Word: spielbergisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...entire season of duds, however, would have been offset by The Mission. The hour-long tale, directed by Spielberg himself, followed a World War II bomber crew on its "bad luck" 23rd mission. The plane's landing gear is knocked out in a dogfight, and a young gunner finds himself trapped inside a turret in the plane's belly. The scenes inside the aircraft had the claustrophobic intensity of Das Boot; the crew members were credibly scared and human; and the suspense built as relentlessly as in Jaws. Despite a fanciful and unsatisfying climax, the show was a small masterpiece...
...most powerful boy in Hollywood without being a man of many faces. There is Steven Spielberg the Good: he directs terrific pictures with sentiment and smarts. There is Steven the Strong: he godfathers Spielberg-style films that soar (Back to the Future) more often than they flop (Young Sherlock Holmes). But from the geriatric elite of Hollywood, Spielberg got no respect--no Oscars, that is. So here comes Steven the Nice, with his first "respectable" motion picture, an adaptation of Alice Walker's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Color Purple. It bears the same relation to his more personal films that...
...narrative style, filled with humor, horror and the obsession to survive, softens Walker's messages: Sisterlove is beautiful, and Men stink. We are inside Celie's head, and for all the tragedies stored there, it is a lovely place to live. It might also seem the perfect spot for Spielberg to visit, since virtually all of his films are about the separation and cathartic reunion of parent and child. The book is full of such wrenching restorations, and for the climax of his movie Spielberg invents one more...
...whole picture is like that: too much of a noble thing. Spielberg has chosen to elegize the story by romanticizing it, swathing the characters in Norman Rockwell attitudes, a meddlesome symphonic score, and a golden fairy dust that shines through the windows like God's blessing. For every scene of raw artistry--as when young Celie's brutal husband "Mr." tears her away from her beloved sister Nettie--there are three others that seem photographed by Rainbow Brite for Hovel Beautiful. The book's famous lesbian encounter between Celie and the charismatic blues singer Shug is played...
...filmmaker as gifted as Spielberg can cow or neuter his talent forever. The Color Purple is speckled with epiphanies, especially in a flash of crosscutting that magically transplants an African plain, where Nettie has gone as a missionary, behind a Georgia bush; Celie looks up from her hymnal and--wham!--a bulldozer crashes through the chancel of Nettie's church thousands of miles away. None of this bravura, though, has liberated the attractive cast. Whoopi Goldberg suffers knowingly as Celie; Danny Glover, as "Mr.," looks vainly for a note to strike besides befuddled menace; Margaret Avery inhabits Shug without illuminating...