Steven Spielberg is kind of a hack

Fedorgasm said:
ET is terrible. 1941 is terrible. Crystal skull is terrible. Always is terrible. The Jurassic Park squirrels are all terrible. Did he direct the terminal? Probably. Because it's terrible. Tin tin was terrible.
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I'm no groundhog expert but it sounds like it would have been a tough time to be a squirrel with all those predators around.
 
Agent Mulder's Hair said:
It made me realize that luck, combined with the fortuitous decision to partner with John Williams, is what really made Spielberg.
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Dude.

If Spielberg is a hack, then John Williams is the biggest fucking hack ever.

His career is entirely based on ripping off Dvorak and Holst.





Dvorak's 9th Symphony is possibly the most ripped off piece of music in film score history. You'll probably recognize a few chestnuts in this movement:




<Moves>












(IMO, Spielberg and Williams are not hacks ;))
 
Agent Mulder's Hair said:
Michael Bay can film a mean sunset though. I'll give him that. :) (The Rock was pretty badass though, for real. And personally I like Pearl Harbor but I'm in the minority on that)


Best frame of reference for action scenes I've ever seen is the first Predator movie. You always know where everything is in relation to everything else and you always know what direction everything is coming from.
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The Rock came before Michael Bay went insane with close ups. I couldn’t get 15 minutes into Pearl Harbor. And I fucking love Predator.
 
Surely luck wasn't afforded to him for EVERY film he ever made...

Even so, I don't believe in TS' belief anyway.
 
So what if he tried some stupid ideas? At the end of the day he recognized they looked stupid and chose not to go with it. That’s part of being a good director. And a creative and resourceful one, I might add.
 
Ottawaguy said:
I was 9 years old when Jaws came out. Some of the scenes freaked me out back then, but rewatching it many times over the years really made me appreciate the opening scene and the power of the unseen. I agree with TS, showing the actual shark would have been less powerful. That opening scene scared an entire generation.
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We're about the same age then. I grew up in Cape Cod, and when that movie came out, the attendance at the local beaches dropped significantly. I remember that several movie houses in the Cape stopped playing Jaws because it was hurting local merchants that survived on summer tourism. The truth is, the waters around the Cape, Martha's Vineyard, and Gloucester have ALWAYS had Great Whites in them. Still do. But that's the effect Jaws had on people. It was an impactful film.
 
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RollSonnenRoll said:
The novel ending of Jaws is that the boat sinks, Brody is in the water accepting his fate as he stares down the shark then the shark succumbs to it's injuries from the hunt and dies just shy of attacking him. Steven said that's really fucking boring and gave us the best damn movie ending of all time. He gets eternal credit for this

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The movie is so much better than the book, which is rare.

All 3 mains are leaps and bounds better in the movie than the book.

Robert Shaw's Indianapolis speech is so well done. Each character is interesting in their own right, a huge rarity in a movie.

That said, I think the adaptation that had to be made with the shark made the movie way better.
 
I love the classic, signature push-in shots. He can get pretty schlocky but his films follow an easily comprehensible three act structure with all the trimmings of rising and falling action.

He is a blockbuster filmmaker, it almost guarantees schlock.
 
OeuvrePressure said:
I love the classic, signature push-in shots. He can get pretty schlocky but his films follow an easily comprehensible three act structure with all the trimmings of rising and falling action.

He is a blockbuster filmmaker, it almost guarantees schlock.
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If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for him to accept critical promotion, directing blockbusters was his first best destiny, anything else is a waste of material.
 
moreorless87 said:
If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for him to accept critical promotion, directing blockbusters was his first best destiny, anything else is a waste of material.
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Agreed. What I like about his films is the feeling he conveys. He draws a lot of emotion through overall pacing and intimate scenes, a lot of meet-cutes that pay off later emotionally.
 
Agent Mulder's Hair said:
I watched Jaws the other night for the first time in many years and I was all like "wow this is brilliant" and it lead me to watch the making of Jaws on youtube. Which lead me to watch the making of Close Encounters.

He got lucky with Jaws because the shark didn't work. So he had to adapt. Which I give him credit for, he did adapt brilliantly. But if things had gone according to his vision, we would've had a very different movie and probably a far less effective movie. And his career probably would've been far less impressive, since the massive success of Jaws is what launched him.

Then Close Encounters. You would not believe the crap he wanted to do with the aliens in that movie. I mean absolutely ridiculous things. This man, this personification of film director, actually shot a take of a monkey wearing shiny silver spandex clothes wearing an alien mask, on roller skaters, roller skating down the ramp of the ufo. He wanted a monkey because he didn't want the aliens to move like humans, and he put it on roller skates because he wanted the appearance of it hovering down from the ufo ramp. So according to him, the first thing the monkey does is rip off it's mask, reach for it's handler, and roller skates backwards down the ufo ramp. I mean wtf Spielberg? Also...poor monkey :( He also tried some stuff with a bunch of kids dressed as aliens sped up in the film, and hired mimes to slow down their motion and act like humans in slow motion, so the aliens would move super fast compared to the humans. THIS guy is synonymous with brilliant film directors?!

It made me realize that luck, combined with the fortuitous decision to partner with John Williams, is what really made Spielberg. Spielberg hasn't gotten worse as he's gotten older. He's just had things go his way more often, and things going his way means that we get sub par films. Even Shia Labeouf has commented on how working with Spielberg was not at all what he had envisioned.


I say all this so that all of you can realize the truth. Spielberg is a lucky hack. You want real directorial talent? Go watch a James Cameron flick. Or better yet, go watch the making of Aliens, for example. Where Cameron had to work in England with a hostile crew that didn't respect him and didn't know who he was, had not seen Terminator, didn't care to see Terminator, didn't listen to Cameron, a few high up folks had to be fired, and the man STILL ended up surpassing Ridley Scott's classic original Alien and making one of the best action films of all time.

Cameron's > Spielberg
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If you want a good laugh, go see old pre-release interviews with Dryfus for Jaws, he basically shit all over the movie. It was basically a hot mess that somehow came together. There were so many things they had to change due to the fact that they had to shoot the film in the winter time, the mechanical shark didn't work well and when they were shooting the shark cage scene they used a scaled down sized cage and were going to put a little person in the cage to make the sharks look bigger by reference. The problem was they wanted to test the cage before putting the little person in it which is the scene where the shark gets tangled in the cage, but there isn't anyone in it. Hence the script change where Hooper slips out and hides, he was originally supposed to die like in the book.
 
Monkey thing was worth a try if you ask me.
 
Agent Mulder's Hair said:
I watched Jaws the other night for the first time in many years and I was all like "wow this is brilliant" and it lead me to watch the making of Jaws on youtube. Which lead me to watch the making of Close Encounters.

He got lucky with Jaws because the shark didn't work. So he had to adapt. Which I give him credit for, he did adapt brilliantly. But if things had gone according to his vision, we would've had a very different movie and probably a far less effective movie. And his career probably would've been far less impressive, since the massive success of Jaws is what launched him.

Then Close Encounters. You would not believe the crap he wanted to do with the aliens in that movie. I mean absolutely ridiculous things. This man, this personification of film director, actually shot a take of a monkey wearing shiny silver spandex clothes wearing an alien mask, on roller skaters, roller skating down the ramp of the ufo. He wanted a monkey because he didn't want the aliens to move like humans, and he put it on roller skates because he wanted the appearance of it hovering down from the ufo ramp. So according to him, the first thing the monkey does is rip off it's mask, reach for it's handler, and roller skates backwards down the ufo ramp. I mean wtf Spielberg? Also...poor monkey :( He also tried some stuff with a bunch of kids dressed as aliens sped up in the film, and hired mimes to slow down their motion and act like humans in slow motion, so the aliens would move super fast compared to the humans. THIS guy is synonymous with brilliant film directors?!

It made me realize that luck, combined with the fortuitous decision to partner with John Williams, is what really made Spielberg. Spielberg hasn't gotten worse as he's gotten older. He's just had things go his way more often, and things going his way means that we get sub par films. Even Shia Labeouf has commented on how working with Spielberg was not at all what he had envisioned.


I say all this so that all of you can realize the truth. Spielberg is a lucky hack. You want real directorial talent? Go watch a James Cameron flick. Or better yet, go watch the making of Aliens, for example. Where Cameron had to work in England with a hostile crew that didn't respect him and didn't know who he was, had not seen Terminator, didn't care to see Terminator, didn't listen to Cameron, a few high up folks had to be fired, and the man STILL ended up surpassing Ridley Scott's classic original Alien and making one of the best action films of all time.

Cameron's > Spielberg
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All directors are crazy, the end result matters when making a film. That's it. He made the best war movie of all time in saving private ryan so cameron can eat a dick.
 
Starck said:
If you've seen one Spielberg movie, you've seen them all. They all follow the same formula. Basic cinema tropes.
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Yeah, Jaws and Schindler's List are like practically the same movie.
 
LHWBelt said:
All directors are crazy, the end result matters when making a film. That's it. He made the best war movie of all time in saving private ryan so cameron can eat a dick.
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second best. The sappiness dulls it somewhat. Full Metal Jacket reigns supreme.
 
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