Spielberg lashes out

I had a friend whose elderly aunt and uncle sat right behind Steven Spielberg at a special screening of a movie in New York.

"I could have hit him over the head and killed him!" his uncle said.

Spielberg might be well-advised to opt for home video. 

I really don't believe the guy goes to movies. But Spielberg is attacking streaming video. He considers movies shown on streaming services to be made-for-TV movies, not REAL movies, although he's also said that his movie, Lincoln, almost didn't get a theatrical release. 

“I hope all of us really continue to believe that the greatest contributions we can make as filmmakers is to give audiences the motion picture theatrical experience,” the directing legend said on Saturday night while accepting the Filmmaker Award at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards at the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. “I’m a firm believer that movie theaters need to be around forever.”

What he really means is that crap like The Transformers and Jurassic Park should be around forever. It's small and medium films don't go to theaters anymore.

Spielberg just isn't very good. Compare him to other directors who emerged at the same time like Coppola and Scorsese. They make a monkey of that guy. There was a time when Spielberg's friends had to tell him to stop making children's movies. He can't film a love scene, he can't film relationships between men and women and he can't make movies about women. 

His movies don't hold up. When they come out, they're talked about like they put every other movie in the genre to shame. After Saving Private Ryan, there were people talking about scrapping every other war movie ever made (even the ones he stole from). Schindler's List was presented as the ultimate Holocaust movie.  I don't think either one is terribly well-regarded anymore.

To me the advantage to seeing a movie theatrically is that you're stuck there. I don't walk out on movies, but I'll turn on something on streaming video, decide it's not for me and turn it off. I don't know how bad a habit this is. Even watching a DVD or broadcast TV requires greater commitment.

The advantage of streaming video over video rentals is that you'll click on movies that you would never rent.