Film Review: Bridge of Spies (2015)

In addition to being a court room drama-slash-Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies acts as a sampler of the various shades of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. It opens with a showcase of his skill as a visual storyteller, transitions into a lively, wryly funny slice of crowd pleasing entertainment, before ultimately ending with an assured, minor-key genre exercise with strong political overtones. In short, it's the Neapolitan ice cream of Steven Spielberg's career. If you like all three flavours on offer, then it's a thoroughly enjoyable few hours. If you only like one or two, then stretches of the film are going to fall very flat, although ice cream is still ice cream.

Film Review: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

"Stella!"

It wouldn't be going too far to say that Jurassic Park was one of the most important films for me growing up. There were a lot of other contenders, most of them Disney animations, but Jurassic Park was the first film I remember being completely floored by. It helped that I was obsessed with dinosaurs, as most six year olds were at the time and, it seems, still are, but the way that Steven Spielberg blended special effects with a lean story to create a sense of wonder and magic really captivated my little, still-forming imagination. It probably didn't hurt that it was one of the first examples I had encountered of a film being everywhere thanks to a huge marketing campaign, so even if I hadn't loved it, I would not have been able to escape it. Watching it (not to mention rewatching it) was a formative experience, to say the least, and while I wouldn't put it as my favourite film ever now (I'm not sure if it would even crack the top 100, assuming that I was crazy enough to make one), its importance in shaping me as a film lover is immeasurable.

Film Review: Jurassic World (2015)

Twenty-two years ago, a man named John Hammond had a dream. A dream of opening a park filled with dinosaurs, resurrected by the wonders of science, and open for all the world to see. That dream went tragically sour when the actions of a rogue employee led to the park's security measures failing, several deaths, and the apparent abandonment of Isla Nublar to its prehistoric inhabitants. Yet the magic of Hammond's vision - and its undeniable potential for huge profits - meant that people would try again, so now his park - renamed Jurassic World, no doubt as a canny bit of rebranding to move away from that whole rampaging dinosaurs thing - is a glistening hybrid of Disney World and SeaWorld.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 98 - Jaws at 40

Jaws, one of the greatest films ever made, turned 40 this year. As admirers of the film, Matt and I thought it would be grand to talk about why the film endures,  the mixed blessing of its influence, and the possibility of The Rock starring in a remake of Big Trouble in Little China.

Take2 Guide to Steven Spielberg

Today marks the official release of the ebook "The Take2 Guide to Steven Spielberg", which was edited by Adam Zanzie, and features essays and reviews from Joseph McBride, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Matt Zoller Seitz, Tom Carson and James Berardinelli. Oh, and me! You can find more information about the book here, and you can buy it from Amazon here.

Oscar Predictions: The Major Awards

Welcome back. I trust that you're all sitting comfortably and are as uproariously drunk as I am. How anyone could even contemplate making it through an awards ceremony sober is truly beyond me. Anyway, that's not important. What is important, is that we're now down to the final, precious few; the Oscars that most people care about! Without any further ado, let's get to it.

Oscar Prediction: The Technical Awards

Hello, and welcome to A Mighty Fine Blog's sixth annual attempt to predict the Oscars, an effort so relentlessly futile that I haven't even bothered to thing of a snappy name or acronym for it. Anyway, a merry AMFBSAAPO to you all!

Joking aside, I really look forward to this time of the year because it's a chance for me to see if my predictive abilities have improved or atrophied in the last twelve months. Having read The Signal and the Noise, I kind of hope that my predictions will be a touch better than in the last few years, though that would be no guarantee that I'm getting better. It could actually just be a sign that the Oscars are getting worse at surprising us all.

As in previous years, the predictions will be split in two. This post will focus on the Technical Awards, by which I mean the ones which are unlikely to get boasted about on future Blu-ray covers. That doesn't diminish their importance to the winners, obviously, who no doubt worked very hard, but it's undeniable that most people tend to care more about the Major Awards. So for the people who just want to know about the big name awards, there will be a separate post going up just after this one. For the cinephiles, though, this is the good shit.

Film Review: A Guy Named Joe (1943)

After America entered World War II in the wake of Pearl Harbour, there was a raft of Hollywood films dedicated to making the case for war in ways both subtle and not. The Ox-Bow Incident, for example, is a Western about the dangers of mob mentality and the terrible things that can happen when good men do nothing. It's a story that could have been told at any time, yet the context of when it was produced and released - not to mention the inclusion of a card asking viewers to buy War Bonds at the end - indicate how film-makers were using their art to support the national cause.

Film Review: Lincoln (2012)

The trap that the overwhelming majority of biopics fall into is attempting to fit an entire life into a couple of hours. In doing so, these films tend to gloss over details, switch others around, and general contort and distort the messiness of real life into a simple three-act structure that in no way resembles reality, let alone the reality of the story being told. That's not to say that some lives don't fit such a structure, or that the structure is inherently flawed, but the overall approach tends to turn the lives of interesting, vibrant human beings into staid dramas full of self-importance. Crucially, they often fail to put across why the subject was important enough to deserve having their story told in the first place.

Film Review: War Horse (2011)

War Horse is a heartfelt, affecting film about the devastating power of war that is almost undone by the incredibly silly conceit at its heart. Based on Michael Morpurgo's children's book and the absurdly popular stage play that it inspired, Steven Spielberg's film tells the story of World War I not through the eyes of the soldiers fighting it, but by following the journey of a horse named Joey, who is raised by a young man named Albie (Jeremy Irvine) in Devon, then sold to the Army by Albie's father (Peter Mullan) to pay the rent on their farm. Once he is on the continent, Joey is passed from owner to owner, and through him Spielberg depicts the various ways in which war affects all those who are touched by it.

Film Review: The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

This can only end well.

When it was announced that Steven Spielberg was going to finally fulfil his long held dream of bringing Hergé's iconic boy journalist/adventurer to the big screen, it seemed like such a natural fit that it was amazing that it hadn't happened sooner. The Tintin comics have delighted countless children and adults for decades with their mix of adventure, mystery and derring do, and when he is at his best, no film-maker can rival Spielberg when it comes to imbuing works with a sense of awestruck wonder and excitement. Then, it turned out that the film would be motion-capture, rather than live action, and you could almost sense the shudder across the Internet as people contemplated a Tintin movie full of uncanny valley faces and awkward animation. Could Spielberg succeed where countless others had failed and make a film that overcame the limitations of motion-capture technology?