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My least favorite director, of all time, has to be Baz Luhrmann. The guy is just an untalented boob when it comes to directing a picture. Just because you can montage doesn't mean you should. Ultimately his films look faux-intellectual to me, they become meaningless exploits in cinematic pretext. I can stand montage, Eisenstein's montage of thesis>anti-thesis>synthesis/new thesis, is always a pleasure to engage in. But Baz just haphazardly utilizes montage without any clear-cut thought.
Steven Spielberg, I know its a cheap shot; but in all honesty outside of Jaws, (which was more of a "luck of the draw" film to me, since the shark didn't work and he had a marvelous editor to pick up his trainwreck/masterpiece), I've been bored to tears by practically every movie he's made. Indiana Jones, the entire trilogy, (why bother to mention the latest turd), was very immature to me. Now I don't mind fantasy. I can buy Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and I love movies like The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, (mentioning a few Miyazaki anime films here; point is they are fantasy tales). However, all of the Jones stuff felt so utterly predictable and boring that I wonder what most people see in them. Jurassic Park was tolerable, but once you get past all the effects-driven dinosaurs and you start paying attention to the action sequences themselves, they feel so incredibly set up and hard to swallow. E.T. was an utter disaster, that's my least favorite Spielberg. To me, that movie is not only boring, but it is a prime example of a cinematic "hustler" film. It panders so cheaply to the audiences emotional responses, and since most audiences aren't knowledgeable to know any better, (what is the quote of P.T. Barnum: "A sucker is born every minute"?), they buy into everything Spielberg dishes out. However, to me all of his works are see through. They are a farm boy's ideal of the grand city without the actual experience of the city itself. Therefore all of his works either lack the heart, or they lack the understanding, of the universes he tries to convey. Schindler's List was a film that had his heart in it, and for the most part, I enjoyed that film. However, I had some issues with the film. It seemed to take on the notion that the Jews were the only ones who took on the Holocausts atrocities; what of the gypsies? what of the mentally and physically handicapped? what of the teachers and the highly educated? Were they not as well victims of Hitler's mass genocide? Again, it has its heart set in the right place, but ultimately it seems to me it misses a big chunk of history and therefore seems almost "Judaically-biased", (not to sound anti-Semitic in my statement here, far from it, I just felt that if you want to really talk about the Holocaust and to give people a greater understanding of it; one should remain true to "ALL" its victims, as much as one could).
Anyway, this is all a rant I suppose, but this is how I feel.
Steven Spielberg, I know its a cheap shot; but in all honesty outside of Jaws, (which was more of a "luck of the draw" film to me, since the shark didn't work and he had a marvelous editor to pick up his trainwreck/masterpiece), I've been bored to tears by practically every movie he's made. Indiana Jones, the entire trilogy, (why bother to mention the latest turd), was very immature to me. Now I don't mind fantasy. I can buy Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and I love movies like The Castle of Cagliostro and Castle in the Sky, (mentioning a few Miyazaki anime films here; point is they are fantasy tales). However, all of the Jones stuff felt so utterly predictable and boring that I wonder what most people see in them. Jurassic Park was tolerable, but once you get past all the effects-driven dinosaurs and you start paying attention to the action sequences themselves, they feel so incredibly set up and hard to swallow. E.T. was an utter disaster, that's my least favorite Spielberg. To me, that movie is not only boring, but it is a prime example of a cinematic "hustler" film. It panders so cheaply to the audiences emotional responses, and since most audiences aren't knowledgeable to know any better, (what is the quote of P.T. Barnum: "A sucker is born every minute"?), they buy into everything Spielberg dishes out. However, to me all of his works are see through. They are a farm boy's ideal of the grand city without the actual experience of the city itself. Therefore all of his works either lack the heart, or they lack the understanding, of the universes he tries to convey. Schindler's List was a film that had his heart in it, and for the most part, I enjoyed that film. However, I had some issues with the film. It seemed to take on the notion that the Jews were the only ones who took on the Holocausts atrocities; what of the gypsies? what of the mentally and physically handicapped? what of the teachers and the highly educated? Were they not as well victims of Hitler's mass genocide? Again, it has its heart set in the right place, but ultimately it seems to me it misses a big chunk of history and therefore seems almost "Judaically-biased", (not to sound anti-Semitic in my statement here, far from it, I just felt that if you want to really talk about the Holocaust and to give people a greater understanding of it; one should remain true to "ALL" its victims, as much as one could).
Anyway, this is all a rant I suppose, but this is how I feel.
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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?
-Stan Brakhage
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?
-Stan Brakhage
the book was about Schindler and what he did, only one small part of the Holocaust
