Tag Archives: Spielberg

Ready Player One

30 Mar

‘Ready Player One’: A pop culture pastiche lacking the power-ups it needs to be iconic

 

By Tom Meek 
Friday, March 30, 2018

Geek references and 1980s pop culture abound in “Ready Player One,” an energetic yet hollow outing from the architect of the blockbuster himself, Steven Spielberg. It’s not all for naught, as the adaptation of Ernest Cline’s YA novel set in the dystopian future bears most of the director’s family-friendly fingerprints: a sentimental score (by Alan Silvestri), misunderstood youth, enigmatic happenings and the fantastical infusing the realm of the real – think “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” And then promptly forget them.

In the year 2045, gaming has become the opium of the masses. Everyone suits up, dons virtual-reality goggles and enters a place in the cloud known as the Oasis, a platform breathed to life by a master game creator named James Halliday (Academy Award winner Mark Rylance), who’s recently passed but has left an Easter egg (apt that it’s being released on the eve of the Paas egg-dyeing holiday) tucked away somewhere in his worldwide video game. The lucky one who finds it takes over Halliday’s Amazon-like empire. Continue reading →

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The Post

18 Jan

‘The Post’: Press felt freedom but faced risk, just like the widow finding herself in charge

 

By Tom Meek 
Friday, January 5, 2018

This Steven Spielberg flashback to tumultuous times of government transparency and freedom of the press as hot-button issues is not only a nostalgic and cautionary rewind, but a haunting reflection of where we find ourselves today. Before it broke Watergate, The Washington Post (“The Post” of the title) found itself on the edge of extinction in the wake of the publisher’s suicide and his widow’s struggles against a chauvinistic landscape and lure of corporate cash.

As dire as that all may sound, the core of “The Post” concerns itself more with journalistic integrity and the onus to inform the public. Shades of “All the President’s Men” (1976) and “Spotlight” (2015) run deeper than just sheer thematic similarity – there’s an actual blood tie in Josh Singer, an Oscar winner for “Spotlight” who partners with Liz Hannah on the “Post” script, and the Watergate break-in, the source of much journalistic scrutiny in “All the President’s Men,” is where “The Post” so poetically ends. Both “Presidents’s Men” and “Post” prominently feature legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee who, no matter who’s playing him, commands the newsroom with dignity and a wry dash of tough love. In the 1976 film he’s played with gruff, stoic smoldering by Jason Robards, who rightly won an Oscar for the portrayal; in Spielberg’s prequel of sorts, he’s played with equal effectiveness by the affable Tom Hanks. The Hanks Bradlee soaks up more screen time, but, like Robards, the two-time Oscar winner is blessed with a meticulous script and a top-notch cast to play off – an embarrassment of riches, if ever there was one. Continue reading →

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Midnight Special

28 Apr

Indie auteur Jeff Nichols ventures into Spielberg territory with Midnight Special 

Bright Eyes

By

We're pretty sure this kid has the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away ... with mind bullets

Jeff Nichols, the budding auteur from Arkansas behind Take Shelter and Mud, gets a tad heavy-footed in his latest Midnight Special, a further contemplation on the Rapture, sanity, and the supernatural. Like his prior efforts, Nichols employs a fly-on-the-wall POV that offers an intimate look into the lives of his protagonists. In Shelter and Mud that technique allowed viewers inside the complex internal struggle of his characters, but in the plot-driven Midnight Special, the conflict is nearly all external. Although Nichols’ latest is more ambitious than his previous efforts, he very nearly hits the mark.

The film begins in a boarded-up hotel room. Inside, there are two armed men and a boy who sits under a blanket reading a comic book with a flashlight. The men are edgy — this is clearly some sort of last stand event, or is it? Without resistance they flee the room and climb into a classic muscle car in the lot and take off under cover of the night; the man behind the wheel even dons night-vision goggles so he can drive without headlights. As the viewers soon learn, these men have a higher calling: trying to save mankind. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world hasn’t gotten the memo.

In small, teasing strokes, including news clips and an immersion into a doomsday cult, Nichols slowly reveals the bigger picture. Roy Tomlin (played by Nichols’ onscreen alter-ego Michael Shannon) and his able driver, Lucas (Joel Edgerton) have abducted an 8-year-old boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, St. Vincent) from the aforementioned cult. The authorities are after the two men for kidnapping the boy, and the cult, led by the venerable Sam Shepard, sporting a too small sports coat and a bad Flowbee cut, has dispatched a goon squad as well. Alton happens to be Roy’s biological progeny, but Shepard’s cult leader is the child’s legal guardian. Their differences aren’t so much about Alton’s theological upbringing so much as the kid has certainly super-human talents, one of which is the ability to shoot beams of light out of his eye. As a result, the Feds (led by Adam Driver’s nerdy greenhorn) want him too. Alton’s clearly a gifted kid, but is he even human? Continue reading →

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Jurassic World

12 Jun

Jurassic World is bigger and badder than its predecessors, but we really miss the original cast

Jurassic Work

By

YOUTUBE

It’s been nearly 15 years since the last Jurassic Park installment, and a lot has changed in the world: 9/11 rocked and divided our nation as the War on Terror took root, smartphones replaced cumbersome cellphones, and GMOs have become talking points at cocktail parties. What’s all this have to do with the revival of the dino-park movie franchise based on the slim yet innovative novel by Michael Crichton and initially helmed by Stephen Spielberg?

The answer is everything. Like the problem of a bigger, meaner and more thrilling wow (read: dangerous) that confronts the conglomerate structure behind Jurassic World, the filmmakers spinning out Jurassic World are saddled with the burden of outdoing what came before. The good news is that the quality of special FX has come light-years.

Today, people caught in the middle of a dino herd don’t look like they’re being shot against a screen and pasted into a jerkily moving computer rendering; they’re now seamlessly in there with the “real” possibility of being trampled or squashed or snatched up by the genetically engineered Indominus Rex, the new badass on the block, cooked up in a lab by a bunch of avaricious DNA jockeys to scare the shit out of money-paying vacationers seeking an adrenaline rush just to know they’re alive.

At the park on a lush tropical island off the coast of Costa Rica, at any time, there are some 20,000 people being run through the vast array of exhibits and rides and fleeced for cash with the rapier efficiency of a Disney or Sea World. Money is a driving force at Jurassic World, and in the birthing lab, there too looms a myriad of hidden agendas and covert, need-to-know data points — like who’s DNA went into good ole Indominus — that breeds malcontent and dubious action.

Continue reading →

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