Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Steven Spielberg Sucks

Does anyone still think Steven Spielberg is a great director? I wager most film critics think he is mediocre, but in the culture at large, there is still a feeling that Spielberg is an auteur, a master director who combines popular appeal with cinematic excellence. This is, of course, utter crap.

His technical skill is not what I'm talking about. He is more talented at directing action sequences than most directors. However, his films are usually nothing BUT a collection of good action sequences.

Most of his films are forgettable, dull, and reliably disappointing. I like to say that Spielberg has made 2 1/2 good movies: Jaws, Schindler's List, and half of Saving Private Ryan, but that is churlish. I loved Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid, so I have to give this a pass, even though I cringe at the Spielbergian flourishes as an adult. Jurassic Park is an OK popcorn movie, but 1941, Always, Lost World, Hook, A.I., Minority Report, and War of the Worlds are really fucking bad - unenjoyable, tedious, and insulting to the intelligence. I even think E.T. and the last two Indiana Jones movies suck. E.T. is repellently cutesy and saccharine, and the later Indy movies are a collection of ethnic stereotypes and ideas for amusement park rides.

It is interesting that Spielberg, who tries so hard to be racially sensitive in the snoozefests Amistad and The Color Purple, can exploit so many caricatures in his other movies. He sure hates Germans for example - there are evidently no decent Germans, ever. The one German that Tom Hanks frees in an act of mercy comes back to kill him at the end of Saving Private Ryan. I'm surprised the federal agents chasing E.T. didn't goose-step. Ok, ok, so Germans are easy to pick on...what about Indians, Asians, and Arabs? They are treated pretty damn badly in Spielbergdom, especially in the Indy movies. I can't think of a more offensive portrayal of Indians as in Temple of Doom. Indians come in three varieties: peasants, bug-eating weirdos, and satanic slavers. Chinese are cackling gangsters or incredibly annoying little boys. Arabs are thieves and cutthroats, and Nazi sympathizers.

Also, Spielberg films rarely feature memorable characters. The most outstanding characters in Spielberg's filmography are Quint (the crusty old sailor from Jaws), Indiana Jones, Oskar Schindler, and Captain Miller from Saving Private Ryan. I would argue that all four of these characters stand out because of the performances of Robert Shaw, Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, and Tom Hanks, not because of Spielberg. Robert Shaw and young Harrison Ford had an irresistible charisma, and Neeson and Hanks have the gravitas of all great "serious" movie actors (think Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Richard Burton). To be sure, they had well-written material to work with, but I think of a good director honing the script, the performances, and the shot selection to make the sum better that it would normally be.

Spielberg doesn't do this, and often does the opposite. I honestly think any nimrod with a camera could have filmed Shaw performing his USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws and had a great movie moment. Spielberg's gift, if you want to call it that, is to make touching scenes sickeningly sweet, amusing scenes cartoonish, and dramatic scenes laughably melodramatic. One of the prime examples is from E.T.: Elliott and E.T. are shown dying in their hospital beds inside oxygen tents. That scene is purposely crafted to make little kids cry. It is ridiculously maudlin, and I sensed that when I was twelve and didn't know what the fuck "maudlin" meant.

Another doozy is from Schindler's List - the shameful "with this ring I could have saved 10 more people" speech that was so perfectly parodied in Seinfeld. That is vintage Spielberg. I don't know another film-maker that would have tried to make that sentimental tripe work, but at least that was in a GOOD movie. The most jaw-dropping, cloyingly sucrose moment in Spielberg's whole career might be the end of A.I., where the robot boy is granted one last perfect day with his mother. That moment is, for lack of a better word, gay. Gayer than "The Music Man." It is almost worth renting the completely awful A.I. just to see this unintentionally hilarious scene.

Spielberg has a fetish for precocious kids in "hilarious" hijinx. They are either saving the day or used as comedy relief. Short Round, the racist stereotype from Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, is the most egregious example, but there are more annoying kids to be found in E.T., Hook, Jurassic Park, A.I., and War of the Worlds.

Another Spielberg staple is the happy ending. Families are united, the world is saved, and so on. The Color Purple has one of the most inexplicably happy endings of any film I can think of. A plodding, serious movie, it breaks new ground by demonstrating, to the shock of moviegoers, that blacks were discriminated against in the United States, as recently as 1930. But not to worry, the movie turns into a musical at the end, with what appears to be an African music and cultural expo thrown in too.

War of the Worlds has such a happy ending, I'm surprised the incinerated victims of the alien invasion didn't spring back to life and tell Dakota Fanning, "Thanks, little girl, we're alive because you never gave up hope! Now let's pass out candy canes and skip on down to the gumdrop factory!"

A.I. and Saving Private Ryan are exceptions to the happy ending rule, but he is trying for an Olympian level of melodrama with those two. Tom Hanks' wonderful last line "Earn this" is marred by the tacked on framing device, showing old Private Ryan crying to his wife. That might have seemed good on paper but it just doesn't work, and I blame Spielberg because as the title says, Steven Spielberg sucks.