Napoleon by Kubrick by Spielberg

The latest buzz in the movie world is Steven Spielberg's latest project: developing Stanley Kubrick's famously-aborted Napoleon project as a TV miniseries. Spielberg and Kubrick collaborated on A.I., with Spielberg finishing that movie after Kubrick's death. Kubrick's family have given their consent for this adaptation.

Spielberg and Kubrick's sensibilities don't really mesh, in this blogger's opinion. The screenplay is as an epic character study/period piece like Barry Lyndon, laced with Kubrick's customary cynicism, a far cry from Spielberg's mass. On the other hand, Lincoln recently showed Spielberg is capable of a cerebral biopic. Let's be cautiously optimistic.

Lincoln

 

Steven Spielberg has long been a bipolar filmmaker. On the one hand there's the blockbuster king whose Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. take matinee fun to stratospheric heights. Since the '80s however, there's also been the serious director tackling difficult historical topics: The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Munich. Spielberg's been accused of simplification, grandstanding and sentimentality, and not without justification. It's difficult, if not distasteful, to make a popular Holocaust film. Sticking to killer sharks and dinosaurs is safer.

Spielberg finally found the perfect adult topic with Lincoln. Loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, this cerebral epic mixes biopic and political thriller into an uncharacteristically complex movie. At its center is Daniel Day-Lewis, who brings our 16th President to extraordinary life.

Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) hopes to start his second term by passing the 13th Amendment to outlaw slavery. But Lincoln faces numerous Congressional obstacles. The Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens (Tommy Lee Jones) distrust Lincoln for his apparent equivocation over slavery and conciliatory attitude towards the South. Moderates led by Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) urge the President to seek a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. And Democrats are uniformly opposed. Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward (David Straitharn) use hook and crook to pass the amendment, while trying to close out the war.

Lincoln proves constantly engaging in spite of its 150 minute length. Munich scribe Tony Kushner gives a caustic, often funny look at 19th Century politics. Secretary Seward employs a trio of fixers (James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson and John Hawkes) to bribe and cajole wavering Congressmen, while the Democrats have their own backdoor methods. Floor debates turn into verbal jousts, with Fernando Wood (Lee Pace) calling Lincoln a tyrant while Republicans demand Wood's head on a pike! At the last second the vote is nearly postponed until Lincoln saves things with just the right half-truth.

Lincoln's greatest achievement is showing the President's handling of slavery. Lincoln has been accused, variously, of being too abolitionist, not abolitionist enough or just a cynical politician who seized slavery as a PR measure. Yet Spielberg shows Lincoln's remarkable restraint reconciling feuding factions in a war-torn nation. Lincoln eloquently explains why immediate abolition is impractical: it would drive Maryland and Kentucky to the South, anger Democrats and divide the Union amongst itself. Yet he also refuses an offer to end the war with slavery intact. Whatever his convictions, Lincoln is not a dictator but must achieve abolition through tortured compromise.

This leads to another thorny area. Lincoln has extraordinary powers as a wartime President, unilaterally raising militia, suspending habeas corpus and outlaw slavery in rebellious states. Are these justifiable emergency measures or the actions of a tyrant? Lincoln himself acknowledges the dubious legality of his actions, but argues the extremity of a house divided necessitates them. This leads to a classic political dilemma: do ends justify means, even when abolishing slavery or winning a war? When does the chief executive overstep his bounds? Rarely has a Hollywood film addressed these matters so cogently.

Honest Abe's personal life isn't ignored either. His marriage with Mary Todd (Sally Field) is fractious yet loving: she's still distraught over son Willie's death and leans on her husband for sanity. The scene where she tells off Stevens at a dinner party is a beautiful moment. Son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) desperately wants to join the Union Army, feeling he should contribute to the war. Lincoln can disarm most opponents with earthy charm ("Not another story!" bellows one cabinet member) but can't control his family. Spielberg weaves these domestic problems into the story without overemphasis.

Daniel Day-Lewis is flawless. From Lincoln's mannerisms and reedy voice to his penchant for homespun homilies, Day-Lewis is credible in a way no other Lincoln actor (Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Sam Waterston) is. It's a brilliant, three-dimensional characterization, equal parts crafty politician, brilliant lawyer and sensitive humanist. Day-Lewis's layered performance captures them perfectly: he's not an icon, but a man.

Spielberg surrounds Day-Lewis with a rich supporting cast. Tommy Lee Jones nearly steals the show, with a snappy quip and burning glower for every occasion. James Spader proves hilarious as Seward's gleefully amoral fixer. David Straitharn's crafty Seward provides perfect balance to his flamboyant co-stars. Sally Field gets several effective scenes but Joseph Gordon-Levitt seems almost an afterthought. Hal Holbrook's cantankerous party elder, Jackie Earl Haley's glowering Confederate Vice President and Lee Pace's obnoxious Copperhead get standout scenes.

Lincoln suffers only modest flaws. Spielberg and photographer Janusz Kaminski go heavy on the iconography, all brooding shadows and angelic shafts of light. There are many cloying moments, from the underwritten black characters who mostly point up Lincoln's virtue to John Williams' portentous score. And the movie could ditch the last 10-15 minutes without suffering much. But then modest Spielberg excess provides only a slight gloss on a remarkable film.

Ben Shapiro is a Big Honking Doofus

Ben at work on his latest piece: "How Liberals Crushed My Nose"

One-tenth score years and nine months ago, I first encountered Ben Shapiro. He made his bones with gasbag Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, squawking about "liberal Hollywood" and showing a complete ignorance of cinema, logic and Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I made a punching bag out of this preening douche nozzle twice (here and here) before moving on to more productive blogging.

Over the weekend I encountered Mr. Shapiro on Front Page Magazine, the neocon hate rag whose raison d'être is assuring readers that a) all Muslims everywhere are out to get us, b) universities are hotbeds of Communism, c) David Horowitz regrets blowing his parents' money on pot in college. In other words, the perfect place for an aspiring crank like Ben.

(Oops, I just violated my political gag order. Offended readers need not read further.)

Ben's latest piece, The Left's Lincoln, is a model of vacuity. Ostensibly previewing Steven Spielberg's upcoming Lincoln, he displays a remarkable ignorance of history, movies and politics in an article he likely hammered out in 20 minutes. Even if you're expecting an article on liberal misuse of Lincoln iconography, you'll be disappointed.

Ben starts off expressing disgust at "radical gay leftist Tony Kushner" writing the screenplay. It's hard to know what disgusts our Michael Medved wannabe more: Kushner's politics or his sexual orientation. Nice of Ben to set the tone immediately.

For an article with that title, you might expect a historical analysis of Lincoln as conservative. Right wingers love to crow about the GOP's laudable early history as an abolitionist "free soil" party and protector of freedmen. (Or most do: a certain strand of libertarian/paleoconservative thought views Lincoln as a repressive tyrant.) Easy subject for an article, right?

Ben does write politics in his spare time, so he's (theoretically) qualified to opine. What does his political/historical analysis amount to? Responding to a Spielberg quote about the GOP and Democrats changing sides on racial issues, Mr. Shapiro writes:

"Well, actually, it’s not a whole other story. Because it’s not even close to a true story. The Republican and Democratic Parties never “traded political places.” Racism is still the preserve of the Democratic Party, which utilizes skin color as a political tool; color-blindness is still the preserve of the Republican Party. There is a reason that Senator Robert Byrd (WV), a one-time member of the KKK was considered the Democratic conscience of the Senate until his death in 2010. There’s a reason segregationists like George Wallace were Democrats. The Democratic Party never flip-flopped with the Republican Party. It just hid its racism beneath a veneer of reverse racism."

There's so much gaping illogic here I don't know where to start. The Democratic Party had a long and shameful history of endorsing slavery and segregation. This however was put paid by Democratic Presidents ushering through the Civil Rights Act and related legislation in the '60s. When millions of conservative Democrats fled the party, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon eagerly snatched them up by campaigning on identical "States Rights" arguments. It shouldn't need said which party currently invokes states rights in arguments over gay marriage, abortion and government bailouts. The idea that the GOP and Democratic Party hold identical positions to what they did 50 years ago, let alone 150, is simply ludicrous.

Further, Byrd and Wallace both repudiated racism late in life. This stands in contrast to, say, Strom Thurmond, who switched parties over Civil Rights and never offered more than a token recantation. The comment about "racism beneath a veneer of reverse racism" is a masterpiece of doubletalk. And a member of a party who's spent the last four years caricaturing the President as a Kenyan Muslim Communist cannot claim "color-blindness" without seeming idiotic.

The rest of the article drops even this modest line of historical inquiry. Ben doesn't argue whether Lincoln was a liberal or conservative. Instead, he bashes Spielberg's filmography, saying for instance:

"A film like Saving Private Ryan puts an antiwar gloss on the most pro-human rights war in the history of humanity. When the character Sgt. Horvath explains, “Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess,” that’s a pathetic statement given that this conflict was about defeating the worst threat to humanity and humane values ever unleashed."

Shapiro, have you even seen the movie? Saving Private Ryan is possibly the purest embodiment of Greatest Generation cultural iconography. One line taken out of context, arguing that war is a nasty experience, is used to argue a movie is "anti-war." Go play with your plastic army men, Ben.

"A films [sic] like Amistad, which revolves around a slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship and the subsequent trial in the United States — portray white abolitionists as selfish folks out for themselves."

Or it's recognition that not everything is (geddit?) black and white. After all, wouldn't you expect evil progressive Spielberg to show abolitionists as faultless heroes?

Jeez, look at that. I don't even like Amistad and Ben's got me defending it. Nice job.

 "In The Color Purple, Spielberg portrays Africa as a grand sort of multicultural place, while the United States is steeped in darkness."

I'll admit I haven't seen The Color Purple. I do remember Amistad showing Cinque and his tribe kidnapped by black slave traders.

"In Munich, the real bad guys are terrorist hunters rather than terrorists – and Israel is so scarred by terrorist hunting that Israelis must move to the United States and abandon their country for absolution."

It does no such thing. Munich shows its heroes dehumanized by a multi-year campaign of assassinating Palestinian terrorists. That is not portraying them as "the real bad guys" unless you inhabit the Manichean mind of a FPM scribbler.

In the Spielberg world, America is the target; only “progressive” forces, reflecting the pacifist, multicultural tendencies of the filmmaker, can cure America of its ills.

What exactly is this Ben? Movies should portray slavery and Jim Crow in a positive light? All war movies should reflect Gunga Din's childhood game mentality? Did you miss the literal flag waving at the open and close of Saving Private Ryan? And didn't you just note that Amistad portrays its "progressive forces" in a dubious light?

To repeat: Ben wouldn't know consistency if it crawled up his rectum and died.

Spielberg, ironically enough, ignores the gory, ugly, beautiful tapestry of the history of the United States page by page – a true story that would bring to light unique and fascinating elements of human nature.

QED. Above, Ben apparently doesn't think negative aspects of American history should be portrayed on film. So what "ugly" and "gory" aspects does he now want included?

We'll never know. Rather than elaborate on the above paragraph, Ben segues into...

"Spielberg's history... is the story of “progress” toward today’s Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams from Amistad would be a Clinton voter; Lincoln would be a fan of Obama;"

I agree that it's morally dicey, at best, to use historical figures as avatars for contemporary causes. On the other hand, Lincoln and Amistad are works of fiction. I doubt Ben has a problem with Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly using dead presidents in ostensibly non-fiction books to parrot modern conservatism.

"by the end of Munich the protagonist would want to sign up for a tour with the Gaza Flotilla."

It wouldn't be a FPM article without insulting Muslims.

To recap: Badly written? Check. Politically and historically ignorant? Check. Vague and unsubstantiated analysis? Check. Comments on movies that give no indication he actually saw them? Definitely. Wildly inconsistent? That's a bingo! It must be a Ben Shapiro.

Groggy tries not to be overtly political save for extreme circumstances. But this articles intertwines three issues I feel passionate about: movies, history and decent writing. So I feel justified in spouting off, just a little. Ben, please join Armond White in the piranha pool.

"Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, Kurosawa buff or Chris Nolan fan, the one thing we can all agree on: Ben Shapiro is a BIG HONKING DOOFUS!" - Dan Rydell

New movie review tomorrow.

Indiana Jones: The Sequels

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's first Indiana Jones collaboration, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is almost unanimously regarded a classic adventure film. Their three sequels (not to mention the very good Young Indiana Jones TV series) have a more mixed reputation. Each has their fans, but also detractors.

In this review, I'll take a look at the first two Indy sequels: Temple of Doom (1984) and The Last Crusade (1989). Despite near-constant TV showings I'd never seen either film the whole way through until now. I caught Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in theaters way back in 2008, and may revisit it for completeness's sake.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)



Temple of Doom is a very unsatisfying sequel. The movie gets a lot of flack for its un-PC portrayal of India, but it has bigger problems: Doom just lacks the flare and excitement of the original. From its dull narrative to the annoying sidekicks, it's a near-complete misfire.

After escaping the clutches of a Shanghai crime lord, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) ends up in India with nightclub singer Willy Scott (Kate Capshaw) and precocious Chinese kid Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) in tow. While on the way to Delhi, Indy and Co. stumble across a village claiming to be victimized by the Thuggee cult. A local ruler (Roshan Seth) scoffs at these claims, but Indy soons finds out the truth: the Thugs are alive and well, operating a mine with child slaves and scheming to convert the entire world to Hinduism.

Temple of Doom gets off to a pitch-perfect start. The early Shanghai scenes are clever (a Mandarin song-and-dance number to Anything Goes) and exciting, and get us in the right frame of mind. Unfortunately, once we reach India the film takes a nosedive. The entire second half takes place in the titular temple and mines, and with no narrative thrust things grow tedious. Spielberg amps up the gore and wild action scenes but it doesn't amount to much excitement; we're just happy that the last 10 minutes takes place outdoors.

Besides lifting the plot and several setpieces wholesale from Gunga Din, Temple of Doom unfortunately appropriates that film's racial and religious politics. There are bloodthirsty Thugs who "kill for the sake of killing," grotesque gags about eating monkey brains, and something as inappropriate as a voodoo doll (!) crops up. An adventure film in 1939 could get away with it; a movie from the era of Gandhi, Heat and Dust and A Passage to India has no excuse. Of course, if Temple were more entertaining we could overlook its political incorrectness.

Harrison Ford has to carry the film himself, and he's more than up to the task. The movie's best gag has Indy preparing to replicate Raiders's "shoot first" scene, only to find he's missing a pistol! Kate Capshaw's whiny damsel in distress is unbearably obnoxious; we definitely miss Karen Allen. Jonathan Ke Quan's Short Round is cute at first but quickly wears out his welcome. Amrish Puri makes a ferocious villain, but Roshan Seth (Gandhi) and Phillip Stone's (The Shining) characters seem to have been left on the cutting room floor.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)



After Temple of Doom's mixed reception, Spielberg and Lucas successfully returned to the original film's template. If The Last Crusade is overly reminiscent of Raiders, it's certainly more dynamic and enjoyable than Temple, not the least from its fun teaming of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.

A few years after his Ark of the Covenant adventure, Indy is approached by archaeologist Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) to help track down the Holy Grail. Those damned Nazis, this time led by Colonel Vogel (Michael Byrne) and duplicitous Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), have kidnapped Jones' archaeologist father (Sean Connery), who has a lifelong obsession with the Grail - and a strained relationship with his son. Reteaming with old pals Professor Brody (Denholm Elliot) and Salah (John Rhys-Davies), Indy and Jones Sr. race the Nazis through Venice and the Middle East, where another temple holds the object of their quest.

Crusade takes awhile to get going, with a long and borderline superfluous prologue of a young Indy adventure (featuring River Phoenix). Unlike Temple, however, the film moves, with a variety of locations (Venice, Petra in Jordan) and creative action scenes providing thrills. The slugfest atop a moving tank rivals the original's big chase scene, and the clever puzzles in the finale are properly tense. Indy's testy father-son relationship adds another layer to his character without bogging down the narrative. Raiders comparisons are hard to avoid, with its biblical artifacts, booby trapped temples, carbon-copy villains and similar gross-out effects, but we don't really care. It's better to see familiar ground well-covered than a botched "original" story.

Sean Connery is inspired casting as Indy's dad; he and Ford have great chemistry, and Connery brings a perfect tongue-in-cheek attitude to the role. Denholm Elliot and John Rhys-Davies reprise their roles from Raiders, with Elliot especially getting a lot more to do. Unfortunately, villains Julian Glover (The Young Victoria) and Michael Byrne (A Bridge Too Far) and pale next to Paul Freeman and Wolf Kahler, while Alison Doody's interesting character is underused. Vernon Dobtchef (The Day of the Jackal) has a tiny bit.

I think Steven Spielberg has taken up enough of my time for now, and maybe we can return to more substantial fare soon. Happy New Years to my readers!

War Horse

Steven Spielberg's new live action offering is a mixed bag. More syrupy than an IHOP breakfast, War Horse has enough striking scenes to make it worth watching.

Devon farmer Ted Narracut (Peter Mullan) buys thoroughbred horse Joey at an auction. His son Albie (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the horse and gets him to plow the family fields, foiling the dastardly schemes of landowner Lyons (David Thewlis). When World War I breaks out, Ted sells Joey to the British army, and the horse goes through a nightmarish odyssey. Joey serves successively as a British cavalry horse, an ambulance driver, the pet of a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her doting grandfather (Niels Arestrup), and a German artillery horse, somehow managing to survive each encounter. At the Second Battle of the Somme he escapes captivity and reunites with Albie, now serving in the British army. But will the badly injured horse survive?

Steven Spielberg has never shied away from sentimentality, but War Horse takes it to an almost-unbearable extreme. The first half-hour is an assembly of obnoxious cliches: precocious kid, broken-down father, long-suffering wife, underdog horse, a mustache-twirling landowner demanding rent and an impossible goal to save the farm. No emotional scene is unaccompanied by ennobling lighting and pompous John Williams music, least of all the Gone With the Wind-inspired finale. John Ford and Frank Capra would blanch at this emotive excess.

Once this preliminary nonsense is disposed of, War Horse gets a lot more interesting. Writers Richard Curtis and Lee Hall provide an episodic structure, allowing Joey (and the audience) to meet a cross-section of vividly-rendered personages. Spielberg takes the war content seriously, showing the Western Front as a repository of suffering and waste. Civilians are displaced from their homes, families separated, soldiers killed at random. Animals like Joey are cruelly worked to death, even more disposable than their human counterparts. Even his miraculous escape from No Man's Land might not save him.

Spielberg's direction is handsome, contrasting idyllic shots of the Devon countryside with the ugliness of war-torn Europe. If he goes overboard in spots, he shows a more sensitive touch in other scenes, especially the extended sequences with the French girl, and a scene where British and German soldiers team up to free Joey from barbed wire. The quiet human scenes are more effective than the overwrought "arty" bits.

The battle scenes are shot in approved Hayes Code fashion, with the gory details tastefully obscured. My favorite bit is a cavalry charge gone disastrously wrong, with a beautiful shot of riderless horses hurtling through the German lines. The large-scale Somme battle is less inspired, with a tracking shot blatantly stolen from Paths of Glory.

Newcomer Jeremy Irvine is boringly guileless and weepy, allowing Joey to steal their every scene. The supporting cast is better. Emily Watson and Pete Mullan shine as Albie's hard-luck parents: screw the kid, these two deserve a movie of their own. The best characters come in the war scenes: Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch as British cavalrymen with anachronistic views of warfare, Leonard Carrow and David Kross (The Reader) as a pair of ill-fated German soldiers, and best of all, Celine Buckens (surprisingly uncutesy) and Niels Arestrup.

Whether War Horse is appealing depends on one's temprament. It's grandly cliched and sugary enough to kill a diabetic, but these qualities make it comfortable viewing. The "old-fashioned" label certainly applies; I leave it to the viewer whether that's good or bad.

The Adventures of Tintin

Again I claim ignorance of a very popular literary property: Belgian artist Herge's Tintin comics have found loving audiences for over 80 years, yet I only know them by reputation. Please take this into account for my review of The Adventures of Tintin. In his animated feature debut, Steven Spielberg presents an entertaining, if disposable, motion capture adaptation.

Intrepid reporter Tintin (voice of Jamie Bell) and his fox terrier Snowy buy a model of the sailing ship Unicorn at a market, little realizing this will launch them on an epic caper. Sinister Ivan Sakhrain (Daniel Craig) demands the model, which Tintin soon discovers contains a clue to a hidden treasure. Tintin and Snowy are kidnapped by Sakhrain, and team up with the drunken Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose whiskey-soaked memory holds the key to the Unicorn mystery. Their adventure takes them across the sea to Morocco, where another model of the Unicorn lay in wait.

Tintin starts a bit awkwardly, launching its story with perhaps undue haste. But it quickly gains its own momentum, engrossing its audience in a unique universe. Several reviewers have compared Tintin to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the go-for-broke action scenes certainly rival Indy's exploits. The frenetic chase through a Moroccan bazaar, ludicrously building in true Spielberg fashion, is the best action scene I've seen in quite some time, though the lengthy pirate flashback is probably the film's highlight. The characters remain ciphers and the plot is super-thin, but these are technicalities in a story like this.

The decision to use motion capture irked many Tintin fans, who feel it doesn't (or couldn't) capture Herge's distinct visual style. This uninitiated reviewer thought it worked just fine: the characters look almost real, but are still able to engage in cartoon antics without live action constraints. Spielberg keeps the comic book origins intact with its oddball characters, vivid rendering of exotic locales, and even "deep focus" shots with action-heavy backgrounds. Viewers looking for escapsim won't have any qualms.

Jamie Bell is a very likeable Tintin, but Andy Serkis's drunken, lovably boisterous Captain Haddock is the real show-stealer. Well-known voices like Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Toby Jones and Cary Elwes populate supporting roles.

I can't rate The Adventures of Tintin as an adaptiation of Herge, but I will recommend it as breezy escapism. No masterpiece, its modest charms make for enjoyable viewing.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is first-rate matinee entertainment. Cartoonish, contrived and corny, it's also lots of fun delivered at breakneck speed. From its kickass hero to the great action scenes, it's a well-crafted, effortlessly enjoyable and unpretentious piece of work.

1936. American archaeologist Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is recruited by US Army intelligence to track down the Staff of Ra, an Egyptian relic which shows the way to the Ark of the Covenant. Seems Adolf Hitler has a team of archaeologists (and soldiers) combing the Egyptian desert for the relic, hoping to put the Ark to nefarious use. Indy treks across the globe, enlisting the reluctant help of old flame Marian Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and Egyptian excavator Sala (John Rhys-Davies) to foil the Nazis, who are led by Jones's arch-rival Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman).

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a goofy throwback to '30s adventure serials and imperial epics like The Four Feathers and North West Frontier. Everything here is in lighthearted, cartoonish fun, from the broadly-drawn characters to the daffy story and deus ex machina ending, all without a pretense towards seriousness or realism. Indy's cartoon resiliency puts John Wayne and Errol Flynn to shame, taking punches, bullets, falls and riding a submerged U-boat (!) with scarcely a grimace (except where snakes are involved). Political correctness and plot logic are out the window: with a film like this, it's best not to spend too much time thinking over details, lest you go insane.

Like most of Spielberg's entertainment films (Jaws, Jurassic Park), the movie has a "thrill-ride" structure that careens wildly from one set-piece to the next. Lawrence Kasdan's script takes us all over the world, from the jungles of South America and the mountains of Nepal to the Egyptian desert and the Aegean Sea. The movie is so fast-paced it never loses steam: character development is fairly rote, but Kasdan's sharp dialogue gives it a witty kick, John Williams's rousing score sets the tone of high adventure and a perfect cast makes the right impressions.

Spielberg's direction is assured, providing nice African location work, unforgettable special effects courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, and delivering a set of gob-smacking action scenes. The action is too varied to become boring, each set piece building on the last: Indy's escape from the snake pit leads to a slugfest with a hulking German goon, which in turn spills over into a lengthy truck chase across the desert. The film's best scene, however, is Indy's face-off with a showboating swordsman, a hilarious bit exemplifying Eli Wallach's dictum from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: "When you've gotta shoot, shoot, don't talk!"

Harrison Ford gives an impressive star turn. He'd already made a name for himself as the wisecracking Han Solo in Lucas's Star Wars films but Indiana Jones ensured his status as a cinematic legend. Not an especially good actor, Ford's rugged charisma served him perfectly in action films like this, and his Indy is definitely one of cinema's iconic heroes, improbably tough and indestructible yet charmingly snide and down-to-earth.

Karen Allen makes a wonderful love interest, feisty yet feminine, and every bit Indy's match. Paul Freeman (The Dogs of War) gets the choice role as Belloq, Indy's slimy yet charming arch-nemesis. Ronald Lacey's (Zulu Dawn) toad-like Gestapo man makes a strong impression despite little screen time; just seeing this creep is enough to scare the bejesus out of you. Wolf Kahler (Barry Lyndon) is good, if less colorful, as a conventionally Teutonic villain. John Rhys-Davies (Lord of the Rings) avoids the pitfalls of stereotype with a fun performance, though Denholm Elliot (A Bridge Too Far) is wasted in a throwaway cameo.

Raiders of the Lost Ark comes highly recommended. It's certainly disposable, and not Spielberg's best work, but hey, sometimes brainless fun is all you need.

Jaws

Jaws is the grand-daddy of all modern blockbusters. Demolishing existing box-office records, Steven Spielberg's shark tale set new standards for popular cinema: neat special effects, slick storytelling and thrill-ride structure appealing to teens and young adults, a lucrative market previously tapped only by cheesy AIP flicks. Filmgoers devoured it, and made Spielberg the king of Hollywood, only to be topped by George Lucas two years later.

One could argue that Jaws's impact was ultimately negative, opening the door for thirty-five years of mindless, explosion-filled, special-effects laden bombs. It's hard to deny, though, that Jaws itself is a phenomenal film, turning Peter Benchley's potboiler into a perfect, well-oiled crowd-pleaser. It may not be not great art but it sure as hell is great entertainment.

The idyllic New England resort town of Amity is turned upside down when two people are killed by a great white shark. Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) tries to close the beaches, only to be stonewalled by the Mayor (Murray Hamilton): it's the height of tourist season, and word of a shark would lose Amity valuable tourist money. A gaggle of dumb bounty hunters kills a shark but Brody and shark expert Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) are skeptical that it's the right one. It takes another round of carnage to convince the Mayor, and Brody and Hooper enlist crazy fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) to bring the shark to heel.

Like all "movie brat" films, Jaws is replete with references to Spielberg favorites. Besides obvious Moby-Dick similarities, a "pull-away zoom" lifted from Vertigo and the obligatory homage to The Searchers, the biggest reference point is Them! Gordon Douglas's fine killer bug film clearly informs Jaws, from the collection of motley "specialist" heroes to the initially-unseen menace, the imperiled children and grieving Mother. Both films feature authorities covering up a danger to the community, but with decidedly different implications. Them's "let the government do it's job" attitude is replaced by post-Watergate cynicism: recalling Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, greedy officials lie and people suffer.

Spielberg and his writers (Benchley, Paul Gottlieb, Howard Sackler and John Milius) turn this melange of borrowed ideas into something special. The story is perfectly paced and structured, each scene fitting like a glove, and the film seemlessly transitions from horror to adventure. In the scenes between shark attacks we get wonderful bits of humor, character development and banality: Brody getting hectored by an irate old man, the banter between Brody and his wife (Lorraine Gary), the bumbling morons fishing with a pot roast, the Mayor's reaction to the final shark attack, Quint and Hooper's amusing rivalry. These wonderful slice-of-life vignettes raise Jaws miles above flicks like Transformers, where calling the protagonists "cardboard cutouts" is insulting to cardboard.

The smart script and Spielberg's humanism also skew standard horror crudity. The victims are mostly likeable and we don't get the tiresome trope of sleazy characters getting what they "deserve." Little Alex Kitner's death is obviously jolting, but more affecting is the quiet scene where his indignant mother (Lee Fierro) confronts Brody. There's ample gore but the real horror come from the primal terror at being eaten alive by a humungous shark. Of course, the biggest scare comes from an entirely different source, which I'll not spoil.

The film had a troubled production, with bad weather and a constantly-malfunctioning model shark delaying shooting, but few of the seams show. Spielberg keeps the shark hidden for most of the film; born out of necessity, this conceit enhances the film, ratcheting up the drama and suspense through fear of a lurking unknown. The shark does look fake but it doesn't matter: Quint's grisly demise is more agonizingly "real" than any besides Torn Curtain's murder scene. Brody's last stand is an impossibly intense, heart-stopping climax sure to make viewers stand up and cheer. Bill Butler's photography is superb, from the ominous attack scenes to the spirited seagoing sequences. John Williams's ominous, iconic score provides the perfect backdrop to the film.

Spielberg repeatedly returned to Jaws in his later films. Much of Jurassic Park is lifted wholesale, from the Quint-like Muldoon to the creepy severed limbs. The Lost World morphs Hooper into Vince Vaughn's Earth First vigilante; we're inexplicably expected to cheer for said dumbass as he singlehandedly endangers the whole cast. Whether or not this makes Spielberg an auteur, Jaws is clearly a career cornerstone, and even with his more "serious" work he's yet to top it.

Roy Scheider (Marathon Man) is the perfect Everyman hero and owns the film, even when his colorful co-stars step up to bat. Robert Shaw (A Man for All Seasons) gives perhaps a career-best performance: Quint could easily be a dime-store Ahab, but Shaw infuses him with a perfect mixture of self-effacing ham and tormented gravitas, culminating in the bone-chilling Indianapolis monologue. Richard Dreyfuss (Dillinger) is an amusing if obnoxious character. Murray Hamilton's (The Graduate) fine performance lifts the Mayor above the usual slimy politician. Lorraine Gary, Jeffrey Kramer and Lee Fierro have nice supporting roles.

Jaws is unquestionably Steven Spielberg's masterpiece. The endless parade of mindless blockbusters, not to mention three lackluster sequels and countless rip-offs, have tarnished its reputation. But it would be unfair not to give Spielberg his due: we would be lucky if even a fraction of Hollywood's output were as entertaining as Jaws.

PS: Please read this excellent, exhaustively in-depth analysis of the film by Jabootu. He had a lot more time and patience to analyze this film than me, and it's definitely worth any Jaws fan's time.

Munich

Munich (2005) is arguably Steven Spielberg's best "serious" film. Heavy-handed and didactic at times, it's still one of Hollywood's more intelligent and reasonable takes on terrorism and the moral quandries of combatting it.

The Palestinian terrorist group Black September engineers the kidnapping and massacre of nine Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic games in Munich. Mossad agent Avner Kaufmann (Eric Bana) is personally recruited by a vengeance-minded Golda Meier (Lynn Cohen) to lead a team of crack agents on a deadly assignment: to unleash a campaign of vengeance against Black September, assassinating its leaders by any means necessary. Avner and his colleagues grow increasingly disillusioned by their work, finding their mission complicated by entanglements with the CIA and KGB, as well as a PLO-sanctioned counter-assassination team.

Spielberg and heavyweight scenarists Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) craft a smart look at a complex and troubling issue. Munich walks a tight-rope between condemning the Mossad action and seeing it as a cruel necessity; repeated flashbacks of the Munich massacre remind us that terrorism is a problem for Israel, regardless of the Palestinians' grievances against them. The Palestinians are allowed their say, particularly a nice debate between an undercover Avner and an articulate PLO leader (Omar Metwally), but Spielberg and Co. don't go overboard with moral equivalence either. Compared to the apolitical or stereotyped terrorists who usually populate Hollywood films - Die Hard, anyone? - it's refreshing to see such a thoughtful take on the subject.

The most convincing argument Spielberg and Co. marshal against counter-terrorism is its open-ended nature. The Mossad operation was a success, eliminating most of its targets, but did little to discourage the PLO at large. The scene where Avner and Co. track down a rival killer (the striking Marie-Josee Croze) is a brutal sequence that lays bare the essential nastiness of their mission. At base an act of vengeance, it's morally dubious but perhaps a necessity. By adopting such tactics, however, Israel risks lowering itself to the level of their enemies, a stark quandry Americans have constantly faced post-9/11.

Unfortunately, Spielberg was never a particularly subtle filmmaker, and this is occasionally to Munich's detriment. Throughout the movie we get lengthy scenes of Avner's team debating the ethics of their actions while in the field. Ciaran Hinds's obnoxious character is the worst offender: he's such a constant whiner that a viewer will question how he got attached to the mission in the first place. No doubt some of the Mossad had qualms about their mission, but these scenes ring as false as the commando debates in The Guns of Navarone. Generally speaking, men who kill for a living aren't as philosophical and introspective as Hollywood seems to think - at least not while in the process of killing.

Fortunately, Spielberg works around these rough patches. Munich plays as a slick, stylish thriller, with lots of intense action scenes and moody hand-held (but not shaky) photography thrown in. It doesn't lack for strong set-pieces, particularly the heart-breaking final flashback, even though Spielberg oddly juxtaposes it with a sex scene. The movie is a bit heavy on the homages to past films - an opening TV-watching sequence out of JFK, a hotel liaison from The Day of the Jackal, The Conversation's paranoid apartment-destruction - and a Spielberg-approved family angle is awkwardly worked in, but this sort of thing comes with the territory.

Eric Bana gives a solid performance in a difficult part. Daniel Craig has a superb "before-they-were-famous" role as Avner's fanatical right-hand man. A chameleon-like Geoffrey Rush shines in his spymaster role, making the most of a smallish part. Mathieu Almaric (Quantum of Solace) and Michael Lonsdale (The Day of the Jackal) get solid parts as a pair of anarchist informants.

Despite some rough patches, Munich is, on the whole, a successful movie. Many foreign films - The Battle of Algiers, The Baader-Meinhoff Complex - may have it beat, but Munich is still commendable as a film that's both thoughtful and entertaining.

Jurassic Park

After spending the '80s trying to establish himself as a "serious" director, Steven Spielberg returned to his blockbuster roots with Jurassic Park (1993), arguably his best film since Jaws. Spielberg boils Michael Crichton's jargon-heavy best-seller down to the crudest component parts - scary dinosaurs attacking humans - and creates a well-crafted, absorbing bit of matinee fun.

Scientists of the InGen company have found a way to create genetically-engineered dinosaurs. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) creates a dinosaur theme park, and invites several experts along for a tour: paleontologist Allan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern), and his grandchildren Tim and Lex (Joseph Mazello and Ariana Richards). Things go awry when greedy programmer Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) steals embryos to sell to Hammond's competitor, sabotaging the computer system to affect his getaway. Soon the dinosaurs are on the loose, and our protagonists find themselves under attack by a variety of vicious creatures.

The plot is thin and the characters ciphers, but Spielberg makes Jurassic Park into a near-perfect adventure film. As with Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie is a collection of set-pieces strung together with a bare strand of story. Spielberg makes each scene play out like a theme park ride (hmm), with its own unique thrills: a T-Rex attack, the acid-spitting Dilophosaurus, a truck plummeting out of a tree, climbing an electric fence, hiding in the kitchen from hungry Raptors. It's not a terribly deep film, aside from some musings about Man playing God etc., but that's all for the better: unwarranted pomposity made its immediate sequel, The Lost World (1997), virtually unwatchable.

Dinosaurs are perennially popular with children, and Spielberg creates a perfect mixture of awe and wonder, interspersed with terror. A brilliant mix of animatronics and CGI by Stan Winston and Co. brings the dinosaurs to frightening, vibrant life. The impressive sound design, mixing various animal sounds into terrifying dinosaur roars and growls, also deserves mention, as does John Williams's beautiful, awe-inspiring score. The arrival at the park, where Grant and Co. first encounter a grazing Brachiosaurus, is a surprisingly beautiful moment balanced by the attack scenes later in the film. The T-Rex is a terrifying force of nature, but the intelligent, human-sized Raptors are far more frightening. With creatures like this, we can be glad that dinosaurs are no longer around.

Sam Neill and Laura Dern have fun with paper-thin characters, but acting honors go elsewhere. Richard Attenborough is wonderful, giving Hammond the perfect blend of cheeriness, arrogance and pathos. Jeff Goldblum's neurotic mathematician provides most of the film's humor and steals every scene. Bob Peck is good though Muldoon comes off as a watered-down Quint from Jaws. Wayne Knight (JFK) and Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) have amusing supporting roles. Joseph Mazello and Ariana Richards are onhand as the requisite annoying kids whose computer skills improbably save the day.

Steven Spielberg would eventually gain acclaim as a serious director (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan), but Jurassic Park shows that his greatest talents lie towards mass entertainment. This is not a bad thing: in an era of disposable summer drek, we could use more directors like Spielberg.