Being 11 and in the burbs when ET came out I can say irrefutably that ET bore no resemblance what so ever to my life. It was Spielberg’s oft repeated 100% false degrading and frankly insulting fantasy of suburban life. If your life was like that I feel sorry for you because really the life Spielberg depicts as typically suburban would suck. No parental love, no guidance, just foul mouthed brats running lose in a messy home. He really has issues with suburbia, it’s sad how many people think his depictions are accurate.
I’m perfectly comfortably disagreeing with the majority, they like Madonna, they’re usually full of crap. Meanwhile there’s actually plenty of critics out there that say much worse things about SL than I ever have. At least I never called it kitschy melodrama, though I won’t disagree. And given how few Holocaust movies get bad reviews ever I’m sticking to the idea that majority of the praise is because if you say something bad about them everybody gets to call you a Nazi. Notice how most of the people that do say bad things about SL have bigger Jew cards than Spielberg, hard to call the director of Shoah a Nazi.
He’s ambivalent about it but the poetic details are on the money.
Claude Lanzman was upset that Shoah was no longer the primary film referent for the subject. It was more jealousy than anything else.