Yesterday I went to buy myself a hamburger that I allow my fat ass only about once a month or so. When it was time to take the finished package ( since I prefer to eat at home ) the cashier lady called me "Steven". I blushed and felt both amazing and embarrassing. No, she doesn't know that I do movies and that soon a movie of mine comes out. She has no actual idea who I am. That was the first time I ever saw her. It's just when you order something, their machine asks you to write a name, so they could call you when it's ready. Writing my own name would be a horrible privacy problem. So instead I write names of celebrities. And this time I wrote "Steven Spielberg".
It should not be a surprise that I clicked on an hour long interview between James Cameron, J.J.Abrams and Steven Spielberg. What was a surprise though, was what they said. I bookmarked the section in my browser, here is the link.
I reviewed a lot of films on this website and in almost every review I mention the name of Steven Spielberg. It's not because every movie I review is made by Spielberg. But it seem like every director can be viewed on a scale of Spielbergness. And the higher you go on that scale the better. At the top there is Steven Spielberg himself.
During the making of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Steven Spielberg was already kind of a big man in Hollywood. But from the other side he was still young. Technically speaking this was his third theatrical film. He did work for television from the late 60s. At that time he already directed a number of feature length TV movies. One of them was the famous Duel. And then he did only 2 theatrical pictures: the 1972's The Sugarland Express and the 1974's Jaws. And now there is this movie.
Something Evil is a little known TV movie from 1972 directed by Steven Spielberg of all people. Steven had a few attempts at horror. Most of them turn out to be less horrific and more psychological in nature. He avoids torturing the audience, but likes to present ideas that are psychologically disturbing, like in Jaws, War Of The Worlds or Schindler's List. This movie is no exception.
Between the 1970s to the 1990s there was a very interesting period in Hollywood. Directors like Steven Spielberg came from relative nobodies to super-stars. Which inspired a lot of directors to take upon the formula of sentimental adventure and try doing something else with it. My Girl looks like a movie clearly inspired by Spielberg, but not quite Spielbergian, in a sense that it doesn't deal with extraordinary circumstances, but rather deals with a family and friendship dynamics.
People accuse me of many bad things for making a movie where kids go against their parents into dangerous situations. Apparently they never seen Super 8. One criticism I hear often about Super 8 is that the kids in this film are way too brave! No wonder Steven Spielberg is attached to this project. He made and produced a fair share of anti-ageism films in his career.
To be honest with you, I'm still confused about the ending of this movie. It was weird and confusing. Thought for some reason it felt like the director is trying to whimsy everything a bit. Like if he was done with making a horror film and for one shot he wants to make a classic Spielbergian alien story. To then cut to a an Edgar Wright musical. I was so confused. But it worked somehow.
As she described her life in Hollywood in the beginning of her career was rather strange. Starting her career not with some kind of kids movie, but with Leon meant that a lot of people saw her differently than other children in Hollywood. For example, when she was 13 years old, a radio station started counting down days until she will be 18. She was offered a bunch of roles similar to those in Leon. She had to decline them. She had to build a persona of an academic, smart girl around herself as a defense mechanism from horny dudes around the world obsessing over her. And so apparently now was the time to understand this craziness. Playing a character who is trying to understand a different character who slept with a child was the kind of role that perhaps would be the best kind of therapy session for Natalie. Kind of like what "The Fablemans" was for Steven Spielberg.
First and for most I should probably address the elephant in the room. Not all Jewish people are successful! And not all of them are rich, even if they are successful. It would be tempting to talk about Steven Spielbergs all day long. But there are other Jewish-born people like Richard Stallman, for example, that aren't rich per se, but are successful in their own way. As you maybe know, Richard Stallman is quite a successful philosopher and a very good computer programmer. But not a very good entrepreneur. On the other hand I personally know very unsuccessful and pretty dumb Jewish people too. So the spectrum is quite wide. Though it does seem like at least statistically speaking a Jewish-born person is marginally more likely to succeed.
Who is the best person then? The most influential one? Can we count Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un? They have plenty of influence. Okay, they are not pretty. And they aren't good people in the Christian sense. So who then? Steven Spielberg? He sounds like a guy who is both good and good.
Being an actual student of Spielberg Zemeckis utilizes a lot of things he learned from Spielberg. For example the film is full of Spielberg oners. There is even a discussion that perhaps Zemeckis does Spielberg oners better than Spielberg himself. But I think then we are already looking at a kind of different breed of oners, called the Zemeckis oner. It is very similar to the Spielberg's oner, as in it is designed not to call attention to itself, but it is not as high energy as a Spielberg's oner. Spielberg tend to use oners in scenes where otherwise there would be a normal short-reverse-shot coverage. And a oner makes him not be bored on set. Zemeckis, it seems, uses oners for suspense. Which is a bit different.
There are not a lot of movies that would influence you directly. Some might suggest possible techniques. Like say watching a Steven Spielberg movie might inspire you to do very interesting camera moves. This movie though literally changed the direction I wanted to go into.
To be frank, Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence dealt with those themes, in my opinion a bit better. There Spielberg made visuals reminiscent of Holocaust to provoke the same questions. Here it's more an international war type thing. And perhaps The Creator is too much of an action film, for the message to be clear.
Also the film has one of the most pumped up energetic bisexual love triangles. And, oh man, the energy of this film is on the level of something like Damien Chazelle's Babylon. The movie just goes full speed and never takes a break. There were a few cuts to the next scene that were kind of strange, flow-wise. Sometimes the movie just needs to introduce a new thing and it momentarily slows down to do so. So yeah, I'm not claiming that Verhoeven is as good as Chazelle or Spielberg when it comes to flow. But he is damn close.
Rajamouli has a nearly god status in India. Every one of the films I saw from him ( I didn't see all of them yet ) are good films. Though as you might expect from Indian cinema, they are all over the top action movies. Watching RRR recently I noticed that Rajamouli actively employs some Spielbergian techniques. Such as shooting through objects, shooting through mirrors and staging complex long shots which have a lot of layers of movement. But on the whole, his style resembles more John Woo than Spielberg. The action is so intense and so over the top that it's at times comical. But it is awesome to look at.
You know this meme of a guy sweating so hard that it looks like water squirts out of him? Well this is Jordan Peele, the writer and director of Nope. He is phenomenal. You can kind of draw a similarity between Jordan Peele's style to somebody like Denis Villeneuve. A lot of breathable slow shots. A good understanding of the size of the screen in the cinema. And the proportion of things on screen in relation to that. He isn't too Spielbergian, but can go quite Spielbergian if he wants to. And Nope has a few good Spielbergian moments in it. Including a few good Spielberg oners. Or should I say Peele oners? Though unlike Villeneuve, Peele is more playful. He lets the movie be silly if that's gonna make it better. While Villeneuve seems to never allow it.
Steven Spielberg said something about Stanley Kubrick that is definitely true about this movie. He said that Stanley Kubrick's films are unpredictable. And there were a lot of moments in this one where I was utterly surprised. Kubrick's direction and sense of flow makes it so it's hard to anticipate what will happen next.
I would say that Babylon, the 2022 film directed by Damien Chazelle is Damien Chazelle's 1941. I wrote an article describing how 1941 is the ultimate Steven Spielberg movie and how there is a certain type of over the top insanity you can expect from a good filmmaker going completely unhinged. 1941 wasn't received well. People in the cinema were reportedly closing their ears from the shier amount of loud explosions that happened in the movie. Babylon is the lowest rated movie from Damien Chazelle. But it doesn't mean that the movie is dull, or badly made. Both 1941 and Babylon are explosive insanity-fests showcasing the ability of a good director to maintain focus in an absolute chaos. Both films are incredibly well directed. There are complex shots and interesting cuts all through out. But perhaps they had injected so much energy into the movies that the movies overdosed the audience. And therefor received worse reviews.
Edgar Wright tends to play a lot with the cinematic language. And he also enjoys himself a complex shot or two. Which he is not shying away from in this movie. To be Frank, Wright is not quite Spielbergian. Spielberg, when doing complex shots, tends to make them invisible. So while watching the movie, you don't actually notice the fact that the shot is complex. And he does it primarily for the story of the film. Edgar Wright likes to show off a little bit more. Which brings me to an interesting theory. The most showy long shot Spielberg ever done was towards the end of Adventures Of Tintin. Which Edgar Write co-wrote. Perhaps Edgar pushed Steve to show off a little. Who knows?
Similar to Spielberg's The Terminal and the fictional country of Krakozhia, the movie also has a fictional country roughly from the same geographic region. This one is called Schlupsk. Though while the movie treats Schlupsk as a country, maybe they are referring to Słupsk which is a city in Poland. Which would both make sense geographically and would explain the character's dislike of Polish people. The movie also has a lot of references to the Kazachs which are associated with the Ukraine more. A home country of Seth Rogen's ancestors.
Branagh often tries to mimic Spielberg. For example, he likes to move his camera a lot and do long takes with camera ballet. But unlike Spielberg, in Branagh movies this is much more noticeable. He isn't very subtle when designing complex camera moves. In A Haunting In Venice I didn't see any of that. He was surprisingly restricted. And I think it's because he wanted to invoke a different feeling. A more spooky feeling. And for that he designed a whole new style. A style that works fantastically, by the way.
So I thought about a slasher monster horror film involving a bunch of teens. The movie would be about a group of teens who are killed by a monster one by one, untill everyone is dead. And in the end the monster should break the ground, rise to unbelievable height and then eat the two remaining characters, while they are confessing to each other that they love each other. As you can tell I was still very much influenced by Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds.
Anyway. I remember sneaking out of bed during one night and using mom's laptop to watch Steven Spielberg's War Of The Worlds. I even remember seeing a part of the movie in a toilet since I was so emerged in the story that I didn't want to press pause.
I was fascinated at that point with the story about the making of Dunkirk, the 2017 Christopher Nolan movie about World War II. It was rated PG-13, while everything else about this subject matter was rated R and a lot of people got upset that Christopher Nolan was afraid to show guts. But Nolan himself explained that in preparation to the filming, he watched Saving Private Ryan ( a very violent Steven Spielberg film about that war ) and saw that other people tend to close their eyes in moment of absolute horror. So they don't actually see the movie. And they miss on tension, immersion and ultimately they are not scared in the end. So to scare the audience about the war, he needed to show death and suffering without the death and the suffering being unpleasant to look at on the screen. And for that kosher approach he got the PG-13 rating.
Since long time ago I was fascinated with stories of success. And since long time ago I was arrogant enough believing that I was destined to success myself. Maybe some of it was my mother's fault. She used to tell me how utterly perfect I am. But since she died from alcohol poisoning I started to become way more sober and instead of success I have depression now. Imagine growing up thinking you will be the next Steven Spielberg, just wait and those dumb hoards of people will recognize your unstoppable talents, just to realize that you are a worthless piece of shit and nobody wants nothing from you.
Often it is required of a storyteller to say less in order to say more. Steven Spielberg had to censor the most gruesome parts of the holocaust in order to make a movie that was actually watchable, and his intuition was arguably right. The movie ended up being a hit, exposing millions upon millions of people to the the holocaust. But it wasn't the horror. It was a watered down version, made so people would not be too upset watching it. The reality of the situation was so much worse that Spielberg didn't even think a movie showing the actual truth was possible. Nobody would be brave or masochistic enough, he thought, to actually see it. A similar story happened to Dunkirk, another World War II movie, this time by Christopher Nolan, who deliberately avoided the worst aspects of a war film to make a film which the audience could watch without taking their eyes from the screen, and as a result, a film that is arguably scarier because of that. Nolan's masterful management of tension is so good that the movie doesn't need violence and blood to be visceral. And yet, to some extent the movie is a watered down version of what war supposed to be. And some argue it is a lesser film because of it.
When it came to films. She herself liked war films a lot. So we watched them. There were other things. Like a series about Russian truck drivers that go into all kinds of trouble. It was not meant for kids. I remember nudity in it. I remember watching Total Recall on TV with her. And I remember being horrified by the ending where Arnold goes outside on the Mars surface and his eye blow up. The TV stations very liked to show Minority Report directed by Steven Spielberg. I really loved that film. And still love that film to this day. It is just littered with complexities. It's amazing.
Anyway, for the last few weeks or so ( roughly since I watched The Fabelmans in the cinema ) I've experienced a kind of intense writer's block which manifested itself in my utter inability to concentrate. At first I just thought I was upset by Steven Spielberg making a movie about himself which becomes popular. While I have less than a hundred views on a teaser for Moria's Race. Then I thought that I've overdosed on caffeine, but since then I didn't drink no coffee and the feeling is still here.
- I didn't let myself watch Steven Spielberg's "AI - Artificial Intelligence" ( aka the best film ever made ) until I finish I'm Not Even Human. And what a relief it was to finally ( some years later ) see AI when I finished I'm Not Even Human.
- People even spread rumors that Steven Spielberg, a director who recently made a handful of pro-freedom political movies, is some kind of child molester too.