One of Canadian director David Cronenberg's best films, The Brood (1979):

A belated post on the man i was going to say great but i dont believe him to be of such stature.

He's got a huge filmography and more awards than you can shake a big stick at. But i don't like his work, so why start with him? Because he's familiar, plain and simple. I'll go through some of his stuff i've seen:

Duel is excellent. It's 90 minutes of a bloke being chased by a truck, no more; no less. It's exciting, solid entertainment with a great lead performance set against a wonderful landscape.

I'm in the minority on this one: i hate Jaws. The monster looks crappy and gets revealed far too early. The camera zoom effect on the beach is a gimmick Hitchcock achieved in Vertigo. People talk over and most of the characters amount to little more than fish food. Is it scary now? no way, laughable perhaps. And that irritating score? Urgh.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of those films that, despite it's niceness, i love. The effects stand up fairly well even if the music doesn't. There's a cameo from French cinematic God Francois Truffaut. Crucially, we really aren't totally sure what's going on until the final scenes in the forest - the reveal is kept until the best moment possible and despite overly synthesised audio it works bloody well.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are all good fun, endlessly watchable, and deep as a puddle. Great way to spend an afternoon, once you've left your brain outside.

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is another nice film that's so sentimental, so cloying in its own trite little world that it becomes almost irresistible. I bet most of you didn't consider or perhaps notice the nod to The Creation Of Adam? Seems Spielberg likes his art classic, and Italian.

look at the fingers:

Empire of the Sun is as bad as they get. An awful WW2 story involving clichés and negative stereotypes bumping into textbook plot arcs for far too long. It was so bad that the last time i tried to watch it i had to turn it off after 15 minutes before ripping my eyes out.

Hook took possibly the greatest childen's book and adapted it, somewhat successfully to a live action film. Could do with some of the moralising toned down, but besides that i've got few complaints.

Jurassic Park again dishes up lashings of moralising on nature and family values. Not bad for a kid's film i guess but it looks realy stupid to me when i see it now. What was Jeff Goldblum thinking? Watch the T Rex jeep chase for seriously bad projection.

Schindler's List, widely considered Spielberg's opus, is to me 3 hours of self-serving crap. It doesn't need to be that long, it takes liberties with the notion of "poetic license" and Ben Kingsley really could have done without the ego boost this gave him. Just because it's black and white that doesn't make it clever or somehow more important. It means the cinematographer was lazy - poor black and white photography will, generally speaking, look ok when compared to its polychromatic counterpart. The direction is largely uninspired with a distinct going-through-the-motions feel with no regard whatsoever to pace, or character development. The thing with the girl in the red coat? A gimmick. Schindler exploited his workers, and that's just my opinion based on watching this film. You take from the film what you come to it with - cynics will find nothing of merit whereas the rose-tinted bunch will find a true tale to stir the emotions. I've been to Auschwitz and this film doesn't even touch how bad the holocaust was.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park . 2 words: no need. best forgotten.

Saving Private Ryan starts strongly but takes a steep nose-dive after the beach landing. Vin Diesel is a bad actor, but he's not the problem - it's the flag waving script that refuses to accept the humanity of the faceless enemy. Dreck.

Artificial Intelligence: AI. I wish Kubrick had made this. Maybe the story was too sentimental for him? He worked on it for 12 years before letting Spielberg direct it as it was "closer to his sensibilities". I guess Kubrick doesn't do trite. Awful lot of navel-gazing sombreness in the film, to the point it becomes self-parody. Forgetful.

Minority Report is back to good Indiana Jones-style action entertainment. There's a story but we really don't care because we want to see the stunts and the futurescape in which they take place. I like it a lot.

War of the Worlds has one of the worst endings i've ever seen, it's just mind-numblingly stupid. It also has far too much Dakota Fanning screaming, it grates after about 30 seconds before resembling a pneumatic drill to the cranium. The effects are good, but that's all.

Munich rides roughshod over such trivialities as facts, giving a turbulent story a ridiculous post-9/11 twist. The actors are a bit stale but the music and sound editing are pretty good. The hitmen are the most unrealistic hitmen you're likely to see; it didn't help that i saw a documentary about Operation Wrath Of God immediately before watching Munich.

Final thought: If it weren't for John Williams, Steven Spielberg's career probably would have ended some time ago. If sentimental moralising is what you want, Steve's your man - and he practically guarantees a profit for would-be investors. A safe bet in all senses of the word never exceptional never putting any noses out of joint. I find him a tremendous bore.

I'll do a detailed post on Steven Spielberg another day, but for now i give you the trailer for the best film he's made so far*: Duel

IMDB Link

Buy the Special Edition DVD HERE (Amazon.co.uk) or HERE (HMV.co.uk) or HERE (dvd.co.uk).

Read the review by the New York Times HERE

*in my opinion, of course.

Inspired by Mr Z, i'm starting this new blog that will focus solely on film directors. I'll keep posting reviews and other film stuff on my other blog, but this one is reserved for looking at directors, their careers, style, habits and persuasions. English, American, European or Asian i hope to cover a broad spectrum of the good, bad and ugly of who does what behind the camera.

the opening video is of David Lynch (Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Inland Empire) responding to a question on product placement in contemporary cinema: