Word: spielbergism
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...Spielberg places kids at the heart of E.T., and properly so. In a way, the choice is one of artistic convenience, because Spielberg has never really grown up. He has little insight into how mature characters function, and it shows in this film: Elliot’s single mother, who remains ignorant of E.T.’s presence far longer than she realistically could (a scene in which her daughter blatantly announces a speaking, moving E.T.’s proximity to her requires the mother to be improbably dense); the kindly scientist, who serves solely as a personal...
...Spielberg knows kids inside and out, and E.T.’s children are true-to-life—cocky, energetic and driven alternately by their cravings for mischief-making and discovery. Spielberg’s connection to them enables him to build their scenes from oh-so-genuine moments of gesture and action, endowing these scenes with a realism that whisks the story from well-observed incident to well-observed incident. The paper-ball fight on Elliot’s bus was a staple of my middle school afternoons, and doubtless Elliot’s feigning illness by warming...
...union of their spirits serves, on a crucial level, to amplify the film’s ability to evoke a sense of wonder in the audience. This is a key practice for Spielberg; his films feed the soul far more than they do the mind. Spielberg is not, in the end, a director who pays inordinate attention to a film’s characterizations, pace or intelligence; he will take an awe-inspiring visual over a smart line any day. At this philosophy’s extreme—the climactic Close Encounters of the Third Kind setpiece, for example?...
...does not drag in the pretentious fashion of Close Encounters—indeed, it feels far shorter than its two hour running time. It does not present its ideas in a terribly new light, but it has heart and it shows us some truth. Spielberg, for his part, keeps dishonest audience manipulation at a low level by his standards, though he can’t resist giving E.T. a sudden late-movie illness to raise the film’s tear-jerking quotient. Those who decry E.T.’s loss of the 1982 Best Picture Oscar to Gandhi...
Directed By Steven Spielberg...