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Reviews
The Post (2017)
Sturdy, well-acted, partially well-directed, conceived
In the famous (?) final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we see a box containing the titular lost but now found object buried behind hundreds and hundreds--maybe thousands!--of other similarly anonymous boxes (damned bureaucracies!? damned soulless government!? both!? neither?). This has become one of Spielberg's calling cards--pile on the instances (boxes, spaceships, etc.) to drive home the point that it's ONE HELL OF A LOT OF (this or that)! So the little girl in The Post who runs the lemonade stand walks through the house with a huge wad of cash, the hotel room beds are literally covered up with boxes of Pentagon Papers, and as Streep's Graham leaves the courthouse near the end of the film, not one or two but MANY young women look up admirably at her as she walks by. Is this hyperbole? I doubt it. It's more a lack of restraint, judgment, and a lack of trust in the audience. Now, on this last point, as Mencken said, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. This is, after all, a public who voted an orange baby "reality TV star" into the highest office in the world! But this is also why Spielberg is not one of the great directors. He doesn't trust his audience in the way that, say, Hitchcock or Kurosawa or Bergman did. Other directors have followed suit--e.g., note the THOUSANDS of Greek ships in the harbor in Wolfgang Peterson's Troy. He brings wit, good storytelling, and great production values. He uses great actors for (often) important stories, such as this one, and he clearly identifies himself as belonging in the tradition of Capra, above all, as American storyteller, and his politics are good, if a bit ham-handed now and then. His many moments of pathos are underscored (no pun intended) by the similarly ham-handed orchestral cues of his musical counterpart John Williams. Spielberg is addicted to the pathetic appeal, and he uses it about every few minutes or so, if not more often, but, as Cicero said, nothing dries so quickly as a tear.
Yet this is, like most of Spielberg's efforts going back to the early 1970s, a good film, well worth one's two hours. The subject, given our day of attacks on the free press and the First Amendment, could not be more timely, and the film, at best, reminds us that we Americans have been through this before. Will a Watergate-like end pull us out of our largely self-inflicted wound, or will we spiral into an out and out fascism? (Nixon did not have a Fox News.) God help us. The loss of a free press would send our democracy into a hole that would pretty much be a burial plot. Spielberg gives a damn, and I appreciate his effort here, despite all I discuss in the first paragraph. Hanks, Streep, Odenkirk, and all the rest are in fine form. The film may have worked better at a 90 minute running time, but that's not going to happen these days. (A "great film" these days cannot possibly have a running time so short, though Buster Keaton, for one, would disagree--look what he did in the 40-something minutes of Sherlock, Jr., which is not a second too long or short.) So as flawed as this movie is, it is a good one, a sort of prequel to All the President's Men. Long live the First Amendment!
Shots Fired: Hour Six: The Fire This Time (2017)
Demme
This is apparently the last directorial effort of the great Jonathan Demme, director of Silence of the Lambs, Melvin and Howard, Handle with Care, and Philadelphia, and it (apparently) aired on the day of his death. There is no replacement for this man. I am not familiar with this show, but the fact that Demme was involved certainly makes me interested.