FINAL Lost in the Movies Patreon podcast • Episode 100 - Concluding the 10s & Reaching the 20s w/ 12 Films in Focus: The Tree of Life as Twin Peaks Cinema, The Lighthouse w/ guest Riley MacDonald, The Fabelmans, Avatar: The Way of Water, Moonlight, The Master, The Act of Killing, Amour, The Florida Project, The Turin Horse, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Toni Erdmann, 40s/30s/silent archive readings of Kiss of Death, Bambi, The Magnificent Ambersons, Three Comrades, The Mind Reader, The Battleship Potemkin, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Be Kind Rewind, Landmarks of Early Film + feedback & more

For most of this year, I've been promising a grand finale to the patron podcast that began in January 2018. This episode also doubles as a conclusion to the decades series launched in August 2023, in which I initially covered films from the 1980s and then stretched out in either direction, finally reaching the 2010s and 1950s in Episode 99. The bulk of the movies discussed in those earlier episodes were given the capsule treatment (less than ten minutes, often less than five, dwelling on just a few aspects); this time, every single topic is a "film in focus" with my review running at least fifteen minutes, in many cases in half hour, and in a few even longer than that. These dozen films wrap up the teens decade and tiptoe into the twenties with two relatively new releases - Avatar: The Way of Water and The Fablemans - which I saw in theaters earlier this year, and which pair up nicely given their complementary contrasts. The line-up also includes a guest discussion with Riley MacDonald on Robert Eggers' crusty psychological horror flick The Lighthouse and one last "Twin Peaks Cinema" analysis, comparing the David Lynch/Mark Frost series, especially but not exclusively the third season, to The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's epic meditation setting a fifties Texas childhood against the backdrop of the creation of the universe. While a couple selections are fairly random (The Master and The Florida Project), six of the other titles were specifically selected because they are the most acclaimed films from the decade that I'd never seen before: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Toni Erdmann, The Turin Horse, Amour, Moonlight, and The Act of Killing.

All of those reflections are packed into a single massive upload (my longest single podcast file) that was finally published a few days ago as a belated October $1/month tier reward; however, I'm cross-posting the whole Episode 100 separately from my monthly round-up because it actually spans several months. I released a set of public archival readings earlier in the year (extending the decades theme in the other direction by sharing pieces I'd previously written about forties, thirties, and silent cinema), and a couple months ago I published the opening of the podcast, an intro with some updates and a long gathering of listener (and viewer and reader) feedback. Though I intended to end that section before Episode 100, I received so many interesting responses in the spring and summer that I wanted to give it one last go. Altogether, the entire package runs over eight and a half hours. If you've not yet become a patron, keep in mind that by joining you'll be able to access not only this whole episode but an archive spanning half a decade including much material that was never made public. The monthly round-up will be presented in a few days but for now, the focus is on this farewell to one of my longest running endeavors...

An American Tail

My interest in An American Tail, the 1986 animated immigrant's tale which I probably hadn't seen since childhood, was reawakened by Molly Haskell's recent biography of Steven Spielberg. She spends several pages analyzing this film and its sequel (obviously objects of deep fascination for her, particularly given this study's place in a series called "Jewish Lives"), whereas some of the director's later movies are lucky to garner a paragraph. This despite the fact that Spielberg didn't even direct An American Tail; the project results at least as much Don Bluth's distinctive vision as anyone's. Still, Spielberg contributed to the writing and was a very active producer; Haskell rightly points out how personal the story is by drawing connections to other Spielberg films. The main character, a curious, guileless little mouse (Phillip Glassner) who wanders the dangerous streets of nineteenth century Manhattan after being separated from his Russian Jewish family during a transatlantic voyage, is even named after Spielberg's grandfather Fievel. When Bluth pushed for a more Americanized name, Spielberg held his ground. Seven years before Schindler's List (and arguably, more explicitly given the Holocaust film's ambiguous point of view) this may be the first time that Spielberg - so eager, by his own admission, to be the all-American filmmaker from the twentieth century suburbs - foregrounded his Jewish identity as an act of storytelling.

Dinosaurs, Sharks, and Aliens: a visual tribute

images from Steven Spielberg's first four creature features

The Favorites - Jaws (#71)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Jaws (1975/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg) appeared at #71 on my original list.

What it is • The body of a young woman washes up on the beach; a little boy is butchered on a sunny day; a man is devoured in what should be a safe inlet while everyone else is distracted by a hoax down the beach. A new cop discovers that the tourist trade is more important than public safety; a knowledgeable oceanographer clashes with the ingrained ignorance of a small town; a physically and psychologically scarred veteran of war and seafaring is consumed by his obsession with bagging the fish of the century. Is this movie about a giant killer shark or is it about a group of men clashing with one another and challenging themselves? For much of its runtime, Jaws plays like a well-executed slice of seventies New Hollywood cinema. The dialogue overlaps and overflows while the camera captures the action with a documentary sense of realism (which doesn't mean handheld shakey-cam but rather patient, fascinated observation of domestic routine). When action and suspense arrive, they are handled with Hitchcockian suggestion rather than roller-coaster revelation, and the screenplay ensures that our focus is on the very adult relationships among the townspeople, colored by economic need, political maneuver, class jealousy, and personal history (you can't beat Quint's Indianapolis speech, penned by John Milius - unless you have the alternate take in which Robert Shaw was actually drunk, which Spielberg himself owns and occasionally shows to lucky visitors). Yet as the film draws toward its conclusion, we see more and more of the shark itself. Bloody death, final showdown, and the film's only explosion ensure a crowd-pleasing conclusion to the picture. We can witness the birth of the modern blockbuster onscreen as the film journeys from Altmanesque social drama to action-packed showdown with a fantastical creature.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Schindler's List (#85)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Schindler's List (1993/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg) appeared at #85 on my original list.

What it is • Oskar Schindler arrives on the screen with an aura of glamor, charisma, and mystery, as superficially charming as he is morally bankrupt. All around him the Jews of Krakow - rich and poor, old and young, cynical and idealistic - are stripped of their property, huddled together in ghettos, herded into work camps, and executed on the whims of their German occupiers. Schindler's concern is to get his enamelware business going, taking advantage of the war (and the possibility of Jewish slave labor) to make a fortune which he can then spend on lavish parties and the best in consumer goods. It would be easy to set Schindler up as an instinctively despicable figure, but instead Spielberg and star Liam Neeson encourage us to enjoy his company, to see the world simultaneously through his eyes and through a wider lens which perceives the suffering he is oblivious to. This is a risky gambit (it would have been easier to focus the film through his eyes entirely OR to make a docudrama about the horrors of the Holocaust) but one that ultimately pays off as these two distant worlds come crashing together, and the awakened Oskar discovers the humanity of those around him, and of himself.

Why I like it •

Reading Spielberg

Revised 4/30: Good news - I've just received an update from publisher John Pruzanski, offering readers of this blog a 20% discount on the guide (click on the link to access the discount page).

When I was 7 years old, I fell in love with "the movies" - no longer harboring affection for just certain movies, but for the cinema as a whole. There were several factors in this infatuation, but the biggest factor may have Steven Spielberg. In this, I'm hardly alone and therefore it's appropriate that I join around 70 other contributors to take part in the massive Take 2 Guide to Steven Spielberg e-book compilation. This incredibly rich tome spans nearly 800 pages, and collects contemporaneous reviews from authors like Jonathan Rosenbaum (did you know this famed Spielberg skeptic actually offered a rave review of Schindler's List on its premiere? I didn't, until I scanned these pages), extensive blog entries, interviews with the filmmaker, and material written exclusively for this volume. Publisher John Pruzanski selected six of my pieces for inclusion: on Jaws, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Lost World, and Lincoln, plus a dual review of Schindler's List and Munich and a piece on the DreamWorks cartoon How to Train a Dragon which mentions Spielberg's influence.

Check out the Take 2 Guide to Steven Spielberg here

Leap of Faith

Lincoln

Think of it like those old early thirties posters, advertising the vocal debut of some silent film star: "Lincoln Talks!" We've heard him speak before, of course. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln was one of the earliest notable talkies - and one of the last films of D.W. Griffith (the Spielberg of his day, though he didn't bode so well in the long term). This was followed by dozens of Lincoln biopics, some trying as Griffith did to capture the whole sweep, others wisely focusing - as this Lincoln does - on a particular aspect or era in Lincoln's life (the best of these being John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, an almost entirely fictional depiction of the gangly lawyer for Illinois which manages to keenly evoke Lincoln's ability to be both convincingly honest and morally ambiguous).

Yet even after all of these movies, when we see Lincoln's historical visage we imagine a voice sturdy and worn, certainly not booming and bellowing like an overblown orater yet conveying depth and solidity between the folksy self-deprecation. Thus it comes as a bit of a shock to hear Daniel Day-Lewis' thin, reedy delivery, almost too flimsy to command attention yet apparently very accurate to the real Lincoln's tones. The voice is also very reflective of the film itself, packaging a grand figure modestly and in a sense underwhelmingly, so that we're almost sitting forward in our seats, straining to catch a sense of the taciturn magnitude dancing behind the images like the fleeting shadows and pools of light in Janusz Kaminski's photography or the brief moments of warfare and desolation dappled between interior intrigues and extended dialogues.

Movies I watched in 2012

Capsule reviews of 15 films viewed since January 2012

(This post originally went up on Monday morning, but was quickly bumped. I fear it's been overlooked since, so I'm re-posting it now; I'd really like to hear back from readers on what they thought of these particular films; also I'd like to highlight "Who's Killing Cinema - and Who Cares", my response to the fascinating David Denby article; it went up middle of Saturday night because I couldn't wait, but deserves a bump now too...)

Histoire(s) du Cinema • The Long Day Closes • Madchen in Uniform • Me and My Gal • Melancholia • North Shore • Road to Morocco • Savages • Shoah • The Story of Film • Super 8 •  Tangled • Tanner '88 • Ways of Seeing • The Wind in the Willows

Schindler's List and Munich

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

When Schindler's List was released in 1993, it was regarded as a breakthrough, a true turning point in Steven Spielberg's career when the wunderkind director finally became a "grown-up." In fact, the movie is very much a culmination of his previous films, more of a crescendo to his early period than a harbinger of his later work. It is a film of flourishes, grand gestures and set pieces, full of heroism and villainy with a larger-than-life backdrop and clearly delineated moral stakes. For this reason, this extremely popular and widely acclaimed movie had a fair number of detractors on its release. They focused on the sentimentality of certain moments (especially Schindler's tearful plea at the end of the movie) and the selectivity of its focus, choosing to dwell on the positive in such an overwhelmingly negative subject. Stanley Kubrick, a friend and posthumous collaborator of Spielberg, supposedly noted that Schindler's List was a story about success, but the Holocaust was all about failure, and J. Hoberman dismissed the movie with the rhetorical question, "Is it possible to make a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?"

These criticisms could be viewed as footnotes to the film's overwhelming success but they speak to a larger phenomenon, a deep-seated critical and intellectual antipathy toward Spielberg (along with an acknowledgement that he can't merely be dismissed, but must be debunked). They're also important because they remind us of that essential fact - that Schindler's List grows out of Spielberg's earlier body of work - and they are interesting because of what came later, especially Munich. Indeed, that film makes an interesting companion piece to the earlier one, in terms of subject matter, narrative approach, and stylistic inclinations. It comes from a period where Spielberg had overcome some of the critical hurdles that still faced him with Schindler's List, and when a truer break with the early films had been made. I would argue that the real turning point in Spielberg's filmography arrives not with Schindler's List, or The Color Purple, or Saving Private Ryan, any of his other self-consciously "adult" films dealing with real-world historical subjects, but with a science fiction film at the dawn of the new millennium. Beginning with AI Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's work darkened - or rather the darkness that had always been there came to the forefront, coinciding with a breakdown in the strict discipline Spielberg films always enjoyed. Munich belongs to this new period of uncertainty and messiness; Schindler's List definitely does not although it contains hints of the darkness and maturity to come.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

E.T. opens like a horror movie. What are we so afraid of? Aliens? People? Divorce? Growing up? Fear is everywhere - the alien screams when he sees the dog, the siblings scream when they see the alien, the mother pours out her coffee and covers her mouth. The men in space suits frighten the family when they break in to their suburban home, and they themselves seem frightened by their responsibility for this strange creature. These are the moments of dramatic fright, but a deeper, creepier sense of fear pervades throughout - present whenever Spielberg cuts away to those ominous men in blue jeans, shining flashlights and slashing through the foliage. Fear lingers in scenes of acute domestic unease, when arguments about doing the dishes turn into revelations of family secrets, or a visit to the garage turns up mementos of father-son bonding, now bygones of an extinct era.

Unlike most horror films, whose visions of the "other" are fundamentally conservative, E.T. seeks transcendence in a tentative escape from the normative, into the foreign. In the process it both domesticates the stranger and "alienates" the familiar; while the alien becomes more human, the knickknacks of suburban boyhood also take on a peculiar, curious quality, as if we are seeing them for the first time and realizing the surfaces we noticed before were merely illusions. This is Spielberg's gift, which most blockbuster filmmakers lack: an insight into the sublime qualities of the everyday, the mysterious in the mundane, so that elements many directors would treat in a banal, obligatory fashion are lingered over, savored and seen with new eyes - that of a child, or of an alien.

Man vs. Machine

A Visual Tribute to Duel (1971)

(An entry in the Spielberg blogathon - spoilers included!) 
 

Part 1 of 3 visual tributes - Merry Christmas!

The Posters of Steven Spielberg

Today I very much wanted to establish what I hope will be a pattern: every Wednesday, reviews of DVD new release(s) on Lost in the Movies. However, due to miscalculations and the desire to cover several movies in one post, that particular piece will have to wait until tomorrow. Please stay tuned for a review responding to Precious, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Where the Wild Things Are.

In the mean time, another entry in the ongoing series looking at directors' posters. (*added a forgotten poster for The Lost World in 2015) Here we have another filmmaker of iconic status, one of my personal favorites, and one whose posters can do as good a job as any of summarizing the various zeitgeists he worked under. (By the way, there's one version of an early Spielberg film not included, but please check it out.)

discussing Schindler

As expected, Schindler's List (placing #23 on Allan Fish's "best of the 90s" countdown) has opened up an interesting discussion on Wonders in the Dark. Does the film trivialize the Holocaust? Did Spielberg spread himself too thin? Are there actually 22 better films from the decade? Is Rage Against the Machine overrated? (Wonders threads have a delightful tendency to wander.) Jump in and discuss - the more voices the merrier.

This post was originally published on The Sun's Not Yellow.

Jaws

Jaws, 1975, directed by Steven Spielberg

The Story: “Sharkkkkkkkk!!!!!!”

And yet it’s so much more than that. At its heart, of course, Jaws is a fantastic monster movie, a film that plays on fears – that employs Hitchcockian suspense and haunted house surprise to hold us in the grip of masterful entertainment. It has been blamed for a dumbing-down of movie audiences, an onslaught of blockbusters concerned only with reeling in adolescents, and a retreat from the edginess and depth of 70s cinema. Yet Jaws consistently holds human figures at its center – and not only because the mechanical creature malfunctioned through much of the production, while a 27-year-old newbie filmmaker, one Steven Spielberg, had to improvise shooting around it. At heart, Jaws is a story about people more than about a shark.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

When Steven Spielberg returned to filmmaking after a nearly 4-year break, he laid an egg. I have to regard this movie as an opportunity for Spielberg to find his sea legs again before he attacked the intimidating subject matter of slavery and World War II in his upcoming work. Even so, The Lost World is a cringingly bad movie. No, not in terms of technique - though the CGI has dated badly, the late Stan Winston's animatronics still impress. And Spielberg, even in his most craven hackery, is still a great filmmaker, so we get interesting ideas for shots rather than lots of standard-issue close-ups which most Hollywood movies market these days. But the story is forced (every turn of events a mechanical effort to take us from A to B to C), the action is often ludicrous, and the dialogue consists of stale bon mots sprinkled among wooden, straightforwardly-delivered lectures on the mating habits of various dinosaurs. But as if that wasn't bad enough, the movie sinks itself even further into the miasma of its own terribleness by forcing an unbecoming - and morally loathsome - animal-rights agenda down its audience's throats.