Spielberg didn't direct The Goonies.
And The Goonies is fantastic.
Yeah, it sucked. Best part was the kid throwing the baseball through the window....and I had high hopes for War of the Worlds
There's a lot of Duel in Jaws, and they're both great.They show that movie late at night several times a year. You can see the influences he used in Jaws he got from that movie.
The thing with Spielberg is he figures out how to present ideas in ways that nobody thought of before. The problem is, he has trouble binding those ideas together into a good movie. Jurassic Park still holds up well, but at the time used CGI to make dinosaurs REAL looking. It was the first movie to do that, and we take it for granted today.
With ET, he was the first to make a movie about an alien that was the hero of the show. That "outcast as a hero" theme has been used in movies ever since.
In Jaws, he was the first to use the "don't show the monster directly until the end" technique. It's now a horror movie standard.
He's done a lot, but his ideas don't always work.
The thing with Spielberg is he figures out how to present ideas in ways that nobody thought of before. The problem is, he has trouble binding those ideas together into a good movie. Jurassic Park still holds up well, but at the time used CGI to make dinosaurs REAL looking. It was the first movie to do that, and we take it for granted today.
With ET, he was the first to make a movie about an alien that was the hero of the show. That "outcast as a hero" theme has been used in movies ever since.
In Jaws, he was the first to use the "don't show the monster directly until the end" technique. It's now a horror movie standard.
He's done a lot, but his ideas don't always work.
Even Spielberg was afraid for Jaws. His "don't show the monster directly until the end" was because he couldn't get the bloody thing to work, he was out of time and overbudget. The cost of running the shark out at sea cost was very high. He thought Jaws was going to be the end of his movie making career.
Sure, now we look at it and say "brilliant idea!" At the time, he was sweating bullets. A series of blunders that ultimately worked in his favor.
Uh... in high school we actually had to write papers on Star Wars, was used to teach the "epic hero" archetype. There's more there than you might think.
Start an online petition saying he should kill himself. How would you feel if someone sent you a link to a petition saying you should kill yourself and it had over a million signatures on it?
Hell yes! I pity the childhood of anyone who can't relate to The Goonies.
uh, yeah. I had that textbook, too. Joseph Campbell, blah blah.
Here's the thing: if overly cliche'd symbolism is the calling card for complex and deep movie-making, then feel free to consider Star Wars the epitome of crafting a story.
There's a reason that it is included in High School textbooks regarding myth-making--because it is blatant enough with symbolism yet thin enough in complexity to effectively introduce the most cursory elements of story craft to a young and inexprienced high school crowd.
Yes, it can actually seem brilliant to the high school mind, but that's about it. Star Wars does nothing new with traditional character archetypes that you will see in tons and tons of other films and stories. In fact, it is nothing more than an exercise in force-fed symbolism, and it dies right there. Empire improves this a bit by adding the complexity to Darth Vader's character and motivations.
Now, if you want to see more of the same archetypes, in much better films that explore the very same themes yet challenge those motivations by creating complexity within characters, and masking their actual roles, watch something like There Will be Blood or No Country for Old Men.
Dude, Goonies is one of the greatest movies of the 80's, and I enjoyed 8mm. Not a great movie, but it was certainly enjoyable to watch.
If you want to respect Spielberg, watch his very first movie, a made for TV film called Duel. It's fantastic.
The thing with Spielberg is he figures out how to present ideas in ways that nobody thought of before. The problem is, he has trouble binding those ideas together into a good movie. Jurassic Park still holds up well, but at the time used CGI to make dinosaurs REAL looking. It was the first movie to do that, and we take it for granted today.
With ET, he was the first to make a movie about an alien that was the hero of the show. That "outcast as a hero" theme has been used in movies ever since.
In Jaws, he was the first to use the "don't show the monster directly until the end" technique. It's now a horror movie standard.
He's done a lot, but his ideas don't always work.
8mm /= Super 8.
very different films!
D: