Something 4 The Weekend by Paul Bullock

Welcome ladies, gentlemen and film fans everywhere to entertainment manchester's weekly feature 'Something for the Weekend'. Every Friday, we deliver to you the best (and, in the interest of balance, worst) of this week's new cinematic releases. If, as Forrest Gump once might have said were he a film fan, cinema really is like a box of chocolates, then think of us as your mini-menu, steering you away from the coffee creams and towards the Turkish delights of the movie world.

The Big Picture

The common belief in certain sections of the critical community is that Steven Spielberg can only make childish, immature films. Certainly anyone who’s suffered through Peter Biskind's movie brat love-in/anti-Spielberg hissy fit Easy Riders, Raging Bulls will clearly understand that just as 1970s New Hollywood was reaching its artistic zenith, Spielberg snuck up behind the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich and bludgeoned them repeatedly across the back of the head with his blaspheming blockbusters.

“Spielberg returned the ‘70s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of pre-60s Golden Age movies,” Biskind whines. “[He] marched backwards through the looking glass, producing pictures that were the mirror opposite of the New Hollywood films of [his] peers. They were…infantilising the audience, reconstituting the spectator as a child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness and critical reflection.”

Meanwhile, influential French New Wave director Jean Luc Goddard has also weighed in, criticising the director for profiting from the Holocaust - despite the fact he conspicuously refused payment for Schindler‘s List - while former George McFly actor Crispin Glover has decided he hates Spielberg so much the only way to vent his spleen is to pen a rant/essay entitled What Is It, in which the Charlie’s Angels 1 and 2 star writes that Spielberg has "wafted his putrid stench upon our culture, a culture he helped homogenize and propagandize."

But Biskind and the rest of his high-brow cronies (particularly Glover) are merely seeking a scapegoat for the blockbuster-bloated quagmire American mainstream cinema currently finds itself in. While it is certainly true Spielberg helped cement the blockbuster formula we know and - ahem - love today and is more than partly responsible for the rash of merchandising which assaults the release of any modern summer movie, if you were to compare Spielberg's early blockbusters to, say, Independence Day or Godzilla you’d find they have very little in common.

Take Jaws, for example. Made today, Quint would become a bumbling comedy sidekick - perhaps played by Eugene Levy - and the iconic USS Indianapolis speech would be dropped altogether - too long and not enough jokes, you see. Hooper would turn from the wimpish, middle class and very male Richard Dreyfuss into a hot female character, wearing tight tanks tops, short short shorts and a come hither smile on her face - think Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough. While Brody would no longer be the tormented, reluctant family man so perfectly played by Roy Schieder, but Paul Walker, blonde, muscle bound and willing to take on any damn shark the sea can throw at him. MANO A MANO!

In the 70s, however, Spielberg, working in step with rather than in spite of, the trailblazing directors around him, turned Peter Benchley's novel into a cinematic tour de force. The central trio were cynical, hard-bitten and worn down by the world and a corrupt mayor who refused to close the beach on the lucrative Fourth of July weekend. The tone was dark, pushing the camera through the murky Amity waters before emerging to drag down skinny dipper Chrissie in the film's daring opening and later Alex Kintner, a young boy, so often the embodiment of innocence in Spielberg films. And, most surprisingly, it actually kept the star of the show underwraps for three quarters of its duration, unlike Roland Emmerich who can't wait to shoot his load with a GIANT CGI shot of a GIANT spaceship, casting a GIANT shadow across a GIANT city like New York.

Indeed, like E.T, Close Encounters and even the Indiana Jones trilogy (particularly Last Crusade), Jaws is just a family affair, an intimate portrait in the life of a family (be it literal or more metaphorical) under great stress. These so called 'simple' and 'infantalising' blockbusters were in fact the Trojan horses of 70s and 80s cinema, slipping familial dramas into a blockbuster scene later dominated by the vapid high concept world of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson.

After all, would you get a scene of a child's view of divorce as sensitively realised as the one around the dinner table which introduces Eliot and his family in Top Gun? Doubt it. Would you find a moment of such subtle familial disintegration as the one of Richard Dreyfuss creating his Devil's Tower a la mash potato masterpiece in Rambo? Unlikey. And would you find Nicolas Cage bickering with his dad about sleeping with the same Nazi in any of the overblown blockbusters he's put his name to? Not a chance. In fact, Roland Emmerich, so desperate to emulate Spielberg's gentle touch, tried to slip a father/son subplot between Jeff Goldblum and his dad in Independence Day. Sadly, Jeff's character wasn't named after the family dog. 'Nuff said.

Still, evidently stung by criticisms, Spielberg decided to 'go serious'. Beginning with 1985's The Colour Purple and stretching to this weekend's new release, Munich, Spielberg has made more obviously grown up films, leaving the aliens behind and focusing on history and real life - only to receive more criticism. The usual complaints are all in force once more, with most citing his early years as a sci-fi director as reason enough for him never to tackle such subjects as the Holocaust (Schindler's List) and slavery (Amistad).

However, while I’m prepared to concede the follies of Schindler's List - which is directed like a documentary, but arguably includes as much invention as Jaws - Saving Private Ryan is one of the most painfully visceral films ever made, whose often-maligned second half is better than the lauded opening; A.I, in spite of its ending, is a terribly under-rated little film which DOES capture the pessimistic spirit of Stanley Kubrick and Catch Me If You Can is the adult Spielberg's thoughts on divorce (E.T being his younger self sounding off on the topic), wrapped in the tidy veneer of a Technicolor crime caper.

Munich, however, tops them all. Combining the so called early Spielberg and the later, dark Spielberg, it stars Eric Bana and Daniel Craig as Mossad agents travelling across Europe to track down the members of terrorist faction Black September who took hostage and eventually killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

Hot stuff, then. Unsurprisingly, the film has attracted its fair share of critics. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch, argued that the film made "an incorrect moral equation" between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-terrorism, while Palestinians have criticised it for focusing only on the Israeli side of events. Even George Jonas, the man who wrote the book on which the film is based, isn't happy accusing Spielberg of 'humanising demons'.

But if anything, these criticisms are more testament to Spielberg's talent than anything else. Sensitively portraying both the Palestinian and Israeli view of events, he has sculpted a balanced and complicated thought piece which filters the down and dirty grit of Duel and Jaws through the familial themes of E.T and Schindler‘s List to create "a vital and compelling call for peace in our times."

Will it earn him any more respect from highbrow critics? His snub at the Golden Globes and the lack of even one nomination at the BAFTAs would suggest not. But while the likes of Biskind and Glover will sit and seethe at Spielberg's calculated plotting of the downfall of Western civilisation, everyone else with taste and without prejudice can sit and enjoy the latest film from a man whose career has covered divorce, war, slavery, the Holocaust and now terrorism. Not bad for the man who infantilised America all those years ago.

Also Playing...

The name Terrence Malik may not be immediately recognisable to some of our younger readers, but he’s one of the most well-respected directors currently working. The helmer of Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, his latest film, The New World, is only the fourth of his career, one which began in the early 70s.

Yep, you read that right. Bringing new meaning to the phrase work-shy slacker, Malik is notoriously reclusive and meticulous with his films, meaning in 30 years, he has produced only a quintet of movies, even leaving a gap of 20 years between debut Badlands and follow-up Days of Heaven. That makes The New World very, very highly anticipated indeed.

Featuring Colin Farrell, it’s a re-working of the Pocahontas legend which is sure to be a hell of a lot darker than the Disney one. The foul-mouthed Irishman plays John Smith, a disgraced English soldier who lands on the area that would become Virginia, USA, in 1607 and becomes acquainted with some of the Native American locals, including the chief (August Schellenberg) and his daughter (Q’Orianka Kilcher). An interesting set-up, then. But whether it will live up to expectation remains to be seen.

Finally, the morons who inhabit Hollywood are at it once again, this time deciding post-modern comedy gold can be mined from that thar The Graduate. Every woman’s favourite divorcee Jennifer Aniston stars in Rumour Has It as the daughter of the family who allegedly inspired Dustin Hoffman’s adventures with Mrs Robinson in Mike Nichols’ 1960s classic. Shirley MacLaine and Mr Personality himself Kevin Costner co-star in a film which, rumour has it (ho ho), is a bit of a stinker.