After watching Minority Report last night, I was surprised to discover that most critics do not consider it to be an utter and complete piece of crap. Roger Ebert, in particular, had an absolutely gushing review, in which he praised the film for being “a thriller and a human story, a movie of ideas that’s also a whodunit.”
Ebert is by all accounts a lovely human being, but every time I read something by him, I am reminded that he does not have the critical sense that God gave a roach. Even an insect that frolics in filth would be hard pressed to find any enjoyment in such a shiny, treacly, turkey of a film. Spielberg as director has found perhaps the perfect outlet for his glibness in this tale of precognitive saviors. The film grinds frictionlessly along, a remorselessly predictable blueprint for itself. Flawed hero, tragic backstory, clever chase scene, cleverer chase scene, cleverest chase scene, false antagonist, twist, real antagonist, reconciliation with perfectly domestic yet also spunky wife. Like the precogs, we can see it all coming and all going too; painful echoes of sentiment past sliding down our brainstems as we float weightlessly in an infinite vat of sentimental horseshit.
The emotional core of the film is (you could predict it) the tragic backstory I mentioned. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a efficient no-nonsense police guy in the precrime unit, snooping out murders before they happen. Beneath his gruff exterior and Hollywood good looks, though, lurks a sadness; his 5-year old disappeared from a public pool. Anderton’s marriage collapsed, and now he takes drugs (ooooh…dark) and watches 3-D home movies of his son and wife. His heart is tugged while watching them and our heart is tugged while watching him; it’s a testament to the power of film and to “complex human feelings”, in Ebert’s words.
Said complex human feelings being: hey, losing a kid — that really sucks. If that happens to you, you’ve got to be deep, right? That is the extent of the film’s character development; Anderton has no other discernible personality traits; nor does his wife. The film’s stupid, by-the-numbers plot, it’s utterly facile and familiar characters, are all supposed to be redeemed by dropping a murdered five-year old onto them from a great height.
Before I had a kid myself, I found this sort of mindless, self-serving manipulation unpleasant. Now that I have a child of my own, who is actually a person rather than a trope, I find it even more detestable. At the end of the film, Anderton indignantly yells at his stupid standard-issue corrupt boss for manipulating his love for his child. Rarely have I seen a moment of such utterly clueless hypocrisy. The whole film is nothing but a giant machine designed to turn unearned pathos into critical bona fides. The closing scene with Anderton, where reunited with his now pregnant wife he touches her stomach, is a blindingly offensive capstone to a thoroughly offensive film, a smug reassuring happy-ending which obligatorily replaces one blank child-marker with another. The kids are just there to make us interested in the utterly uninteresting “star”; a dead child for motivation in the bulk of the story; a live one to wrap things up neatly. What could be wrong with that?
It hardly seems worth mentioning, but the movie looks dreadful too — all smooth lines and computer graphics, a future as streamlined Disneyland, where even the poverty and grime look like part of an amusement park ride, and cops invade everyone’s civil liberties with cute animated spiders that make you wish you could get warrantless retinal scans too. Maybe the precogs could foresee a worse filmmaker than Steven Spielberg sometime in the far future, but right now, as far as I’m concerned, he’s got no challengers.
I often find a strange disconnect between the Ebert who reviews contemporary popular films and the one writing on classics (like in his great movies books).
That’s fair enough. I’m sort of forever bitter at him for his truly horrible review of “I Spit On Your Grave,” but I’m sure I must have agreed with him about something somewhere at some point….
I didn’t know this was based on a story by Philip K. Dick. Did you ever read it?
I think I did, though it was a long time ago. It has very little to do with the movie, which seems to be how these things usually go.
I think “dead kids” is the new “My parents are dead!” for the millenial generation. IIRC, the movie version of “I, Robot” did something similar.
His anime reviews are really great, though. (Rogert Ebert’s.) I think the best part of Minority Report is all the future consumer technology stuff in it. There’s an interview with one of the future tech consultants that’s pretty interesting, if I can find it again. I’ve been reading a lot of circa-2003 academic papers where the authors are paranoid about iris scanners and RFID chips and consumer credit databases that follow you around everywhere and so on. (This was also the plot of the great great Japanese dystopian SF novel Loups-Garrous.) During the last presidential election, you could see reporters using the floating interactive touch screens in Minority Report to move the data around for us. Probably only a matter of time before certain wealthier areas *do* look like Minority Report. I think most of Hong Kong already does. The US doesn’t just because most of our public infrastructure is already 20-40 years old.
“he’s got no challengers.”
I know this was a closing rhetorical flourish, but come on. We could all name two dozen worse filmmakers off the top of our heads.
Anyway, don’t underestimate the appeal of a clever chase scene!
I actually think Schindler’s List may be the absolutely worst film I’ve ever seen. I really, really hate it.
I’m hard pressed to think of a filmmaker that makes me angrier than Spielberg. There are certainly less competent directors…but they tend to be less pretentious and less critically lauded.
Subdee, I didn’t even know Ebert did anime reviews. Definitely points to him for that.
I was kind of taken with MR’s look at first…but the slickness and cuteness of it just got more and more cloying,and by the end I was thoroughly sick of it.
I rate the Spielberg of Jaws through E. T. pretty highly. Jaws, in particular, is a textbook of cinematic storytelling technique, and its use of metonymy as a narrative device is especially remarkable. After that, though, he became fixated on being “prestigious” in middlebrow terms–he wanted to remake himself as David Lean–and his films went to hell in a handbasket as a result. Schindler’s List is probably the most despicable of the bunch. I enjoyed Minority Report–it’s certainly easier to take than his more “serious” efforts, but there’s all sorts of maximizing-audience-appeal crap that he deserves to have kicked out of him. I also didn’t think much of the balloon-camouflage bit he ripped off from De Palma’s Carlito’s Way. While I’m on the subject, you know.
Yeah, I remember that you like Spielberg more than I do. At least we agree on Schindler’s List though!
In addition to the earlier Spielberg films (including Indiana Jones) I think Munich and War of the Worlds are great. And one could make an argument for AI. I have issues with Schindler’s List while still being bedazzled by it. And no one can film action sequences like Spielberg — he’s the master.
Spielberg definitely took some of the bite out Dick’s short story for Minority Report. If I remember correctly, the agent commits the murder in order to save everyone’s belief in the precog system. I also didn’t like the way Spielberg sold advertising during the mall scene that’s supposedly critical of futuristic invasive corporate control — that really bugged me when I first saw the film.
Schindler’s List does have pretty impressive cinematography. Don’t you think that the Spielberg take on the (cotton candy) action sequence is getting a bit long in tooth? He’s definitely made his mark but the last good/memorable car chase I remember from him was probably Raiders. Even the car chase from Matrix 2 was more interesting than the things he’s come up with recently. Ditto someone like Frankenheimer on Ronin or The Train.
Schindler’s list is such a manipulative, atrocious piece of shit that the technical excellence just makes it worse. If it were clumsy at least it would be less effective.
Spielberg’s action sequences always seem really glib. That’s certainly the case in minority report; the chase scene in the factory is just so cutesy, and then it doesn’t even make sense at the end. Same with the chase scene with the precog leading him through; the smugness is just unbearable.
The critique of corporate culture or invasive police technology is so utterly unbelievable and shallow; there’s just no sense that Spielberg actually cares about that stuff at all. It’s like the dead kid; just there to make it seem like it’s a serious film. The idea that Spielberg would offer a serious critique of consumerism is simply ludicrous.
The funny thing is, I didn’t even know this film was by Spielberg when I saw it. It was only at the credits that I said, oh…right. No wonder this sucked.
I still like Raiders…but it’s probably best if I don’t see it again.
Suat: you must be forgetting the car chase with the CGI monkeys in the Crystal Skull
Sheesh. Reading “The Future Will Be Stupid…Today!” reminds of what a chasm there exists between versions of what people call “criticism.”
Just this morning I read James Wood’s critique of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” (Also available online at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/08/13/120813crbo_books_wood .) Wood carefully parses what makes Knausgaard’s book challenging, boring, and how it is an authorial strategy which yields benefits. His cases and arguments proved by examples, lengthy quotes from the book. He notes influences, similarities in approach; overarching societal changes, evolution in attitudes towards death.
Then there is Bevis and Butthead’s “This video sucks!” Considering the source, one could not expect otherwise. Yet ’tis, as Mark Twain put it, “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
No wonder so many artists hate critics; how is one to defend oneself against a facile bit of snark such as, “Anderton’s marriage collapsed, and now he takes drugs (ooooh…dark).” Imagine Ingmar Bergman’s “Winter Light” being treated thus: ” ‘God’s silence’…ooooh, that’s rough!”
To recycle an old comment o’ mine…
Am reminded again of that friend of critic John Simon, who upon leaving a performance of “Macbeth,” would loudly announce, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Oklahoma!'” Then, exiting a performance of the famed musical, would call out, “It’s good, but it’s not ‘Macbeth’!”
…does it make sense to criticize a gloomy drama by the exact same standards one would a rousing musical? To expect, say, “Where the Wild Things Are” — about as perfect a work as one could ask for — to have the character complexity, sweeping portrait of a society, the range of humanity, of a “War and Peace”?
So, what irritates about the Spielberg “Minority Report” that it should be lambasted thus? One factor certainly is that instead of being a cheerfully empty action-adventure (such as “Jaws” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), Spielberg and his scribes add “unearned pathos” into the mix. As if every other Western movie gunman or borderline-alcoholic private dick did not have some murdered family, marriage torn asunder backstory to add some shadowy tones to the character. As if we either had to chose between the equivalent of a live-action “Road Runner” cartoon or Strindberg. Or Thomas Kinkade and Edvard Munch. And, never the twain should meet.
Said attitude leading to Tim O’Neil, guesting in the “Comics of the Weak” column, noting that:
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I don’t need Doonesbury to tell me that my demographic is important now. All I really care about is that Garfield never changes. It is comforting to me that Garfield remains substantively the same now as he was back in 1978, in much the same way as a Big Mac purchased in Jakarta will taste the same as a Big Mac purchased down the road from my apartment building. I still care more about Garfield – big, fat Garfield with his pathological love of lasagna and equally pathological hatred of Mondays – than I ever have cared about Doonesbury, for the simple reason that if Garfield is stupid then at least Jim Davis has never thrown out his shoulder from patting himself on the back so hard.
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http://www.tcj.com/bangbangbang/
Yes, it’s better that something should be utterly empty and stupid than it should aim its sights higher. And a creator should not feel any satisfaction whatsoever if they don’t aim their work toward thew lowest common denominator.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The film’s stupid, by-the-numbers plot, it’s utterly facile and familiar characters, are all supposed to be redeemed by dropping a murdered five-year old onto them from a great height.
Before I had a kid myself, I found this sort of mindless, self-serving manipulation unpleasant. Now that I have a child of my own, who is actually a person rather than a trope, I find it even more detestable.
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Chee, you must be one of those folks who notices on the car ahead of them, a “Baby On Board” sign. And thinks, “There’s a baby in there! I’d better not run into them!”
I imagine you find “unpleasant” and “detestable” the “mindless, self-serving manipulation” which occurs in every novel, story, comic, film and TV show where a sympathetic character is put in peril or has died. Unless kids are uniquely more valuable and deserving of our concerns than those who have gotten older. (Said attitude leading to the “Right to Life” bunch’s; where an embryo or fetus is of infinite worth, but some low-income kid who’s actually been born deserves not a penny of government aid.)
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I actually think Schindler’s List may be the absolutely worst film I’ve ever seen. I really, really hate it.
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Don’t spare the nuance, man!
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Spielberg’s action sequences always seem really glib. That’s certainly the case in minority report; the chase scene in the factory is just so cutesy, and then it doesn’t even make sense at the end.
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Though I’ve never encountered them, surely others have commented on how heavily many of Spielberg’s action scenes are clearly hommages to the elaborate “gags” in silent movie comedies. For instance, one of the Indiana Jones movies features a flashback on how “Indy got his fear of snakes” which is a perfect example. And, how easy it is to imagine Buster Keaton, being chased by some toughs, hiding out in a Ford assembly line as a Model T is built around him; then at the end, put-putting into the distance, while the frustrated goons wave their fists in impotent rage.
Of course, if that idea doesn’t come to mind, then yes, “glib” or “cutesy” are understandable reactions…
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…cops invade everyone’s civil liberties with cute animated spiders that make you wish you could get warrantless retinal scans too….
The critique of corporate culture or invasive police technology is so utterly unbelievable and shallow; there’s just no sense that Spielberg actually cares about that stuff at all. It’s like the dead kid; just there to make it seem like it’s a serious film. The idea that Spielberg would offer a serious critique of consumerism is simply ludicrous.
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The idea that Spielberg would hit you over the head with an obvious, heavy-handed “critique of consumerism” or of the invasion of civil liberties is ludicrous, yes.
Now, consider: were you thrilled and delighted when the movie showed the lead bombarded with commercials as he walked through the mall, addressing him by name? Or did you find the ads, for all their high-tech glitz, noxiously intrusive? (And, that Spielberg didn’t blatantly make a “critique of consumerism” meant that he could get the very companies involved to help pay for the making of those intrusive ads.)
And, for all their cuteness, those robot spiders were again shown as chillingly intrusive; that people passively accepted their prying their eyelids open and eye-scanning is creepy, rather than delightful. In the same fashion that the masses now take for granted that “security cams” are surveying their every move in public.
By the way, that retinal-scans in a mall could identify the protagonist, the better to aim ads at him, is an important plot point. The same as with the “dead kid” backstory. Which rather than being tossed in to make the character “deep,” serves to provide a powerful motivation to get the character to commit the murder he’s supposed to.
BTW, must give a nod to the movie’s bits of black humor: some silent-movie-ish (the runaway eyeballs! the jet-pack sizzling some burgers), others sinister (the filthy operating conditions; the creepy way the attendant to the precogs fawns over them; the way one precog stops a woman passerby: “Don’t go home! He knows!“).
For a thoroughgoing take-down (preceded by laudatory comments by other critics) of a work, not only hilarious but backed-up by examples from the work, which actually educates readers about why the item in question deserves to be scorned, might I recommend “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” by Mark Twain: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/hns/indians/offense.html
@Jones:
“Suat: you must be forgetting the car chase with the CGI monkeys in the Crystal Skull”
Forgot that it was awesome or forgot that it was terrible. Hyperbole aside, isn’t it just a less energetic/competent knock off of the water-wheel chase scene in Pirates of the Caribbean 2? That’s what I thought when I saw it.
I was pretty impressed by the set-pieces in Tintin, but I suspect that was at least as much due to Weta/Peter Jackson as to Spielberg.
@Noah:
Could you maybe be more specific about the “glibness” of Spielberg’s action scenes? I know he uses slapstick a lot – do you have a problem with that?
I don’t really remember much about Minority Report. Or Saving Private Ryan. Next to nothing about his J.G. Ballard adaptation.
I haven’t seen Schindler’s List, Amistad, War Horse, a bunch of others (mainly his dramas).
If there’s one thing I think he excels at, it’s lighting (or selecting good lighting cinematographers). Noah would probably call it “luminous vomit” :).
Ave, the slapstick is maybe part of it…they’re just very nudge nudge, isn’t this fun, look at the magic of cinema. They’re also just very clearly orchestrated. The MR scene in the car factory is a good enough case in point, I suppose. The two main combatants are wrestling around while the factory machinery rises and zaps around them, all in careful adventure-theme park dangerous-but-fun timing…and then at the end it looks like Tom Cruise has been done in…but no he hasn’t! He’s actually in the finished car! Which he drives away in, because of course car’s right off the factory floor are totally fueled up and ready to drive!
Again, the end doesn’t even make any sense; there’s no real explanation of why he got in the car rather than getting killed; there’s no reason that the car is able to drive away. Logic is just utterly abandoned in the service of a comforting cutesy joke.
“They’re also just very clearly orchestrated.”
Okay, I can relate to that somewhat. I don’t think I find the knowing “careful adventure-theme park dangerous-but-fun timing” thing as much of a turn-off as you do, but after recently re-watching Jurassic Park 2, the action just seemed way too cramped and posed the whole time. Part of it is no doubt his sentimentality , but maybe it’s also due to Spielberg’s heavy reliance on storyboards.
That’s interesting; I didn’t know about the storyboards.
One comparison I keep thinking of is Jackie Chan. His action sequences can be really cutesy too…but they’re built around amazing physical ability and grace, obviously, rather than on special effects or directorial control over the entire world of the film. That makes it less oppressive/totalizing. With Spielberg, everyone just becomes a thing to be tossed around/manipulated without any regard to either logic or persons. It’s the way he uses that dead child too — or the Holocaust. It’s entirely instrumental.
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ave says:
{I know]…Next to nothing about his J.G. Ballard adaptation.
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Spielberg’s sentimentality was certainly minimized somewhat by the posthumous collaboration with Kubrick’s chilly view of the human antheap.
Tim Kreider (not only a brilliant cartoonist, but an excellent writer and quite the Kubrick analyst) on “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”: http://tinyurl.com/8evluv2 . With a good quantity of ammo therein for Noah’s anti-Spielberg arguments…
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…maybe it’s also due to Spielberg’s heavy reliance on storyboards.
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Maybe, though a lot of action directors or masters such as Hitchcock storyboard complicated scenes (heavens, nowadays they even do “animatics” [ http://www.aboutanimatics.com/ ]) and their action scenes don’t have the quality Noah notes in Spielberg:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
One comparison I keep thinking of is Jackie Chan. His action sequences can be really cutesy too…but they’re built around amazing physical ability and grace, obviously, rather than on special effects or directorial control over the entire world of the film. That makes it less oppressive/totalizing. With Spielberg, everyone just becomes a thing to be tossed around/manipulated without any regard to either logic or persons.
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Yes, that makes sense…
No Charles–one cannot make an argument for “AI.” I found that the most detestable and infuriating piece of self-important, manipulative trash I had ever seen, and it led to my swearing off ever seeing a Spielberg movie again–a resolution that I’ve had no trouble whatsoever keeping.
Well, maybe, Andrei, but then again, yes one can. AI starts off playing with the idea that you have a toy that wants to be a boy, but really what it is a program that wants to be treated as a boy (strong AI, in other words), and ends with the rather sad conclusion that these aren’t the same thing, being treated as a boy and actually being a boy. I imagine John Searle loved this movie. Along the way you get some rather effective dramatic moments where people dealing with commodified children are not acting as real people, either. I think there’s quite a bit of substance to the movie, in fact. All of its manipulative, fairy tale aspects are pretty much dismantled by the end, but not with a bludgeon. That would be my short defense.
Suat, was there a better action sequence in all of film than the Normandy scene from Saving Private Ryan? It surely deserves to be put in the top 10, at least, with the likes of Ben Hur’s chariot race. And his action-oriented films are generally paced so well. Jurassic Park was a really fun ride in the theater, not that it’s something I want to return to. There might be some memorable scenes from other films, like Matrix 2, but I think Spielberg is better at constructing the overall action arc in his films. He’s the opposite of someone like John Woo, who has some great sequences early on in a film, but doesn’t much go anywhere from there (his later sequences are about as good as the earlier ones).
Also, to Noah’s point, it seems that when there are critical aspects in Spielberg’s film, everyone dismisses them as accidental — e.g., AI’s rather illusory and depressing ending (any cynicism or darkness is credited to Kubrick). However, Munich and War of the Worlds are just as critical about fantasies of family. I think there’s more going on in his films than most critics are willing to grant, and Spielberg isn’t blind to such things.
Oh, I just read Mike’s last post: QED.
See, I thought Jurassic Park was wretched from beginning to end. The chaos theory explanation has to be one of the dumbest pseudo-scientific bits of idiocy I’ve ever been subjected to at the movies, which is saying something.
Didn’t see Saving Private Ryan, thank god. Spielberg and Tom Hanks; bleah.
Maybe we should do a Spielberg roundtable some day. There’d certainly be more difference of opinion than with a PKD one….
Count me in. I’d love that.
Charles: I agree that the Saving Private Ryan Normandy scene does work very well as an action sequence. It’s probably his best work. The effect is entirely destroyed for me by the rest of the film. Its technical perfection is also problematic. I’ve mentioned this before but audiophiles like to use that scene to test their home cinemas/hi-fi set-ups. This speaks volumes about the scene in question. I remember that Domingos once cited someone as saying that war is quite photogenic. Saving Private Ryan is definitely a case in point. Noah would probably shoot himself in the head if he got to the end of the show.
Oh yes, as to one of Noah’s previous comments: I like Jackie Chan considerably less than Spielberg – even if restricted to the action sequences. I avoid his shows like the plague.
You don’t like Jackie Chan? Your heart’s just a big lump of rock, isn’t it?
So nice to read some unkind words about Minority Report. HATED it when I saw it, and have been subjected to nothing but insane praise for it from all corners ever since. The entire critical community seems to be convinced that it’s some dark, complex masterpiece, and all I saw was cotton-candy fake-intelligent bullshit. Stephen Mulhall comes the closest to getting me to reconsider with his analysis of it in ON FILM (a really fun book), and he makes some really good observations on the condition of movie-stardom and the use of that condition in film storytelling. But at the end of the day, that movie is a piece of dogshit. Thanks for the release, Noah.
Oh, and I’m not a blanket Spielberg-hater…though aside from Munich I can’t think of anything he’s made that I’ve liked in about 20 years. And I don’t know that Jurassic Park holds up outside of nostalgia and isolated effective moments. Love Jaws, Raiders, and ET, though, and I have mixed but fond feelings towards a number of his other films. Of course, he’s also made some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life (i.e., The Terminal).
I even like Tom Cruise! Like, I legitimately like watching Tom Cruise be in movies and do things. And I still fucking hate Minority Report. Sorry, I clearly have a lot of feelings here.
When I want to laugh, I look up Armond White. PKD fans will love his review of The Adjustment Bureau, “Matt Damon, Dickhead,” in which he sums up Dick’s thought:
And celebrates Spielberg’s The Minority Report:
The Adjustment Bureau would have been a lot better if they’d just ditched all the PKD-style gimmickry and done it as a straightforward romance. Damon and Emily Blunt had more chemistry onscreen than any two actors in recent memory.
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ave says:
[I know]…Next to nothing about his J.G. Ballard adaptation.
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Mea culpa; Ballard is best known as an SF writer (if an odd one; consider Cronenberg’s film of his “Crash”), thus I (with my earlier remarks) assumed that “AI” was being referred to.
I should’ve remembered it was Brian Aldiss whose “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” story was the basis for “AI,” and Ballard’s autobiographical memoir of being a boy in a Japanese POW camp, “Empire of the Sun,” that Spielberg filmed, starring a young Christian Bale.
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Andrei says:
…I found [“AI”] the most detestable and infuriating piece of self-important, manipulative trash I had ever seen…
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I’m assuming you mean (surely so, emotional manipulation being part and parcel of a huge portion of all art, including that of all the Old Masters) excessively manipulative.
Which Spielberg can understandably be accused of. As Tim Kreider puts it in his “AI” essay, “Spielberg can’t resist tugging at the heartstrings — for example, giving the medic in Saving Private Ryan a touching speech about his mother so we’ll be sure to be sad when he’s killed.”
However, in that film, as Kreider points out, “It’s hard to say what, if anything, [Spielberg] ‘wanted’ us to feel watching this film.” With many an example given of how our reactions and expectations are played with, flipped around, instead of comfortingly, predictably, catered to.
As for “self-important,” most any serious, ambitious work that takes itself seriously could be so accused. The telling factor is, does it match up to its ambitions?
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Ng Suat Tong says:
Charles: I agree that the Saving Private Ryan Normandy scene does work very well as an action sequence. It’s probably his best work. The effect is entirely destroyed for me by the rest of the film. Its technical perfection is also problematic.
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It’s an utterly brilliant sequence, indescribably harrowing. With chillingly harsh bits (based on actual events) as a GI telling others not to shoot (and put out of their misery) Germans set on fire by flame-thrower attacks. In other words, let them suffer.
I bought the film many years ago, but other that the Normandy Landing sequence, have had no chance to see the rest; the Missus is not into war movies. So I’ve been spared the most “moving” parts…
As for the “its technical perfection is also problematic” argument, I don’t agree, though it’s a defensible viewpoint. Surely utter chaos and confusion, splattered intestines and such, are closer to the reality of combat.
But unlike the stereotypical artiste who only follows his muse, some creators — especially if working in one of the most expensive art forms ever — hold back, lest they alienate their audience. And try not to have them leave the theater in a gloomy funk. Surely it would have been more realistic had the teen-age boy, alienated from his father, not survive their separation in “War of the Worlds.” But then, we wouldn’t have had the satisfying (emotionally, if not intellectually) resolution of Father and Son reunited at the end, their past difficulties put behind them. If we’d seen in “War Horse,” the noble beasts torn apart and lying in mangled heaps, would not a huge portion of the audience been alienated?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
You don’t like Jackie Chan? Your heart’s just a big lump of rock, isn’t it?
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Yeah, Jackie’s a delight. My wife was “into” his movies, and silent-comedy-meets-martial-arts approach, long before we met, and watching him made me a believer too!
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Jason Michelitch says:
So nice to read some unkind words about Minority Report. HATED it when I saw it, and have been subjected to nothing but insane praise for it from all corners ever since. The entire critical community seems to be convinced that it’s some dark, complex masterpiece, and all I saw was cotton-candy fake-intelligent bullshit.
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I think “Minority Report” is entertaining and well-wrought SF with some thought-provoking ideas courtesy of PKD, but hardly a masterwork. Those absurdly overpraising work which is merely solid do it a great disservice; provoke a pendulum-swing in the opposite, and just as incorrect, extreme.
“Private Ryan” is a lot more worthwhile and complex than you’d think from comments here.
For example, the coward G.I. not only survives, but triumphs. Not exactly John Ford or Capra territory.
Robert, you’re such a romantic!
The romance in MR was just dreadful, I have to say. The wife is just sort of wheeled out as a victory prize…uck.
By the by, Robert, have you read Nana? You might really like it; it’s totally a soap opera in a great way.
Has Johnny Ryan or some such muckraker ever proposed a Schindler’s List prequel… maybe a Steven Spielberg rendition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? It could be called “Jews.” (insert anti-anti-Semitism emoticon)
“Maybe we should do a Spielberg roundtable some day. There’d certainly be more difference of opinion than with a PKD one….”
I thought this one was interesting: http://www.reverseshot.com/article/reverse_shot_31_nostalgia_and_light. I’d think you’d come up with more unique approaches to Spielberg’s work, though.
P.S. Jackie Chan was the best and only filmmaker of my early adolescence, and it upsets me that I won’t see another like him for probably a few decades.
Mike–
I meant “manipulative” as in “manipulative”:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/manipulative?region=us
and “self-important” as in “self-important”:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/self-important
Hah! Mike H. having the dictionary quoted against him; how I have waited for this day….
Saving Private Ryan has a horrendous, obnoxious conceit at its centre. That’s really the mission??? And, Noah, the chaos theory stuff — although funny — is not the worst bit of nonsense in Jurassic Park; that honour goes to the explanation of how they recreate the dinosaurs with only fragments of their DNA. Let’s just throw in some frog DNA!
But you shouldn’t underestimate the skill involved in crafting competent, entertaining cinema, even if it’s empty-headed or ideologically noxious. Surely we’ve all seen enough poorly-made films to know how hard it is to rise to the level of merely adequate, particularly for action sequences.
On A.I.: for me, finding out that that film had its defenders was like finding out that Vince Colletta had his. *Spit-take*
“But you shouldn’t underestimate the skill involved in crafting competent, entertaining cinema, even if it’s empty-headed or ideologically noxious.”
But sometimes incompetent and boring can be more enjoyable, is the thing. I mean, Tarkovsky’s Stalker is arguably neither competent nor entertaining, but I kind of love it. Same with Plan 9 from Outer Space (to pick an obvious example,) which I don’t love, necessarily, but which is infinitely superior to Minority Report.
Technical achievement is technical achievement, but technical achievement and quality don’t have anything like a one to one relationship with each other.
First Spielberg, then Tarkovsky! Who’s next?
Yes, please elaborate on Tarkovsky’s incompetence…I think George Clooney suggested something similar about Solaris.
I was going to make a similar comment. In what possible way is “Stalker” “incompetent”?
Have you seen any other of Tarkovsky’s films? If you see them as an entire body of work, it’s obvious that Tarkovsky had all the competence of Orson Welles or Ingmar Bergman, and more. I mean, I personally think it’s obvious from thirty seconds of any of his movies, but I mention seeing them all because you clearly need more convincing.
I’ve seen Solaris and Stalker, and like them both a lot. They’re not slick, you know? By Hollywood standards, they’re arguably incompetent. The incredibly long drive in the car in Solaris, for example.
His films are intentionally clunky, it seems to me, but that doesn’t mean they’re not clunky.
Here’s my essay about Solaris. I think it’s one of my favorite films.
I think maybe people are misunderstanding my point…. The issue isn’t that I think that Tarkovsky is incompetent. I love Tarkovsky. The point is that there is no objective measure of technical competence by which we can say “Spielberg is a good filmmaker, therefore we should give him some sort of props.” There is no formal excellence worthy of praise divorced from the aesthetics of the film as a whole. I actually find Spielberg’s slickness really off-putting and irritating. It’s a bug, not a feature as far as I’m concerned. On the other hand, Tarkovsky’s incredibly unslick pacing really sends me…as does Jack Hill’s scrappy filmmaking. Really, at this point I’d probably rather watch the train wreck that is Superman IV for its train-wreckness rather than sit through MR again.
There’s just no reason that its seamlessness should excuse Schindler’s List from being the worst film ever, is what I’m saying. On the contrary, the seamless slickness is part of what contributes to its awfulness, from my perspective.
Tarkovsky fans are a touchy lot. I’m just about to read Roadside Picnic to see if he dumbed that book down the way he did Solaris.
That driving scene is chaos cinema compared to the candle lighting scene from Nostalghia.
Tarkovsky’s pacing is based on the notion that long-takes touch upon the spiritual and are more authentically cinematic. Montage for him was literary. It’s not really correct to call such a ideologically driven approach incompetent, I think. But I still prefer Spielberg.
out of curiosity, Noah, what’s wrong with this as a rough notion of quasi-objective competence: competent artists are able to convey what they want to convey. Thus Tarkovsky would have been incompetent in Stalker had he set out to make an action-packed thrill ride that will leave you gasping for breath but, you know, since his aim probably wasn’t to do that but instead to produce a meditation on whatever the hell that film is supposed to be about (really long takes of industrial waste?), he’s competent since he achieves that aim.
similarly for Spielberg’s technical competence: when he wants the viewer to understand spatial and causal relationships (the basis of action sequences in the “classical” Hollywood mode), he achieves that. This is entirely compatible with holding that he’s incompetent in other respects (e.g. emotional and thematic depth).
Well, part of the problem is that you have to read the creator’s mind, which isn’t always possible. And, of course, there’s the problem that different people are going to disagree on success or failure. And that not everyone will hold to that definition of competence. I could probably come up with others, if pressed.
Spielberg also frequently fails in demonstrating spatial and causal relations. As I said, in MR, the chase in the factory makes no sense spatially or causally, and there are stupid plot holes throughout the rest of his work, to put it mildly. He certainly succeeds in the presentation of a slick exterior…but is that what he wants to be doing?
I talk about what I think Stalker is about here.
And Charles, liking Spielberg more than Tarkovsky is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Damn it.
“part of the problem is that you have to read the creator’s mind”
Isn’t it more that you read some purpose in a film, then assess whether it’s been successfully implemented? On the other you can, I guess, somewhat read Tarkovsky’s mind through his book.
I don’t see much of a spatial disorientation in the factory scene. It’s incredibly implausible that one could survive being built into a car, yes, but it makes sense spatially. The major problems are why is Cruise’s car the only one that comes out in the warehouse where he can easily drive it off, where did he get the key, or some energy charge for fuel, and why did the doors magically open to let him steal it? I’m guessing that’s what you mean by causal relations.
It didn’t make sense spatially to me; why would he end up in the driver’s seat rather than under the hood or, you know, bloodily disembowelled in the inner workings?
Though, yes, the idea that the car would be ready to be driven off is ridiculous.
Character development stuff is implausible too…and Agatha’s motivations don’t really make much sense (if she doesn’t want him to kill that guy, why help him escape exactly? Especially since she knows she’ll just get caught again.) And so forth.
Of course, plot holes are quite normal for Hollywood. “Competence” tends to mean slick finish, really, not clear causal or spatial relationships, I’d argue.
I think it’s a matter of vocabulary, Noah: “incompetence” is not the same thing as “slickness,” or as “keeping things moving and entertaining.” It’s a matter of being able to do a convincing match cut, of creating spatial continuity within a scene, of being able to compose or block a shot. The basic building blocks of the cinematic vocabulary. Tarkovsky clearly shows that he can do that with perfect competence, whether in “The Childhood of Ivan” or “Andrei Rublev,” or in “The Sacrifice.” If he then chooses to transform or even violate these rules for the sake of a specific filmmaking style, he does not show any more incompetence than “Ulysses,” says, shows any incompetence in the author of “The Dubliners.” This is very different from Wood in “Plan 9,” who clearly demonstrates that he didn’t master the basic cinematic competence.
Well, maybe…though I think competence often serves as a way of saying “slickness,” or entertaining filmmaking, or what not.
Joyce seems like a weird analog to Tarkovsky…he’s an avant garde of excess rather than of spaces. PKD seems perhaps a better analogue. There are spaces in the narrative and bits that go nowhere. Is that incompetence? It’s not not incompetence, exactly…but the incompetence is thematized and part of the aesthetic experience.
And as for Wood…if it’s an entertaining film, and the parts not quite fitting is part of the interest, what does it mean then that he didn’t master basic cinematic competence? Plan 9 is a lot better than the remake of Total Recall. So why does it make sense to say that Wood is a worse filmmaker than the folks who made TR? Yes, TR is slicker, but so what?
Ornette Coleman reportedly had trouble hitting the right notes when he was playing in an R&B band. In some sense that makes him incompetent…but surely it also calls into question whether competence is really, or can really be, evaluated separately from artistic achievement.
I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “this is what he’s doing, and I believe he’s competent at that.” But it seems like you have to define the context somewhat more specifically than just “cinematic competence.” Competent Hollywood genre product — yes, Spielberg does that. But does that make him a more competent filmmaker than Ed Wood or Jack Hill or Tarkovsky? Depends on what you mean by filmmaker, and what your mileage is.
I hadn’t quite realized, but I think this conversation suggests that filmmaking has not experienced quite the wholesale deconstruction of craft that has occurred in visual art, or to some extent in music, has it? Video’s made some inroads (as those found footage films show). But despite that, there’s still a standard of a well-made film that people can refer to and feel like it has some sort of objective meaning. I presume it’s in part because there’s just such a large capital investment in filmmaking, and because popular film is just so much exponentially more popular than experimental stuff that the latter hasn’t infiltrated/undermined the former? I don’t know…maybe other folks with a better sense of film history can explain it better, but it’s a pretty interesting phenomena, I think.
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Andrei says:
Mike–
I meant “manipulative” as in “manipulative”:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/american_english/manipulative?region=us
[“characterized by unscrupulous control of a situation or person: she was sly, selfish, and manipulative”]
and “self-important” as in “self-important”:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/self-important
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Hah! Mike H. having the dictionary quoted against him; how I have waited for this day….
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How very easy it is to “win” if you leave out the versions that don’t fit your argument.
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ma·nip·u·la·tive
1. influencing or attempting to influence the behavior or emotions of others for one’s own purposes: a manipulative boss.
2. of or pertaining to manipulation of objects or parts of the body; serving to manipulate: spinal manipulative therapy.
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dictionary.com
In what way do the vast mass of creative folks not “attempt to influence the emotions of others” for their own purposes; that is, to have them feel what the artist wants them to feel?
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ma·nip·u·la·tive
adj.
Serving, tending, or having the power to manipulate.
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the Free Online Dictionary
Is not too useful; going to the crucial term, we see:
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manipulate
1. ( tr ) to handle or use, esp with some skill, in a process or action: to manipulate a pair of scissors
2. to negotiate, control, or influence (something or someone) cleverly, skilfully, or deviously
3. to falsify (a bill, accounts, etc) for one’s own advantage
4. (in physiotherapy) to examine or treat manually, as in loosening a joint
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World English Dictionary
There’s “cleverly, skillfully” there; only the last of the terms has negative connotations.
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ma·nip·u·late
1. To move, arrange, operate, or control by the hands or by mechanical means, especially in a skillful manner: She manipulated the lights to get just the effect she wanted.
2. To influence or manage shrewdly or deviously: He manipulated public opinion in his favor.
3. To tamper with or falsify for personal gain: tried to manipulate stock prices.
4. Medicine To handle and move in an examination or for therapeutic purposes: manipulate a joint; manipulate the position of a fetus during delivery.
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the Free Online Dictionary
There’s “shrewdly” (hardly necessarily negative) “or deviously.”
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manipulate
1 handle or control (a tool, mechanism, information, etc.) in a skilful manner: he manipulated the dials of the set
– alter, edit, or move (text or data) on a computer: the pupils can manipulate the data or screen image
– examine or treat (a part of the body) by feeling or moving it with the hand: this system of healing is based on manipulating the ligaments of the spine
2 control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly or unscrupulously: tried to manipulate stock prices.
– alter or present (data) so as to mislead: nations may still be able to manipulate their own data
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http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/manipulate
Even this version of the Oxford Dictionary first lists “cleverly,” then “or unscrupulously” as ways in which people may be controlled or influenced.
Note how the examples given above of certain negative definitions of manipulation involve politics, financial shenanigans, rather than the arts:
“to falsify (a bill, accounts, etc) for one’s own advantage”
“He manipulated public opinion in his favor.”
“[He] tried to manipulate stock prices.” (Used twice, by two dictionaries)
“tried to manipulate stock prices.”
“nations may still be able to manipulate their own data [so as to mislead]”
Indeed, BusinessDictionary.com highlights how there is a crucial difference here:
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manipulation
1. General: Artful, expert, or skilled handling of an implement or situation.
2. Law: Creating a false or misleading appearance to deceive.
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Now, is there anyone here who can’t tell the difference between a creative person — however modest or great their gifts — orchestrating effects in order to move their intended audience, and a corrupt politician running for re-election as a “law and order” candidate, or a con-man’s spiel?
Goya, in his “Disasters of War” series image “Truth Has Died,” embodies that abstract virtue as a beautiful, full-bosomed young woman: http://hoocher.com/Francisco_de_Goya/Truth_Has_Died_%28Murio%20la%20verdad%29_1810_14.jpg .
In his “The Shootings of May 3, 1808” ( http://history.hanover.edu/courses/art/goyamy3.jpg ) the victims display the whole range of individualized humanity; their executioners, “just obeying orders,” are shown as the unified, inhuman, faceless mechanism of death they have become.
Even when far lesser creators are involved (that is to say, virtually everyone else), the same jerking of our emotional strings is involved. Only an utter dimwit could fail to see how in “The Scream” Munch employs physical distortion and color to manipulate our emotions; how Spielberg (as Tim Kreider put it) gives “the medic in Saving Private Ryan a touching speech about his mother so we’ll be sure to be sad when he’s killed.”
And, awww! She’s not just sad, she’s got a lil’ kitty! http://valor_phoenix.tripod.com/Art/KeaneKitten.jpg .
The only place where creative manipulation meets the vileness of the legal version is in advertising (a shoddy product or politico is made to look admirable) or propaganda ( http://rpgathenaeum.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/hitlerportrait.jpg ).
So, Andrei, you waxed wrothful about how “AI” was detestably and infuriatingly “manipulative” and I responded, (revising my initial wording so as not to risk offending; serves me right) “I’m assuming you mean (surely so, emotional manipulation being part and parcel of a huge portion of all art, including that of all the Old Masters) excessively manipulative.”
To which you responded, in effect, that it was not the degree of emotion-tugging which irritated. You just meant it was plain ol’ manipulativeness that elicited the reaction.
So are you then so ticked off ’cause Spielberg was “creating a false or misleading appearance to deceive”? (For instance, the doc who talked nice about his Mom in “Saving Private Ryan” was actually a scumbag, whose death should have been cheered?)
Or, as your one cherry-picked definition said, that his creativity in “AI” was “characterized by unscrupulous control of a situation or person”? Because, yes, what could be more “unscrupulous” that a moviemaker would try to make us feel dread, sympathy, sadness, for his characters?
Or, does the very idea that he’d attempt to affect your emotions (how dare any creator try and do that) come across like a mind-rape?
Ah, but I gotta cut this short! (For me, that is.) Received a call a few minutes ago about doing some volunteer artwork (natch, it’s a rush). And just when I was going to get started on “self-important”…
But have time for this:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
And Charles, liking Spielberg more than Tarkovsky is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Damn it.
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Um, some people can “like” “The Road Warrior” better than “Citizen Kane” (or in my case, the B-52s over Beethoven), yet be aware it’s a purely emotional reaction, not to be confused with a thoughtful assessment of aesthetic virtues. While with others, it’s “I hate _______, therefore it’s lousy.”
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Charles Reece says:
Tarkovsky fans are a touchy lot. I’m just about to read Roadside Picnic to see if he dumbed that book down the way he did Solaris.
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The premise of the tale is pretty splendid, but there’s not a great deal of philosophical depth there. Hence, it’d be less “dumbed-downable.”
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
out of curiosity, Noah, what’s wrong with this as a rough notion of quasi-objective competence: competent artists are able to convey what they want to convey. Thus Tarkovsky would have been incompetent in Stalker had he set out to make an action-packed thrill ride that will leave you gasping for breath but, you know, since his aim probably wasn’t to do that but instead to produce a meditation on whatever the hell that film is supposed to be about (really long takes of industrial waste?), he’s competent since he achieves that aim.
similarly for Spielberg’s technical competence: when he wants the viewer to understand spatial and causal relationships (the basis of action sequences in the “classical” Hollywood mode), he achieves that. This is entirely compatible with holding that he’s incompetent in other respects (e.g. emotional and thematic depth).
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Absolutely outstanding in its clear-headed sensibility. And no, it’s not necessary to “read the creator’s mind,” and since we can’t, the whole argument should be tossed out.
Does it take an Amazing Kreskin to divine what Spielberg, Hitchcock, and other “lighter” directors are aiming at? Hardly. Why, even with less “catering to public tastes” types like Bergman or Kubrick, it takes no “Vulcan mind-meld” to see what their aesthetic goals and intentions are. Heavens, even in Bergman’s “Persona” — which John Simon called probably the most difficult film ever made — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the filmmaker’s intentions, the points he wishes to get across.
Moreover, looking at a creator’s body of work can give plenty of clues as to what are important recurring themes and creative goals for them.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Plan 9 is a lot better than the remake of Total Recall. So why does it make sense to say that Wood is a worse filmmaker than the folks who made TR? Yes, TR is slicker, but so what?
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Not having seen the remake, from what I hear it’s still a safe assumption that “Plan 9 from Outer Space” is a better movie: in an outsider-artist sensibility, “so bad it’s good” way. Which doesn’t mean that Wood is overall a better filmmaker; but that — as with Fletcher Hanks over some far more refined yet uninteresting comics creator — in that case (he made plenty of utterly insipid, flat flicks), his weaknesses came together to form strengths.
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… I think this conversation suggests that filmmaking has not experienced quite the wholesale deconstruction of craft that has occurred in visual art, or to some extent in music, has it? Video’s made some inroads (as those found footage films show). But despite that, there’s still a standard of a well-made film that people can refer to and feel like it has some sort of objective meaning. I presume it’s in part because there’s just such a large capital investment in filmmaking, and because popular film is just so much exponentially more popular than experimental stuff that the latter hasn’t infiltrated/undermined the former?
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Yes, and hooray for film’s avoiding that supposedly “liberating” “wholesale deconstruction of craft”; else it would have degenerated into the circle-jerky, in-groupish crap of so much of modern art, and become as irrelevant.
Mike, Fletcher Hanks isn’t so bad he’s good. Hanks’ art is beautiful; wonderful color sense, lovely odd compositions. In an art world context, there’s just no reason to see him as a less skilled than, say, Neil Adams…and indeed, every reason to see him as more skilled.
The outsider art reference is exactly right. But outsider artists aren’t so bad they’re good. Rather, they challenge the notion of what’s bad and what’s good. Art by children and the insane, as well as outsider art, is so thoroughly influential in modern art that it’s seriously challenged the notion of craft…which isn’t ideal in every way, perhaps, but which is arguably better than the condescending “so bad it’s good” meme, which is the only way film has of dealing with someone like Ed Wood, who deosn’t conform to conventional notion of skill but is still an interesting filmmaker.