God Save us from the "Spielberg" touch

Rating: 1/10 (10 January 2003)

I lasted about ten minutes in this "gem" before running from the theatre in disgust. I'm so sick of movies that tell you every moment how you should "feel". Spielberg doesn't trust his audience to make their own decisions about what they are watching. Each and every single second is so manufactured that it is impossible to react in any other way than in the micromanaged specific predigested fashion in which Mr. Spielberg wants us to. Perhaps his movies are meant to be watched with the sound off. They are like panels of a cartoon. The visuals are clear and they certainly tell a story in a clear and distinct way, but there's no room to breathe, no air on the screen. It's like being at a Natural History museum looking at stuffed cavemen hunting a sabre tooth tiger. Sure is pretty. But nobody's breathing up there.
Since I only saw ten minutes (which is enough for me if a movie is as terrible as this one. The film could've turned into "citizen Kane" the moment I left and it wouldn't matter, the damage had been done) I can only comment on what I saw, so here goes:
The title sequence:
I hated those faux-sixties cartoon drawings. Like everything in Spielberg's post-"Close Encounters" body of work, it doesn't quite make it. It was a cute idea, but instead of getting an artist who would really do a good job stealing from the Saul Bass school of design, he got somebody who fumbled the job, making it seem more like the cheapo animation in one of those 70's health movies like "I am Joe's Stomach" or something. Even worse is John Williams score, but the less said about him the better.
The "To Tell the Truth" opening was one of the laziest first draft attempts at expopsition I'd seen since the Ndugu letters of "About Schmidt". Doesn't anybody know who to write dialogue anymore? Plus, the transition from the gameshow to the rainy sequence in France was both clumsy and non sensical. Once again, Speilberg gets a case of the nauseating "cutes". Gee, French people are funny, they can't pronounce this character's name. Gee, does everybody in the audience get that THIS is the guy that Leonardo De Caprio was talking about in the previous frame? That fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks? By this point I had one foot aimed towards the exit.

Then we get another "cutesy poo" Spielberg moment when the fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks has to open an umbrella inside because there's a leak. Sacre Bleu! That's Hi-larious!
Then we get another in a long list of what I like to call the "Pinnochio meets Faces of Death" moments that Spielberg seems so fond of. Where broad bad comedy meets the harrowing and gut-wrenching. Like in Amistad where first we get Matthew McCaughnahay doing his best High School Acting version of "Mr Toad's Wild Ride" and then we get African American slaves chained together and thrown into the sea. This is where Leo's consumptive hacking (which is better suited to "Midnight Express" than this lightweight ersatz caper/chase flick) is juxtaposed with the worst accent I think I've ever heard in a movie (even worse than Leo's irish? accent in the Gangs of New York). The fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks is nattering on under that umbrella, the faceless French guys are chimpering in inaudible francois and Leo is hacking up like John Hurt in Aliens. What's wrong with this picture? Why is Speilberd so determined to gross us out? (See "Minority Report" with its hacking of snot and rancid-food-eating scene for his most recent offense)
Then we get Leo's attempted escape which of course is accompanied by the entire prison population shrieking and urging him on like the Forum crowd in "Ben Hur".
When Christopher Walken arrives, he managed to use his own quirky acting rhythms to throw a pleasant monkey wrench into Spielberg's well oiled McMovie. But by the time Leo was watching his parents dancing the wine stain into the white rug, and then when Walken told Leo not to hit the curb while parking (guess what he does anyway!? Screams of knee-jerk laughter from the multi-plex crowd)I had seen enough. I want to have my own feelings, Mr. Speilberg, thank you. I have only to refer to "Far From Heaven" as an example of how to let an audience think. Even though the movie had an arch tone and over-the-top dialogue at times and looked like a techinicolor fantasy, it never told you how to feel. It allowed you to make your own decisions. But I'm afraid Mr. Spielberg has morphed past the point where he'll have anything meaningful to say to someone past an eighth grade education.
Yuck. Ten minutes was tooooooo much.