Shallow

Rating: 4/10 (4 May 2013)

It's the type of movie that people think should be done, the type of movie you know the man playing Lincoln will get the Oscar if he's any talented... Again, it's Spielberg up to the task, and it's getting old... It's full of good feelings, of great actors, of drooling music... Frankly, we're tired of this.
Anybody who rates this movie so high has never seen the HBO TV series on John Adams, because THAT was good. That was unpretentious, and despite the overall historical accuracy, you could understand it. Here, "Lincoln" is full of boring political dialogs and useless secondary plots (the one with his son Robert is so badly executed...), and you can clearly see Spielberg didn't know how to end it. So he just did a speedy shot of his youngest son hearing the news in a theater, just to confuse the audience. What's the point ? If you refuse to show the assassination, or to talk about it, then just don't show it at all... There's nothing wrong in ending the movie in Lincoln still alive, we all know what happens next...
And the music, God the music... It's everywhere, ever seen a European or South-East Asian dramatic movie ? You don't need to use this Hollywood music so much to tell the audience what to feel... Spielberg is one of the best directors of the 20th century. In the 21st, he's just a parody of himself. He doesn't evolve, hence we all pity him. He's making the same movies, they just don't talk to us anymore, don't mean anything. The new world of movies is dark, honest, brutal, experimental, and doesn't treat the audience like we're all sobbing uneducated housewives...