Word: spielbergism
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Blame it on Spielberg and Lucas. The momentous rise of Jaws in 1975 and the astonishing popularity of Star Wars two year later are now widely recognized as gilded nooses - pinnacles of plebeian filmmaking that regrettably turned studio heads away from craftsmanship towards greener pastures. Marketing budgets ballooned to rival production costs, strategic release date positioning during the summer months became essential and, as you mentioned, inexplicable sequels popped up left and right. Studios now saw it fit to accompany Psycho with three full remakes, investing in tag lines like, “Norman Bates is back to normal...
...brilliant stories of Philip K. Dick, Eternal Sunshine has a plot propulsion that's almost Spielbergian in its simplicity. A gentle creature gets lost and must fight to get back home--home here being his mind and his girlfriend, or what's left of them. The Spielberg movie this one most resembles is Always, in which a dead man tries to reconnect with his surviving wife...
...Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ couldn't seem farther apart. Gibson's film is accused of fanning hatred against the Jews; Spielberg's, which won the Best Picture Oscar and six others in 1994, dramatizes the toxic effects of that hatred, and the ability of one man--the gentile factory owner Oskar Schindler--to save 1,200 Jews in Poland during the Nazi Occupation. The two movies are kin, though, as serious, violent historical dramas made against great odds--and as personal testaments that, their directors have said, transformed them...
Schindler's List did more than earn Spielberg some long-overdue respect as a serious filmmaker. It spurred him to create the Shoah Visual History Foundation, through which survivors of the Nazi Holocaust bear witness to the ordeals they suffered, the families they lost, the ideals they held high. He continues that good effort in this DVD's extras, particularly a 77-min. documentary, Michael Mayhew's Voices from the List, which assembles recollections of the Schindlerjuden and others who outlived the Nazi madness...
...another DVD extra, narrator Morgan Freeman insists on the role of these survivor-storytellers in teaching the young about bigotry. "Could it change the world? The Shoah Foundation knows it can." That seems an impossible quest. But what Schindler accomplished, Spielberg hopes to carry...