Thundering Hooves
Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse was indeed “out of the bag” as of 4 pm earlier today, as Deadline‘s Pete Hammond noted at 3:43 pm Pacific. Press/guild screenings were held in LA and New York around the same time today (1 pm on this coast) and lots more are happening tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday (including some public sneaks).
Which means, as I understand it, that it’s now permissible to write about it but not to formally review it. Got it.
Hammond’s headline asked if Spielberg “Can Win Another Oscar?” Yeah, he could. Definitely. Not for this film but he could down the road. Never underestimate the future of an obviously talented director. Spielberg could wake up some day next week or next year and turn his career around like that.
Hammond is more politically correct than yours truly so allow me to stay within the boundaries of the piece he posted earlier today. Hammond talks, I comment….good enough? A robust chit-chat between friends.
Hammond: “What Spielberg has wrought is a stunning looking and highly emotional epic that is Hollywood moviemaking at its best, and seems likely to be the filmmaker’s most Academy-friendly work since his Oscar winners, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.”
Wells comment: Let me put it this way. I sat next to a significant headliner in the Oscar-blogging community during today’s War Horse screening, and after it ended (roughly around 3:25 pm) we both said, almost in unison, “Hammond is crazy…there’s no way this thing wins the Best Picture Oscar.” Okay? No offense. Due respect. Just our opinion. We could be wrong.
Hammond: “Is War Horse old-fashioned? You bet, but in this fast-moving techno culture that may be a welcome thing. Even though some of the Academy’s more recent Best Picture choices, notably No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire and The Hurt Locker among others, indicate a different sensibility than the kind of once-traditional ‘bigger’, more craft-laden film the Academy once favored, and a category into which War Horse definitely falls.”
Wells comment: As I tweeted late this afternoon, War Horse is a time-capsule movie. Every luscious, immaculate, John Williams-scored frame says ‘this is how Oscar-bait films used to be made…if the director was hungry and utterly calculating.’ It’s analogous, I feel, to Hitchcock’s Topaz. The handprint and the auteurist chops are unmistakable but they have a crusty yesteryear feel. Out of the past.
Hammond: “Spielberg is known to be a great admirer of David Lean, and with its sweeping vistas, deliberate pacing and epic story of one horse’s remarkable journey through the front lines of World War I, the film could almost be a tribute to the great director of such classics as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Wells comment: War Horse contains unmistakable tributes to Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory. War Horse‘s best scene is a British attack upon German lines across a blown-apart, puddle-strewn No Man’s Land — very similar to (and in some ways an improvement upon) Kubrick’s classic tracking shot of French troops attacking German positions in Glory. Spielberg also includes an “attack on Aqaba” sequence with sword-bearing, horse-riding British troops attacking Germans and overturning tents and steaming pots of whatever and killing guys with blade-swipes, just like Lawrence‘s original. Spielberg even features a British noncom named Higgins, an apparent nod to the Corporal Higgins in Lawrence who refuses a cigarette to Daoud and Farraj.
Hammond: “There should be some kind of separate Academy Award for the horses [as] they are surprisingly expressive.”
Wells comment: This is true. The horse (or horses) who play Joey are very actorish. And the black horses who play Charcoal, Joey’s best four-legged friend, are no slouch either. I would go so far as to say the horses are almost hams in this thing.
Hammond: “War Horse is probably too emotional and traditional to earn much love on the hardcore, unsentimental critics awards circuit, but I imagine it will fare very well at the CCMA’s , Golden Globes and Oscars.”
Wells tweets w/edits: “Tonally, emotionally and spiritually, War Horse is Darby O’Gill and the Little People goes to war with a horse. And I’m saying this as a fan of Darby O’Gill and the Little People — within its own realm and delivery system it’s a decent, cheerful, sometimes spooky little Disney flick. In any event, welcome to Spielbergland. It’s like no other place in the world. If you can push aside the carnage-of-war stuff, War Horse is essentially a nice Disney family movie. But the concept of restraint is out the window. The King’s Speech is a b&w Michael Haneke film compared to War Horse.”
Hammond: “The King’s Speech triumph last year over the more trendy critics choice of The Social Network might indicate there is still room for less edgy, more ‘traditional’ films in the heart of the Academy voter. We’ll have to wait to see, but the sheer scope of War Horse certainly gives it its own niche against smaller favored Best Pic hopefuls (seen so far) like The Descendants, The Artist, Midnight In Paris and Moneyball.”
Wells comment: War Horse is wonderful, beautiful and very touching…if you’re Joe Popcorn from Sandusky, Ohio or Altoona, Pennsylvania. Or if you feel a nostalgic affinity for “less edgy, more traditional” films and can just roll with what War Horse is serving. I think it’s so shameless it’s almost a hoot, but that’s me. It’s all of a piece and very exacting and lovely and handsomely shot and full of highly expressive emotional performances, but my God! Spielberg!
I like DARBY O’GILL too (such exemplary special effects)… but wouldn’t OLD YELLER be more in line with this particular Spielberg/ Disney analogy (noble, self-sacrificing animal, superbly crafted filmmaking, emotionally manipulative, etc.)?
As close to a “yes I liked it, it’s very good for what it is but it’s not really my thing and would prefer other movies win the Oscar” as we’ll get.
“War Horse is wonderful, beautiful and very touching…if you’re Joe Popcorn from Sandusky, Ohio or Altoona, Pennsylvania…”
I think I get what you’re trying to say here, but I don’t know if this is articulating it properly. Why, for instance, would an average moviegoer be any more susceptible to a sentimental Spielberg film than someone like you? And I also don’t even understand how that’s dissing the film — if you think “War Horse” is going to be “wonderful, beautiful and very touching” for “Joe Popcorn,” then it’s probably going to work similarly for plenty of other viewers. I’d personally prefer to see you criticize the film through your own lens rather than doing so by predicting what some other demographic would think.
Just some thoughts. “No offense. Due respect,” etc.
Wells to Danny King: Posting in-depth, full explained objections or agreements with the film would fall under the heading of a full-fledged review, which is temporarily against the rules.
Jesus H. Tittyfuckingchrist…. It’s going to be last year all fucking over again….
“Moneyball” = “The Social Network”
“The War Horse” = “The King’s Speech”
Prepare for Wells to hate every movie from now till the rest of the year that looks like it might be a threat to “Moneyball” when it comes to winning that thing that is the single most important item in the history of civilization….OSCAR!
Oscar-Elsewhere should be a real hoot for the next few months.
They really hold press screenings for movie critics on Thanksgiving Day?
i think we’re being premature…wells sees ‘war horse’ this weekend…he might love it…
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA..or not….
Waiting for Well’s review of “The War Horse” will be like waiting to hear Sean Hannity’s take on an Obama speech.
Wells to scooterzz: Try paragraph #6, brainiac.
I’m looking forward to this mainly because it’s a Great War movie. I’ve always been more interested in the First World War than the second, and I’m wondering how “Horse”‘s battle scenes compare to “Private Ryan”‘s.
Jeff, the Great War centennial is in 2014. Do you know if any A-list director is planning anything? I would think Cameron would be interested in a 3D take on Verdun or the Somme, to mention two of the more well-known campaigns.
“I really like it and think its well done but because non-film snobs will like it too I must knock it down a bit”
There, that was much shorter.
Bottom line, Jeff: You have zero credibility when it comes to judging a Spielberg movie.
Wells to FrankO’File: I have no credbility because I’m convinced that Spielberg is a high-end journeyman hack with an all-but-incorrigible sentimental streak? There is ample…make that mountains of evidence to back up that view. He’s probably the only hack in Hollywood history with a personal net worth of over $3 billion, but that’s an asterisk, not a disqualifier. He loves what he’s doing and so do tens of millions of viewers, but he’s essentially a showman, a (mostly) impersonal ringmaster in the Ringling Bros. tradition. He’s not quite the Cecil B. DeMille of our time, but he’s in that realm.
I’ve been grappling with Spielberg and his films for 40 years now (starting with the televising of Duel in ’71) and I feel I really know the man inside and out.
Almost all of Spielberg’s movies have been about him, or about the fact that he’s a skilled, highly gifted filmmaker who likes to “get” audiences and sell tickets. The charge that was first thrown at him back in the late ’70s and early ’80s (along with DePalma and Lucas) is that he’s a middle-class, not especially worldly or well-read kid from Arizona who likes to make movies about other movies, and that he’s not exactly swept away or lifted up with great feeling or conviction about the world outside the Hollywood realm. Spielberg hasn’t really grown out of that. He still lives in his own world. War Horse is the latest of his films to make that abundantly clear.
With the exception of Schindler’s List and E.T. — arguably the only two films in his canon that have delivered truly personal, deep-down convictions and emotionalism (as opposed to generic sentimentality about family, tradition, the American way of life, the U.S. military during World War II, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, etc.) — Spielberg’s filmmaking passion has mostly been about a simple equation. He’s committed to entertaining general audiences by making entertaining, emotionally whorey popcorn films for general audiences, and by frequently soaking these films in calculated sentimentality to the orchestral accompaniment of composer John Williams.
Spielberg’s mission has always been about making Joe Popcorn enthralled and amused and soothed and entertained, and he’s always done this by showing us how happy and soothed and entertained Steven Spielberg is while making a film. He loves wearing that red coat and top hat and shouting “ladies and gentleman!” through a megaphone and bringing out the dancing elephant and the trapeze artists and the lion and the lion tamer with the boots and the whip and the chair.
Few have his naturally strategic directorial eye, or his special compositional instincts and intelligence. He’s always delivered that special mise en scene excitement, that snap-crackle-popcorn, but he’s never been a serious filmmaker who engages with the world he lives in and/or his own personal core issues (other than his love of cinema). He never puts any intimate issues and passions into movies, probably because he doesn’t have any intimate issues and passions (other than his love of cinema). He’s about the cinema of impersonal passion and conviction, about his worship of movies that turned him on as a kid and of great influential directors and great classic films, and of solid craftsmanship and cool smash cuts and great rollercoaster chase sequences and all that.
Steven Spielberg is a jumble of talent and pizazz and a grab-bag of influences without any real core of his own. He’s Mr. Americana, Mr. Hook, Mr. Always (“It’s England, man!”), a money machine, and the most successful shallow filmmaker in motion picture history.
nd for 13 years I’ve hated, hated, hated the fact that Spielberg cheated when he went in tight on the old grieving man’s eyes in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and then cut to Tom Hanks and his comrades on the landing craft about to land at Omaha Beach. That was a wildly dishonest cut (or transition), and for me it brought the whole film down a notch or two.
Spielberg was a golden boy and a filmmaking dynamo operating in the exact right moment in time from Duel through E.T./Poltergeist, although I became convinced when I saw 1941 (which included an hommage to Jaws, four years after that film came out) that he was quite the egotist, and that he didn’t have the outside-the-Hollywood-realm experience or bull-headed integrity to be John Ford or Howard Hawks.
And then he resurged with the third Indiana Jones film (which I genuinely love on an episode-to-episode basis).
And then he found Schindler’s List, a story and a subject he deeply cared about and brought his core convictions to, and almost a total abandonment of his usual look-at-how-clever-and-enthused-I-am devices (except for the little red-tinted girl in the ghetto) and sentimentality (except for Liam Neeson weeping with guilt at the end).
Yo Jeffro!
You crack me up dogg. Let me tell ya something about Joe Popcorn from Sandusky. And I can say this cause I live within an hour of Cedar Point.
They don’t go to movie theaters any more cause they can’t afford it. When it comes down to puttin gas in the clunker for the week guess what wins out.
Now the real action is happening at the Red Boxes. Krogers and other stores got 4 or 5 of them and the line can still be up to 10 deep.
Whatever it will be nominated at the least. I still remember the better than decent review of “Munich” that deteriorated into a full pan (poor Olivia Spencer – go back and read what you wrote and now she’s out of the running?)…and then it was nominated and you wrote a pretty funny “Speilberg says fuck you to Wells” piece.
Get ready for it again.
“”Moneyball” = “The Social Network”
“The War Horse” = “The King’s Speech”
Really, not. I haven’t seen War Horse but I’ve seen Moneyball twice and the only thing in common with The Social Network is that Aaron Sorkin contributed to both films. They are so very different and it’s an insult to both Benneth Miller and David Fincher to continually lump them together. Moreover, Moneyball is a straight up sentimental film about two men — it has much more in common with The King’s Speech. There is no Social Network this year. Most directors/writers simply don’t have the balls to make a movie like that, where no one is redeemed, where it ends on an ambiguous, strange note, where it’s about an unlikable hero. You don’t get more likable than Brad Pitt in Moneyball.
You can make the argument that War Horse being like The King’s Speech – perhaps the British element, perhaps it being about one of the world wars, but please don’t shit on the memory of Social Network or ruin the potential for a great film like Moneyball by making such a lazy comment.
I don’t see Jeff slitting his wrists over Moneyball — the only movie he’s gone to bat for is Tyrannosaur. He also never had it in for Tom Hooper, not until it looked like it was going to beat Social Network, an unfortunate conclusion to last year’s colossal goat fuck. But he’s had it in for Spielberg from the beginning. Big difference there. He actually liked The King’s Speech.
Sasha, Actionlover can speak for himself, but my reading of his equating of those films has nothing do with the films themselves and everything to do with how Jeff champions a film for the Oscars and then subsequently trashes the films that he sees as a threat.
Jeff seems to have a little bit of wiggle room this year, though. He quietly dropped Moneyball further down his Oscar Balloon, and he moved The Descendants to the top slot. So he seems to be hedging his bet a bit, but now that he has seen War Horse, he is acknowledging that it is the potential spoiler for his film(s).
As someone who is not particularly excited to see this (looking forward to Tintin more), the Hammond review and Jeff’s responses both suggest that even though it is overly sentimental (a given from day one) the film works and doesn’t have any glaring flaws.
I think right now, handicapping the race you have to say that Moneyball, War Horse, and The Descendants are all about equal. If either The Descendants or War Horse does great box office then they’ll pull ahead of Moneyball. The Academy isn’t going to throw a bone to a film that makes Hurt Locker money in a year like this. I always thought The Hurt Locker win was more about not wanting Cameron to win for his “silly” Dances With Na’vi movie.
Warhorse is going to be the most loved and the most hated movie of the year. I was able to attend one of the early screenings for the public and I agree with Jeff. The average movie goer over 50 will love it, while the cinephiles will hate the Oscar bait aspect. I am torn between both of my personas. Depending on how the yet to be seen films perform, I could see at least a Best Picture nomination. Not a win!
http://www.mattawards.com
As someone else already said, Jeff has zero credibility when it comes to Spielberg.
The box office probably plays more of a role in securing a BP nod rather than an actual win. My feeling is once they’re in, it becomes a more level playing field and they’re viewed on their merits. But Jeff’s weakness for Spielberg aside, he’s at least consistent in pulling for the more ambitious films as against those baked with the traditional Oscar bait recipe – even if they turn as good as expected.
And I’ve always hated, hated, hated the fact that Spielberg cheated when he went in tight on that old man’s eyes in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and then cut to Tom Hanks’ eyes on the landing craft about to land at Omaha Beach.
While it is deliberately misleading, the cut isn’t to Hanks’ eyes but to the beach and a few ships first. Plus the focus is that the old man’s eyes are blue (like damon), while Hanks has green eyes.
“Oscar bait” is a term that has meaning for perhaps 0.1 % of the population. It exists only in the insular world of movie bloggers.
Oh, I see. That totally explains why he’s able to have vivid recollections of events that he never witnessed and people who were dead by the time the platoon reached him.
Hey man, I have friends in Altoona.
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