Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, USA, 115 minutes

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman

Photography: Douglas Slocombe

Music: John Williams

Editors: Michael Kahn, George Lucas

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Ronald Lacey, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kahler, Anthony Higgins, Alfred Molina

As an inevitable fact of life, I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark a few times (among other things, it's one everybody can watch at get-togethers) and have been toting around a VHS I don't remember acquiring. I have always resisted it a little and the nostalgic 1940s Saturday afternoon serial aesthetic it sports. The element is under willing influence of cowriter George Lucas, who in approximately 1981 could do no wrong. But ultimately Raiders has always struck me as too much about not enough. It's slapstick, it's swashbuckling, it has something for everyone. It's never dull so it is always dull.

I avoided it until it was two years old, at which point I learned a lesson I have had to learn again since, which is that director Steven Spielberg's movies should not be underestimated. They are so expertly made, tuned so uncannily to the audience, that I usually end up sucked into them even somewhat against my will. I ditched the VHS experience this time, opted to pay the $4 to stream it, and found myself greeted by one of the longest and most detailed disclaimer statements I think I've ever seen (and I look at horror movies on the semiregular): "Rated 16+: alcohol use, foul language, frightening scenes, sexual content, smoking, violence." I want to talk about at least a couple of these things—the drinking by Karen Allen's character Marion is insane—but let's start with the frightening scenes.

Jurassic Park (1993)

USA, 127 minutes

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Michael Crichton, David Koepp

Photography: Dean Cundey

Music: John Williams

Editor: Michael Kahn

Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Bob Peck, Martin Ferraro, BD Wong, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Samuel L. Jackson, Wayne Knight, Phil Proctor

Say what you may about director Steven Spielberg, he does seem to have a sense for how to construct movie magic (for lack of a better term). Case in point. I always seem to forget how good the original Jurassic Park is, which should not surprise me because it is basically a monster movie about dinosaurs directed by Steven Spielberg and that's close to exactly the kind of thing I can't resist. But Spielberg is particularly good at stripping away clutter and focusing on elements that surprisingly matter a lot: here, notably, a sense of wonder, which he hits on a pure note almost effortlessly in the first hour, spent mostly explaining and detailing the picture's premise. Setting aside a silly plot about corporate malfeasance that is there merely to put the chaos in motion, the fundamental concept is some science mumbo-jumbo laid out in an industrial training film style with a seductive credibility. Why couldn't scientists extract the blood of dinosaurs from mosquitos preserved in amber and then clone them up with the DNA sequencing? Well, why not?

Thus, after a series of helicopter shots and introduction to the exotic jungle setting of an island off the west coast of South America (shades of Darwin! but a lot of this no doubt is also the work of cowriter Michael Crichton, a giant of pop culture in his own right, though I don't know the source novel), and with the John Williams orchestra sawing away sweet, we come to see dinosaurs roaming a pastoral landscape and it is thrilling. Spielberg plainly knows the importance of special effects (as much as copious reaction shots) because these images of dinosaurs are absorbingly believable and likely took up much of the budget (happily, he routinely commands big ones). Spielberg, and/or Crichton, is also not above larding it up with Dickensian touches that work even when you know you know better: the semi-huckster semi-visionary impresario who loves his grandchildren, the young couple sorting out their feelings about children, all those questions about whether humans even have a right, let alone the wisdom, to tamper with nature. Jurassic Park basically gets you coming and going.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

USA, 138 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Hal Barwood, Jerry Belson, John Hill, Matthew Robbins
Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, J. Allen Hynek

Director Steven Spielberg's first (and best) movie about aliens from outer space is a curious mixture of the arty and the boffo. A good argument can be made that it's a movie about religion, faith, and/or obsession (sort of like Ordet). As with many visionary art films first the middle is too long and then the ending is way too long. But Close Encounters also has a global perspective right out of Hollywood pictures like Casablanca, traveling (or pretending to travel) to such far-flung exotic points as the Sonora Desert in Mexico, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, Dharmsala in Northern India, and Alabama as Indiana, looking expensive for the sake of a few intriguing narrative details. Plus the special effects, of course. And it's juiced constantly with theatrical movie alarm and/or juvenile humor. Bob Balaban as an interpreter is given regular freak-out scenes as things develop, and at one of the headiest moments in the formal encounter with the aliens a man is shown running desperately for the porta-potty. Diarrhea, I presume. Or maybe cognitive dissonance.

Close Encounters has long been a favorite of mine, for good reasons and weird (where the RUCK are those aliens?! we really need them now). It's one of those movies I've seen enough that I can recite lines as they are coming. In fact, in some cases ("Don't you think I'm taking this really well?" ... "Who are you people?") I'm down to working on specific intonations. I said a lot of what I have to say about this fascination affair several years ago in a rundown of favorite movies I did with Phil Dellio and Steven Rubio—about the suburbs, the obsessions, the higher truths out there. Now I feel like I'm starting to just burnish the same points. Let’s say I'm being overly completist about getting to all those titles from the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? Although, at the same time, it is interesting how Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a real mouthful of a title!) continues to reveal itself even at this level of familiarity.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

USA, 115 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Melissa Mathison
Photography: Allen Daviau
Music: John Williams
Editor: Carol Littleton
Cast: Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, K.C. Martel, Sean Frye, C. Thomas Howell, Debra Winger

Director Steven Spielberg was already big time in 1982, complete with a certified flop and the oomph to slog on through (1941, which I still haven't seen, though it is presently at #236 in my Netflix queue so I'm getting there). He had shown he could do horror (Duel, Jaws), science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), big budget action adventure (Raiders of the Lost Ark), and even desperate crazy kids relationship romance (The Sugarland Express). But a movie intended expressly to make you cry, well, even if it's all tarted up with science fiction trimmings or whatever, that seemed like a stretch for popular culture and for me, at least at the time. Eventually—it started slow as blockbusters go—E.T. turned out to be a giant smash, overtaking Star Wars in 1983 as the highest-grossing film of all time. It still sits at #4 on the all-time list adjusted for inflation at Box Office Mojo, behind only Gone With the Wind, Star Wars (resurgent doubtless under the weight of its endless rereleases), and The Sound of Music. It's just ahead of Titanic, DeMille's second Ten Commandments, and Jaws—Spielberg is the only director in the top 10 with more than one movie.

I finally did see E.T. the summer it was released, and I cried at all the right parts I'm sure, but it felt a little porny, and feels even more so now. The movie's rise to popularity suggests an interesting trajectory—it holds top 10 box office records for ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th weekends, but is much lower for earlier weekends. Is that repeat viewers, or word of mouth, or some combination? Anyway, the idea of going to see a movie because it would make you cry was new and exotic, though I later realized of course it's one of the oldest traditions of storytelling there is. My first experience had been a TV broadcast of The Wizard of Oz I happened to sit down to watch by myself when I was 21. It was disconcerting to find myself overwhelmed by emotion over things like Kansas, ruby slippers, and no place like home, but there I was, and it wasn't altogether unpleasant, once the tears and tender convulsions stopped—kind of cathartic. Now I'm old and sentimental and cry at anything that resembles kindness, from great moments in film and literature all the way down to soft drink and auto insurance commercials. I use it as a certain indicator. If it can make me cry I want to know why, even the commercials—especially the commercials. That's how I've decided it's generally kindness that sets me off, and we can all benefit from more of that.

Ready Player One (2018)

There may be enough to like on the surface of Steven Spielberg's immersive foray into video and role-play gaming to make it a good movie, but mostly it felt empty to me, though it's always likable and often entertaining and even spirited. It is high science fiction concept, set in a bleak dystopic future, and majority visual attack, roaring at you with swirling, bobbing CGI that makes your head spin. It features a commodified virtual gaming reality that offers a Matrix-like escape for citizens of the post-apocalyptic world of 2045 (exact nature of apocalypse unspecified). The structure of the movie, naturally, mimics the structure of a video game. Fire up the gear, enter the game, and take a challenge to win a key which unlocks a clue to the next challenge, delivering another key, clue, and challenge. In this particular game (backstory provided), three keys will make you rich beyond your dreams. So rich that an evil corporation has thrown heavy resources and dirty tricks experts into winning, putting their evil corporate thumb on the scales to disadvantage our scrappy Scooby-Doo heroes jacking in from these future slums, which look like auto graveyards. Ready Player One riffs not just on the pell-mell boom and crash of fast-moving animated action—what do you think those challenges are about?—but it's also decked out with the frippery of a dense and constant stream of pop culture references: Rush posters, Back to the Future music, the Iron Giant itself, Freddy Krueger, Alien biology tropes, King Kong and Pong and the Batmobile and topics in the history of video gaming. That's approximately 0.1% of what you will experience in brief flashes. It had to be a licensing nightmare getting it all straightened out. And you're going to need a remote to pause some of these images and study the detail—hang on, that home product has to be almost here by now. It all feels more like a series of stunts than anything thought through very far. For example, one thing that definitely drags it down is the supersaturated nostalgia pop soundtrack, which always feels obvious no matter how much I might like the song (and I don't even like them all): "Jump" by Van Halen, "Take on Me" by a-ha, "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates, "Blue Monday" by New Order, and so on. They feel shoved in mechanically, with little sense for making the music connect and work with the narrative or visuals. It may be surprising, but Spielberg has spent most of his career working with John Williams. He doesn't show the least pop music soundtracking skill here. It's almost shocking since he is otherwise such a captain of pop culture. There's a reasonably inspired sequence in which the action enters the movie The Shining—the sets and locations and characters from that movie—which gives another opportunity (with A.I. Artificial Intelligence) to witness and ponder the unusual affinity between Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. Like the weather everywhere, if you don't like what's going on in this movie wait a few minutes. Maybe you'll like the next place it frenetically zaps to. I was hoping for a little more, probably because it's Spielberg, but the best video game movie I've seen so far is still Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Jaws (1975)

USA, 124 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Photography: Bill Butler
Music: John Williams
Editor: Verna Fields
Cast: Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray, Murray Hamilton, Carl Gottlieb

A few weeks ago, catching up on horror backlog during the Halloween season, I got a chance to see Frozen (from 2010, not to be confused with the Disney animation from 2013), which is pretty nifty and actually much better than I expected. Two particular things I noticed: the name of one of the production companies involved is A Bigger Boat, and in an interview director and writer Adam Green declared—tongue no doubt in cheek, but still—that he wanted to make a movie that would do for chairlifts at ski resorts what Jaws did for sharks at summer beaches. This in turn impressed two more things on me: the enduring impact of Jaws, and my basic immunity to its premise.

I mean that I'm not afraid of sharks, never have been, and never give them a thought. (Ditto chairlifts.) It's not like they're zombies or evil spirits or something. But I've watched people seized by the delicious agonies of the fear of them nearly all my life. That's just one more long-term effect of Jaws—adding sharks to the pantheon of classic movie monsters and/or gnawing human phobias (piranha too for that matter). The creature from Black Lagoon has nothing on these beasts, except similarly beautiful underwater footage. Over 40 years later we have a ridiculous Sharknado franchise going and some pretty good movies like The Shallows too. And they're all about sharks, which actually pose less danger to us individually than radical Islamic terrorists, tipping furniture, slips in the bathtub, or air flight crashes—probably combined.

Schindler's List (1993)

USA, 195 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Thomas Keneally, Steven Zaillian
Photography: Janusz Kaminski
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagall, Embeth Davidtz, Malgorzata Gebel, Shmuel Levy, Mark Ivanir

At the time Schindler's List was new I was not entirely on board with the larger Spielberg project and I focused more on the problems I saw with the picture. I'm a little more on board now, and can see I missed a lot of what makes it arguably a great movie. There are great performances and its commitment to showing what the Holocaust and the German Nazi regime looked like is unstinting, the main reason the movie is so long and rated R ("contains some adult material"). It is ambitious about telling a simple, resonant story of the Holocaust, and erecting a broad sweeping vision of that context—the systematic abuse and murder of some 6 million Jews by German Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

Schindler's List is good, even great, because it doesn't flinch from showing the details. It learned well from Shoah the stories of what happened in the Holocaust. Shots and scenes in Schindler's List are often reminiscent of what we came to understand from the massive 1985 documentary and elsewhere. And yet, something nags at me when I look at Schindler's List. The movie often seems bloated and gaseous in memory, over-swamped by the excesses of its own good intentions somehow. I don't doubt the veracity but it often feels exaggerated for effect. And I still see the problems I've always seen with it. They still work to undermine the movie's best intentions and strengths. They aren't big problems, in terms of screen time generally, but somehow they puncture it, almost irreparably.

The BFG (2016)

I can't blame anybody but myself for this pick. I trusted director Steven Spielberg's name on it and very little else I heard or saw. The comparison is frequently made with E.T., but this is not very much like E.T., although the Extra-Terrestrial in that one, and the Big Friendly Giant in this, may have something of a resemblance and the same amiable dispositions. The BFG lives on its special effects, of course, and much less so on the story, though it comes from Roald Dahl (whom I know only by general reputation). These days, the hero is always a plucky girl rather than boy, which is probably as it should be. I note it only in passing. Her name is Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), she is an orphan already old for her years, and she's very likable. An insomniac, one night she observes the giant skulking around London. When he notices her watching him he kidnaps her and takes her to Giant Country. Sophie dubs him the BFG. It turns out he's the only vegetarian in a crew of human-eating giants. Somehow the Queen of England becomes involved. It gave me a pain. I don't care much for royalty, even less when they are convenient to a narrative. The BFG is family-friendly mostly because the BFG (Mark Rylance in CGI) is such a kindly gentle figure. There is a fair amount of gluttony and other sins on the part of the rest of the giants, and multiple scenes built out of fart jokes. Look, I don't have anything against fart jokes. But while The BFG can be funny, it's never funny enough. And it's warm but not quite warm enough. Maybe that's the CGI. It takes the suspension of disbelief a little too much for granted. Among other things, the BFG collects dreams in jars, which becomes a significant plot element. Yes, you heard me, dreams in jars. I saw this at a morning show the day after the 4th of July (which would make it the 5th of July). Families were in attendance and a good time was had by all, as far as I could tell, but they also felt perfunctory and uninvolved, as if still a little dazed by fireworks and the long day before. Spielberg knows how to charm with film in his sleep, and I suspect that might be what he attempted here. I didn't say he could always charm with film in his sleep. The effects are solid, though nothing is new. For example, the first we see of the BFG is a shadow on a building, which directly recalls the first we see of a UFO in the final cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a shadow on a truck and the moon-soaked countryside. Spielberg has been using that trick and others for decades. I didn't see The BFG in 3D, which might have helped with the dreams in jars thing. Unless you're a family, move along. Nothing to see here.

"The Minority Report" (1956)

Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story is easily recognized in Steven Spielberg's 2002 film adaptation of it, which is only more remarkable for the fact that nearly half a century separates them. The technology is very different—they're still using punch cards and audio tape in the Dick story whereas Spielberg convened a consortium of technical experts and/or visionary whatsits to inform the view of  future technology he used in his picture, which includes hacking directly into human brains, as well as all manner of strangely probable urban design. In the story, our hero John Anderton is middle-aged and over the hill; in the movie he's Tom Cruise, capable of extraordinary chin-ups in battle situations. But the basics are there: computer analysis predicts crimes that are then thwarted before they happen. "Precrime" has practically wiped out murder and other violent crime, yet everyone in prison is by definition innocent of actually doing something. There's the rub, and it chafes as much in 2002 as in 1956. Anderton finds himself suddenly charged with a precrime and, convinced it's a put-up job by a career rival, he runs and attempts to get to the bottom of it all. The precogs who see the future in dream states are a trio of genetically mutated humans who are taken as developmentally disabled by most, and treated like animals raised for consumption. In fact, their appalling role in this is largely unexamined in either story or movie. To me their treatment is clearly a greater institutional crime than jailing people for what they weren't able to do, given at least that it seemed to be working for the purpose. But the issue bothering most people around here is the one about imprisoning technical innocents, with its ringing echoes of Enlightenment priorities. It's not that Dick and Spielberg are unaware of the inhumane treatment of the precogs—both depictions are remarkably brutish, though in different ways—it's more that they don't know what to do with it, and genuinely seem more interested in the issues of precrime criminal justice. And they are worthy issues, no doubt, complex and gristly. We need to stop people murdering one another if we can, of course. It's just, for me, if you're enslaving and brutalizing people to get that information in the first place, that's the first issue you'd want to deal with. Thus, both story and movie feel slightly beside the point, for all the interesting highlights they otherwise have to offer.

In case it's not at the library (and in other anthologies).

Poltergeist (1982)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Photography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein

Let's stipulate right off that Poltergeist is silly and unscary, except (maybe) for a couple of scenes jammed in the middle. The funny thing ha ha about this movie is how wrong it gets everything, even basic stuff, with paranormal investigators who are easily spooked, anachronistic science fiction effects, a proto-Big Chill couple smokin' dope in the bedroom, and seeming endless out-of-context hokum about "the light." It tries very hard to appear to know what it is talking about but it is obviously empty: "Poltergeists are usually associated with individuals. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area," explains our head paranormal investigator at one point, who wraps herself in a motherly shawl (Beatrice Straight). She is only reading lines from a script by Steven Spielberg in which he is merrily making shit up to fortify the special effects. He is the only poltergeist anywhere around here.

Therein lies the rub, of course—there's an exciting credit in director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but the script is by Spielberg, the first words we see at the end are "A STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCTION," and it is, by all indications, Spielberg in full flush of working on Raiders of the Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wanting to take on a horror project. By all indications, Hooper was there for the cred to get the deal done. By all indications, it was dollar signs on eyeballs (not least Hooper's) that wrecked this. And by all indications, it worked, a sideshow in the big summer of Steven Spielberg, with E.T. released just a week after it. Cha-ching, baby. E.T. is still high on the list of all-time earners, currently #9 between Shrek 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But Poltergeist is not doing so shabby itself—#800 all-time.

Lincoln (2012)

USA/India, 150 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Tony Kushner, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Photography: Janusz Kaminiski
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Bruce McGill, Peter McRobbie

Over his long career Steven Spielberg has always seemed to find ways to inject himself into the zeitgeist, even to the point where sometimes he seems to seize control of it and point it in new directions. With Jaws, he took a gnawing fear pervading vast numbers of lives and gave it a name and a place to focus—was anyone really that worried about sharks before 1975? With Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he took a groundswell yearning for meaning and did the same, extracting the spiritual out of the secular impositions of superior technology.

In many ways the historical film Lincoln plays to that pattern. I keep returning to the extraordinary timing of it, even knowing how hard it would have been to plan for, let alone achieve, and even given that ultimately it is beside the point. But I keep trying to imagine what Lincoln would have looked like if Mitt Romney had won the presidential election last month. And I find that I can't imagine it at all. I'm convinced that a good deal of the power of Lincoln—and I think it is an extraordinarily powerful movie—lies in the way it resonates with our present circumstances. Abraham Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents precisely because as Americans we return to him and his era whenever we find ourselves plunged in internal crises, as we are now.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Artificial Intelligence: AI, USA, 146 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, Steven Spielberg
Photography: Janusz Kaminski
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Jude Law, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Al Jourgensen

An interesting project would be to go through A.I. and catalog all uses of the word "real"—and its counterpart, "artificial," which is in the title two ways. The boy-robot David (played brilliantly in an unsettling performance by Haley Joel Osment) is constantly reminded by others that he is "not real." When he is abandoned in the woods by Monica Swinton (played by Frances O'Connor), in one of the most wrenching scenes in a picture full of them, he shamelessly pleads and grovels, drawing on his understanding of the Pinocchio story to ask if he can come home again if he is a real boy. "That's just a story," Monica says. "But a story tells what happens," David responds. "Stories are not real," she says. "You're not real."

The story of this film is well known and fascinating, involving a collaboration that seemed unlikely at the time between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. Starting in 1984 they traded notes, design ideas, and suggestions back and forth, riffing on a Brian Aldiss story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." But as with so many movie projects it never came to be. After Kubrick's death Spielberg took it up again. The result is a formal collaboration that feels at once like both of them—and a little strange and disorienting at that, because directors with such distinctive visions so rarely collaborate. In the end it feels more like a Spielberg project (with some admixture of Gene Roddenberry's optimism in there as well), concerned with families and impossible love lost and found, and unafraid of the heartwarming gesture. But the ghost of Kubrick definitely hovers over it in its visual schematics, in the ways it so freely philosophizes and addresses its largest issues, and in its clinical precisions.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

#49: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

With Close Encounters coming some six months after George Lucas's Star Wars I noticed a trend at the time to take sides for one against the other. Me, I was always in Spielberg's camp, and not just because I have a lifelong fascination with UFOs. If it's better not to bother me when a new "UFO Hunters" is on the History channel, then it's no surprise that I went for this over what still seems to me a ponderous fairy tale with pretentious airs of mythos. Not that I want to relitigate along the old fault lines—I have long since retired to the minority here, and I know it. Heck, full disclosure, I like the "Star Trek" franchise a lot more than the Star Wars, and I know that's open at least equally to charges of simple-mindedness and bad acting.

Anyway, I think the enduring strengths of Spielberg's picture actually have very little to do with UFOs or even with science fiction. Spielberg was so good during this time at capturing the textures and small-bore realities of middle-class suburban life—the messy family rooms, broken toys, TV sets always playing, the exhausted parents and the sudden vulnerabilities and rages of their kids. That's all over this.  But what sealed the deal for me was how sneaky shrewd it is about taking on some of the most profound terms of being alive itself. "This means something," Roy Neary keeps insisting plaintively, as he plays with his mashed potatoes or goes about destroying his basement. "This is important."