Word: spielbergisms
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These films mark returns to prominence by directors who have been working in movies for at least a quarter of a century. But where are the Japanese equivalents of Spielberg and Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese-younger directors who can revitalize the box office and the art form? Some are locked into the industry's tradition-bound system of slow advancement, where experience is rewarded but rarely offered. "This brutal apprenticeship has long controlled the Japanese studio system," notes American Writer-Director Paul Schrader, who will soon go to Japan to film a biography of Novelist Yukio Mishima. "I think...
...mind heaves with possibilities: The Sisters Karamazov? Twelve Angry Ladies'? Young Girl with a Cornet? Mrs. Roberts? How long before the world is treated to a revival of Moby Dick, starring Victoria Principal as Captain Alice and ubiquitous Meryl Streep as the passionate yet complex crew? Or Steven Spielberg's E.T.T.E.? Or Richard Attenborough's epic film biography of the Indian pacifist Blandhi...
...voice into "another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." They grew up, or at least aged, to become successful film makers: John Landis with National Lampoon's Animal House, Joe Dante with The Howling, George Miller with The Road Warrior and Steven Spielberg with half of the megahit movies of the past eight years. But they never forgot The Twilight Zone. In Steven Spielberg's E.T., one teen-ager hypes the spookiness by singing Marius Constant's ding-ding-ding-ding theme from the TV show; and Spielberg's Poltergeist...
...Spielberg's segment (based on a 1962 TV episode called Kick the Can) means to demonstrate his familiar compact with the movie audience: "If you believe, I can make you all feel like children." So speaks the endearing Scatman Crothers, presenting the gift of renewed youth to a home full of old folks. Once again Spielberg is cranking up the magic machine that has served him so well. This time the spell does not hold; one can hear only the machinery, purring like a contented windup kitten...
Dante's episode (from It's a Good Life, aired in 1961) turns the Spielberg ethic on its head and finally gets the movie moving with spooky style. Jeremy Licht plays a boy with monstrous powers, who corrals an ersatz family and bends them to his infantile wishes. In this cartoon nightmare, giant skinned rabbits pop out of hats, and people who talk back have their mouths erased. Like the best Twilight Zone originals, Dante's horror-comic homily provides an oblique moral: youth must not be served, at least not peanut-butter burgers on a paper...