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First and after all, this film is beautifully photographed, shades of gray, it has the texture of a black & white picture.
of course the shadows of the past flashes through, from Blade Runner to The Fith elements, Spielberg did not repeat himself ad nauseum in this one.
You can find horribly wrong scenes, like the meeting with the old lady,one of the creator of the three who can forcast the future.
But some are so wonderful, touched with creativity.
Even Tom Cruise made his role come to life.
And the film ? I will have a second look at it, but I do not thing it is really good.Time will tell.
Follow Ups:
Unfortunately, his success has made him an easy target, and most, if not all of the socalled "bad reviews" he has received, have more to do with doing in ANYONE who is successful, and just plain jealousy, that there must be SOMETHING wrong with someone who is successful, so it's not right to like ANYTHING he produces or has anything to do with.I must say, publically, he has been a good sport about all of this. It's got to be alot of pressure on anyone, to endure all of this silently. I wonder if anyone would be as understanding, considering all of this.
***Unfortunately, his success has made him an easy target,Would you mind defing that "success"? I presume you mean the Hollywood style one.
It seems to me, that he enjoys success, at being able to do what he wants to do...to make movies, and the movies he wants to make, with relative freedom, outside of whether they "succeed" finanicially.Something like this, in and of itself, engenders hostility, within the his peers of the film industry, and to those whose job it is to tell us what we should see and consume. 'How dare one person, have that much Freedom, and be able to do this', so goes their reasoning.
Well, it seems to me, he has earned that privilege, and to do so, in spite of what the arbiters of Taste, tell us is utter garbage, is admirable. Those who "do" something practice it and do it, and those who can't, Teach...as the saying goes. In the end it's all subjective, anyway.
We all know what we like, and there isn't anything or anyone that's going to tell us, what it is. Film is a subjective experience, that we enjoy, personally, not in some collective sense. The Artists who touch our Soul, deserve to be elevated to the level of the Gods...because that's as close, most of us, will be to The Gods.
I have no problem with someone making tons of money, but if one wants to be an artist, then his "success" better be defined differently. Considered that way, Spielberg is nothing but a failure.
Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Schindler's List were artistic failures? Not in my opinion.
...does movie making have to do with art? They aren't shown in museums after all. Last time I checked they sell the tickets. It's a business. At the business of moviemaking he is successful by any measure.joe
nt
... is not necessarily art - re: movies.joe
...they also sold tickets to see the Michelangelo dude. Made tons of money. Good business, no doubt.
...vs. mass market.Face it Victor - hollywood can't stay in business making niche market products. Mass market success does not connote failure.
joe
***Mass market success does not connote failure.I never stated that in the general sense. But we were talking about a particular guy, and I would suspect he sees himself as an artist, not just a man selling tickets in the booth.
Success or failre - that depends on your aspirations. If his was to be the best and most efficient producer of substandard films with huge financial reward - then he is successful, and I have no problem with that. But from what I know he DOES see himself as an artist.
BTW - what you are calling "niche market" used to be mainstream films, just perhaps forty years ago. And forty years ago Dumb and Dumber would not collect a thousand bucks.
How did we manage to change that much?
...to regard the mass market phenomenon as a recent artifact of Hollywood. It really isn't. The handful of Hollywood gems from the past were accumulated over a century of filmmaking. There were thousands of unexceptional B and lower pictures the studios churned out by the hundreds each year using contract actors. Reagan starred opposite a chimp - remember? Is that really so far removed from Dumb and Dumber? Hardly a vision of an idyllic past. And foreign films have never done serious business in the US except for the occaisional British import by the major studios...joe
Well, you got me thinking. It is impossible to have the right answer without running a complete number crunching analysis, but my gut feel still is that there were more good films made in the forties, etc, than we see today. In addition I presume that the total output of the US movie industry is higher today - is this correct?
First question - I'm not so sure. My dad went to the movie theater every Saturday morning when he was a kid in the 1940s and early 50s as did many others of his generation. B movies, serials and cartoons were the fare of the day. Can you say the Three Stooges? There was a clear demarcation in quality that was more explicit than today. B movies were a staple. Gangster movies, Westerns, War movies, love stories and melodramas. All produced to rather predictable and quite purposeful formulas with contract actors. Then there were the road show engagements. Major hollywood properties shown only in the best theaters and a more limited number of premium screens. I saw the tail end of this era in the '60s back in Houston as a child at the Windsor Cinerama. A roadshow engagement theater with a HUGE curved cinemascope screen made from three screens edge to edge. I still remember this huge single screen premium theater. Balcony seating. a total audience that had to exceed 700. Intermissions. I saw the first few Bond films, Lawrence of Arabia, How the West Was Won and few others in the place. An experince that is not recreated anywhere today. They tore it down years ago. Even at their peak there would only be a handful of roadshow engagement theaters in even a large city, so there were never very many.And then there were the drive in theaters. Believe me, quality was not the driver in these, but there were surprises. I saw The Good the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistfull of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and Once Upon A Time In The West at the South Main Drive in back in the Houston of my childhood. Of course I saw a couple of Godzilla double bills there too.
Your second question - are there more movies made now? I don't really know. There were quite a few made in the pre TV era, so the quantity differential might not be quite so great as you imagine.
joe
Spielberg is a guy who can do great films. He'd rather make money.
***Spielberg is a guy who can do great films.And I can play Brahms cello concerto better than Rostropovich.
Perhaps you know something we don't?
Spielberg is great at making films with guaranteed commercial succes in the US mainstream movie theaters - that is far cry from making "great" films. He hasn't made any, and by all indication is not gonna.
But he IS a master at what he does.
Hi Victor,
The Color Purple is a movie that shows what Spielberg can do. Even there he pulls back from the full impact the book delivered; but it is a superb movie. But perhaps you prefer to watch a chunky German girl run down the same street 25 times ;)
It was bad and boring. I suspect it was made with an eye on an American market.But I have been watching a lot of indie films lately, and one doesn't need to go to Europe to be better than Spielberg in art department.
Accounting department is different.
Well, artists are in the eyes of the storm...Critics can be constructives too !But what has it to do with my comments on MR ?
I found MR a rather tedious film. Perhaps I am no longer impressed with special effects as I saw nothing at all special within the film. I was not awed or "dazzled" by anything (including storyline), and was rather thrown off by the fact that this depicts the future: jetpacks, technology in abundance, Lexus squad cars from another world, YET, everyone lived in the same housing as we do now. It was just incongruous to the overall theme, I felt.Stevie mis-fired on this one and A.I.
I was hopeful from the reviews, but I found it was slow to get moving, had too much distracting high-key cinematography, suffered from over-use of special effects for inconsequential elements, and revealed glaring inconsistencies in the meshing of the hi-tech society to the plot.
Cruise's acting range is inadequate for the role...he's simply not capable of portraying a desperate or menacing character. The potential of the key character of the abducted precog was virtually lost.Its final half hour or so was much better; much less cartoonish; but didn't overcome the heavy handedness of the rest of the film.
It would have been mediocre from any other director. For Spielberg it (like AI) is a huge dud. Since "Schindler", his name on a movie has become a simple marketing commodity.
In this kind of film, there is no character evolution possible.
That is why you can see it once and then it throw away for eternity.
Too bad.
the film had some tender moments. but i'm not a fan of this film.not too long ago i happened to see 'blade runner'. it's in a different class than 'minority report'. i can't pinpoint what it was about it right now, but it has a certain style that makes it interesting, more unique.
minority report will fade. it doesn't have substance, nor anything particularly unique. in fact, i didn't see it too long ago and i hardly can remember it. (i think that's more of a bad sign of the film than me!!!).
speilberg is capable of making great films. when i saw 'schindler's list' at the movies, that movie seemed to stun me and the whole audience. that's a film from this director!
Wenn Blade Runner came to sreen it was totally eclipse by " the Star Wars " hysterie. It took a long time to come out of the limbo...
Witness is in the same vein.
On Minority the digital effects are particulary bad.
Is it worth reading? Never saw Blade Runner.
Blade is actually in his kind, poetic & good story & film noir & actors very good ( even over acting HF) AND the MUSIC has something who stick to moody end of times, that we are filling as times go by...Our very ending.
AND it is erotic.
The first time I ever saw Tom Cruise being a character, rather than just being himself.An interesting film.
I don't know if Tom has been playing himself, I think he simply has been playing extremely badly all his life. Being a bad actor is not a huge sin, as long as one doesn't take himself too seriously.But Tom does.
On the other hand, Ryan O'Neal never did. He simply went through the life as a mediocre actor not looking for any high awards. But since he also was not an obnoxious idiot (like Tom), something good DID happen to him, something that forever placed his name near the top of acting achievemnts of all times.
I am talking of course about his success in Barry Lyndon. Kubrick simply saw the interesting raw material in Ryan, something that he could form at will, and form at will he did, as Ryan has not been able to raise to that level again, left to work with the lesser directors.
Taking a relatively unknown actor with no good track record was great risk for Stanley, but it also produced an immense award and sent the shockwaves through the critics community. No one expected Ryan to shine as he did in good hands.
However, oen would be foolish to try the same lucky shot again. Why Stanley did just that we shall never know, but also there was a sizable difference between him selecting Ryan and trying to hit the target with another bad actor - Tom Cruise.
I suspect the real failure lies not in the fact that Stanley was beginning to lose it, painful as it is to admit, but in the rotten nature of the subject - Tom. Unlike the young Ryan, Tom came with a huge and bothersome baggage of arrogance and, I shall use that term extremely losely... fame. He also came with an inept wife.
So while Ryan simply conformed to every movement of the master's hand, Tom kept his idiotic self largely intact, like an ugly rock inside the soft clay. Instead of letting the master make a gem out himself he simply took control.
The Pygmalion was at his last breath at this point. Much is known about his difficulties in working with the two "spectacular" stars - and the end result was certainly not what he was hoping for.
So - was it his fault for trying the same "secret thrust" once again? Like German in the "Dame of Spades" he dives headlong trusting his luck, and failes in a spectacular, but eventually rather boring way.
Should we then place some blame on Tom for bringind down the illustrous director's career? Hardly. But his negative contribution shall never be forgotten.
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