Word: spielbergisms
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What Oprah wants, Oprah gets. She has, after all, earned an Oscar nomination for her first movie part, in Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple. For more than a decade she has dominated the afternoon airwaves with her syndicated talk show. She is among the nation's most admired and influential people. Now, 11 years after first reading the Morrison novel, here she is as the producer of what she told screenwriter Richard LaGravenese would be "my Schindler's List": a pristine, potent distillation of Beloved, which opens Oct. 16. And there she is onscreen as Sethe. Or rather...
...year of the story's life; the surrounding woods and streams are limned in lustrous imagery. But the whole picture, with its flashes of desaturated color and reversal film stock, is a visual trip. In one sense, this ranks as Demme's most adventurous and painterly film. Like Spielberg, another movie boy wonder in his 50s, Demme has made a new movie that plunders and enriches the cinematic vocabulary...
Almost assuredly a major player in late-year awards tallies, Steven Spielberg's war drama was more coherent and less lazily rhetorical than 1997's Amistad. In fact, it seems churlish to take anything away from a film with such a unanimously powerful opening, with two pitch-perfect supporting turns from Jeremy Davies (the milk-livered translator) and Barry Pepper (the born-again sharpshooter), and an attention to history that is emotionally edifying and alive. Still, the connecting material by which Robert Rodat's script moves from the opening battle sequence to the last is less than wholly compelling...
Sometimes it really is a small, small world. Next week DreamWorks--the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen--opens its first cartoon feature, Antz. The computer-animated story of life in an ant colony, Antz features the voices of Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone and Dan Aykroyd. In November Pixar, the creator of Toy Story, and Disney, the studio where Katzenberg was chairman for 10 years, plan to release A Bug's Life, which also happens to be the computer-animated story of life in an ant colony. It features the voices of NewsRadio...
Nobody wants to deny Spielberg his success. A scrappy kid who dropped out of film school, he's earned his reputation as a media mogul and magician. But it would be a relief to find him working with material that doesn't come with built-in compassion and grandeur, that instead explores the textures and ironies of everyday life. Saving Private Ryan, though emotionally staggering, leaves no room for discourse--which is why one can walk away feeling simultaneously weepy and cheated...