[Borges]

Previews almost always misrepresent a movie making good ones look bad and bad ones look good. I can't your comments about WOTW seriously unless you've seen it. Try to see it in a theater as the sound mix is one of the best thigns about it.

I don't know which of his films you would call 'mass marketed tripe'. The Sugarland Express? Empire of the Sun? E.T. was expected to be a small little personal film. Movies about children hadn't made money at the time in almost 20 years. And in general he raised the level of main steam filmmaking in the mid 70s. Jaws and Close encounters were worlds away from the Love Story, The Towering Inferno, the Poseidon Adventure type of junk that was clogging theaters at the time.

P.S. The ending of A.I. is most definitely not happy.

[discostu]

Previews often make bad movies look good, but it's rare for them to make good movies look bad. I will not be seeing WOTW, everything YOU'VE said about it afirms the opinion I got during the previews I would hate every minute of it.

Sugarland Express - one of his early movies that's actually very good, back when he used his talent. Important to note as much as I despise the modern SS Jaws is one of my all time favorite movies, problem is he just doesn't put the level of work into movies anymore
Empire of the Sun - this was actually the movie that first made me theorize that SS was feeling guilt over all the mass market tripe he was producing so he needed to make something "important"
ET - who expected it to be a small personal movie?! That thing got hyped up the wazzoo, I rememer seeing a full page print add for it in the paper 3 months before it came out. And really ET sucked, it was stupid and insulted the audience with its pedestrian heart string tugging.

Other movies that were "clogging" the theaters during SS's rise: Godfather, American Graffitti, Patton, A Bridge Too Far. Sure you can pick and chose bad movies during that time period, you can pick and cose bad movies during any time period. But when you open your eyes you see there was plenty of good stuff going on that wasn't SS.

The ending of AI is much happier than it would have been if SS ended the movie when he should have. Closing credits should have run with bot-boy chanting in his ship staring at the statue, but that was too much of a downer for Spielberg, he needed the kid to be real at least for a little while, and resurrecting the Close Encounter aliens was just silly.

[Sam the Sham]

Yes, we spoke about that earlier.

Spielberg, in a way, rescued Disney because he showed how childhood could be depicted in a way that wasn't nauseatingly saccharine. Disney in the 70's was an industry joke. And when you have become an industry joke you will find it hard to recruit talent. You will become what Disney was then, a place where hacks churned out the same junk they had been doing for the past 20 years. It required a brilliant director, someone who would never have worked for 70's Disney, to rewrite the template.