I disliked heartily (Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple, Hook) or were intermittently interesting failures (Amistad, Minority Report.) I am, however, a defender of Schindler’s List. I can’t really disagree that it’s “three good movies–one about Oskar Schindler, one about Amon Goeth, one about the Nazi persecution of the Jews–smashed together to make the super-duper holocaust spectacular I suppose Spielberg wanted to make,” but the thing is he almost pulls it off. Until the relatively disastrous last 20 minutes or so, Spielberg trusts his audience, and the multiple strands do reinforce the other, and I think it’s foolish to deny that the level of craft (both the filmmaking and acting) really is quite remarkable. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s The Sorrow and the Pity; Roy is right that Spielberg isn’t a deep thinker, and even its ambiguities are straightforward if you know what I mean. But, then, plenty of fine filmmakers haven’t been particularly deep thinkers; that Schindler’s List won’t really tell you anything you don’t already know doesn’t, I think, mean that it isn’t an excellent film. Saving Private Ryan is a tougher case, with its many dreary patches and unspeakably awful coda, but the battle sequences (not just the much-lauded D-Day sequence but also the final one, which I think is just as good) really are first-rate, so I am inclined to give it qualified praise (which I’m sure I’ll hear about it the comments.) Having said all that, I haven’t decided whether or not to see Munich, which I have to say I’m pretty skeptical about; I’m pretty behind right now, having not even seen Capote yet.

Roy also unearths this classic quote from Tim Graham, who complains that a panel of film critics “even discussed obscure movies they liked.” It would be hard to come up with a line that better summarizes the reduction of art to politics and intellectual insecurity that characterizes the new conservative approach to evaluating art. To state the obvious, if you’re interested in movies, you don’t read critics to tell you what to think; you read them to allow you to engage with works you’ve seen, or to discover movies that haven’t been heavily promoted but that one might find interesting. If you want discussions of film to be nothing but a circle-jerk confirming your (political, not aesthetic) predilections, you’re not really interested in film at all.