Posted on 02/25/2012 10:31:50 AM PST by rhema
I couldn’t care less about someone’s accent. It’s irrelevant to the fact that if you’ve seen a lot of American WW2 films then you’ve seen everything that SPR does except the latter does so with a higher budget and much more self importance. The most potentially interesting element of the film - that Private Ryan himself was just an ordinary guy and probably not worth all the superior soldiers who were killed trying to save him - seemed to be lost on the filmmakers.
I would agree that Band of Brothers is actually a superior work, than Saving Private Ryan. But it was the success of Saving Private Ryan, that made Band of Brothers possible in the first place.
What about folks who hate both? SPR is just another WWII movie, a classically irritating Spielberg effort tweaked for maximal popularity while you know full well he can do better if only he didn’t try so hard to please the ma$$es. And SIL is just kind of there, it’s got a cute hook, but in the end it’s just another customer drama.
And Borge isn’t a troll, he’s just a literati, with all the strange ways of judging “art” that implies. It’s amazing he’s actually willing to say something bad about a Spielberg movie.
Customer Drama? Did you mean costume drama? It’s a lot wittier than most of that sort of thing...thanks to Stoppard...and references to Shakespeare and the drama of the time are built into the very structure of the thing. I dislike any number of Spielberg films (Hook, The Lost World, Amistad is even worse than SPR). He actually takes a lot of chances considering his stature...Schindler’s List and A.I. for example.
Yeah costume drama, hyperactive index finger there. A wittier than normal costume drama is still pretty darn boring. It’s just a dull genre, mostly because it’s so full of itself.
Schindler’s List wasn’t taking any chances, people in the movie industry aren’t allowed to hate movies about the Holocaust, so he was guaranteed good reviews and full support. For what frankly is just another Holocaust movie.
About the only risk he really took in AI was he actually tried to be creative in his directing. And did pretty well, though I think the movie is better if it ends with the “kid” wishing. The end of that was such a Spielberg “must find some sort of happy ending”. One of my biggest complaints with him is his knowledge that happy endings make more money. Minority Report is a much much better movie if the credits roll when Cruise gets lowered into the cryo-vat. But I gotta give him credit that AI (until the last 10 minutes) is a better Kubrick movie than EWS.
Sorry but you’ve got it bassackwards. The last 10 minutes were a pathetic Spielberg superglued “happy” (in a very relative sense) ending. The story ended when the kid ran out of power. That’s when closing credits should have rolled, yeah it’s a downer, but everybody knows Pinocchio can’t be a real boy, and we already know you can’t have the Spielbergian suburban childhood out in reality. Except Spielberg hates downer endings, so he desperately found a way to give the robot some level of wish fulfillment. It’s especially stinky in this case because up to then it’s a solid Kubrick movie, the last 10 minutes is all Spielberg. Even you wind up pointing that out, why in the world is a Spielberg-ian suburban childhood in a Kubrick movie, does not belong, roll closing credits when his battery runs out.
Sorry but nobody actually cares about the economic undergirdings of the Holocaust. And it’s really like every Holocaust movie ever made, evil Germans, sad Jews, one person fighting the system. It’s a cookie cutter.
They weren’t all evil though and the Jews weren’t all sympathetic. A lot of the Nazis were just bored and cogs doing a job. Even the Ralph Fiennes character was fairly multi-dimensional. If you don’t care about it that’s your own concern but it’s still up on the screen in a way we hadn’t seen before...that’s the opposite of cookie cutter.
The last ten minutes of A.I. were right out of Kubrick’s outline. That would have been there even with Kubrick making the film. The stuff that Spielberg added was the Flesh Fair sequences.
Sorry it’s still cookie cutter. Even having a couple of characters that break the normal movie mode is cookie cutter. Basically what he did with SL was take the Holocaust mini-series, tightened it up, and filmed it in black and white. Everything that’s in SL is in that miniseries not as well acted and in color.
Which one of Kubrick’s outlines. He’d been “working” on that movie forever. Lots of outlines, a few part done scripts. And no matter the source it’s still a lame ending. Really try it next time you watch it. Hit that eject button when the fade to black happens. THAT’S the end of the movie, it’s more complete, more contained, and doesn’t drag on for a pointless stupidity.
The 1978 ‘Holocaust’ miniseries was reductive and borderline offensive - right down to the stereotypical Jewish family at its center. SL is complex. Look at how the characters are developed...certain Jewish characters are always in the background and shown through little brush strokes yet you know quite a lot about them without spending much time with them. It also had people dying on screen in a manner different from any other film. And it was disturbing without really being all that violent. Compare it to ‘The Pianist’ which takes blatantly easy shots at the viewer’s built in responses to the material.
I’ve heard that argument bout A.I. many times so it’s not like I haven’t thought about it. The sheer discomfort the audience feels during that final sequence in the future is not unintentional. Spielberg said that about the sequence being Kubrick’s.
The “discomfort” audiences feel in the final sequence of AI is because they know the freaking story ended already and they gotta pee.
The 1978 Holocaust is basically the same as SL. Only longer and therefore slightly less interesting.
The miniseries was a bunch of trite dramatic encounters staged in the wake of known historical events. It was dismissed at the time and since then by Holocaust scholars and survivors as crass and unenlightening. There were very few such complaints about SL which had a much better script and an actual point of view about the subject matter.
I don’t care how few other people noticed that SL is the same trite BS as the miniseries, it IS the same trite BS as the miniseries.
The two had completely different foci. What would be a non-trite film about the subject matter?
They’re both about the Holocaust, same focus. There aren’t any. At least not that I’ve seen. It’s a very cookie cutter place for Hollywood to go.
That’s like saying all films about WW2 are the same. I hope your lofty standards for the subject can be met one day.
No it’s not. Largely because there’s been so many more WWII movies. Part of the problem is there really aren’t that many Holocaust stories to tell, from a dramatic perspective it’s a pretty shallow well to draw from. Your Jewish characters have to mostly die, some are going to face dilemmas involving loves ones, your German characters have to mostly be evil or at the very least willing to ignore the evil they’re participating in, you need to have some sort of sympathetic German who’s trying to fight it in someway. If you vary too far from any of those then you run the risk of making a movie that takes place in the Holocaust for no apparent reason. And there probably are good movies in the topic, but since it really doesn’t interest me (not Jewish, family left Germany before the first big one, figured out not to trust governments and genocide is bad all by myself) I don’t really delve deep into the genre. But when I do delve into it it’s always the same freaking movie over again, which causes me to be even less interested in the genre.
SL was taken from a unique incident that hadn’t been explored before. It wasn’t really about the Jewish characters but about the interactions of people on the other end and how they are driven alternately by duty, greed or just plain boredom. IT’s also just plain old great film-making. The liquidation of the ghetto sequence for example. And the different registers of cinematography when dealing with the Nazi high life and the life in the ghetto. It’s like two different traditions of filmmaking colliding.
We’ve seen ghettos in WWII and Holocaust movies before, and they’ve all done a compare and contrast on Nazi high life. Nothing even slightly new in that. Maybe done with more skill, but it’s Spielberg he is a really good director. Remember my primary complaint with Spielberg is he uses his skill to make very well executed bad movies. So yes while we’ve seen absolutely everything in SL somewhere else before we probably never saw it that well done before. But it’s still trite, repetitive, boring, and cookie cutter; it’s just a really well executed cookie cut.
Sl is completely engrossing. I’ve not heard it described as boring before. Personally I find ‘Star Wars’ boring.
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