Word: spielbergisms
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Directed by Steven Spielberg...
THIS IS ONE instance where black and white would have been better than color. The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's gritty but triumphant novel and Steven Spielberg's debut directing a "serious" film, suffers from too much technicolor, too much flash in the face of the book's grimy realism. Spielberg transforms scenes that portrayed the grim existence of Southern agrarian Blacks into fields of dreamy and idealistic color that resemble an explosion at an Izod Lacoste factory more than they do images of rural life in backwoods Georgia...
...doesn't know. This is pretty horrible stuff, especially for a sixteen-year-old, but some of the disgust we are meant to feel is lost among the wash of color and high quality production. Unable to communicate subtly the extent of the father's shortcomings, Spielberg is forced to rely on a line from the script in which father tells daughter to "hurry up" while she's in labor...
...into cheap sentimentality. Celie learns that Nettie and her own two children by her father are living as missionaries in Africa. As a result, we are treated to dream sequences of elephants crashing through the fields of Georgia. This is one of the film's most colossal flaws: whenever Spielberg has trouble interpreting the text, he slips into the trademark Raidersesque exoticism and trick camera shots-gimmickery which has made him famous but which destroys the tone of the story...
...Pudding established a parallelaward for male entertainers. Recipients includeJames Stewart, Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman,Steven Spielberg, and Bill Murray