Ali Arikan – Press Play Video Blog

Roger Ebert: End of Message

Last weekend, the BBC published an article titled “How to write the perfect obituary” following the brouhaha around the New York Times’ recent obituary of Yvonne Brill. The Times piece had been deemed inappropriate and sexist for kicking off a rocket scientist’s post mortem with her apparently exemplary domesticity, including her “mean beef stroganoff,” and the BBC talked to a number of writers about the potential pitfalls of writing obituaries. It was a fluffy weekend piece, and I would have moved on were it not for one particular detail.

Among the writers interviewed was Harry de Quetteville, the Daily Telegraph’s obituaries editor. Apart from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Daily Telegraph, arguably London’s greatest daily, was Roger Ebert’s favorite newspaper, and he particularly relished their obituaries. When I saw de Quetteville’s name, a momentary lapse in consciousness almost inspired me to compose a new e-mail to Roger. The subject would read “The BBC on how to write the perfect obituary; they’ve also talked to the Telegraph’s obit editor,” include a link, and end with “/eom.”

You see, “/eom,” i.e. “end of message,” was an abbreviation that Roger had particularly taken a shining to. He used to make a point of reading all of his emails, as well as the countless comments that his blog posts would elicit, so he had once emailed a large group of his correspondents urging them to submit links to him in a message’s subject line, and to finish it off with an “/eom” so that he would know the body text was empty. To the point. That’s the way he liked it. “Don’t beat around the bush.” Say what you’re going to say. Then “/eom” that baby”! His customary reply to link submissions was a concise “Tweeting! /eom”.

And tweet he did. He was against the very idea of Twitter at first, famously declaring “I will never be a twit” in a blog post dated March 28, 2009. Yet less than seven months later, he joined Twitter, the final one in a long list of media that he mastered over the course of a 42-year journalism career, by announcing proudly to the world: “This just in: I am a Twit.”

In hindsight, Twitter was the last hurrah of Roger Ebert’s illustrious life. His position as the chief film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, but, more importantly, his film review show with the late Gene Siskel, had already turned him into a household name. But on Twitter he gained a further following his sincere, whimsical, and witty musings on life, the universe, and everything. Many have commented on how his passions outside of the cinema, which he extensively chronicled on his personal blog starting in 2007, introduced a more personal insight, but his film reviews had always reflected so much of his interests, passions, and idiosyncrasies. He only publicly admitted to being an alcoholic in 2009, yet hints of his ailment had been scattered throughout his writing for decades. He didn’t have to acknowledge his agnosticism or his admiration for Darwin: it was evident in his reviews. He loved Shakespeare and was a life-long Anglophile, two further fascinations he frequently detailed in his criticism. But blogging helped clear up the bigger picture. He enjoyed waxing lyrical, without having to worry about pitches, deadlines, or word limits, and relished the interactivity.

In fact, interactivity had always played a huge part in his modus operandi, even before he took to Twitter or Facebook—even before the rest of the world really took to the Internet, in fact. He was an early adopter of e-mail, and had his own forum on CompuServe, which he embraced fully. Right around the same time, his Video Companion was included in the Cinemania CD-ROM, which surely played a further part in introducing his writing to a younger audience. But even before the ascendancy of new media, Ebert always communicated with his fans. His weekly Movie Answerman and Film Glossary columns accepted submissions. He taught courses on film, and started his own film festival, the annual Ebertfest at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He simply loved to engage in conversation with the thousands who venerated him in whatever shape or form that tit-a-tat would take. He was a genuine renaissance man, and he adopted new challenges wholeheartedly.

As I wrote that final sentence in the previous paragraph, I got curious and checked RogerEbert.com to see how Roger rated 1994 Penny Marshall comedy, Renaissance Man. Not highly, it turns out, and after finishing off his pan, I followed the links provided within the review itself to Roger’s notices for Dead Poets Society, Private Benjamin, and, finally, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet. This led to my getting lost down the rabbit hole of Roger’s reviews of other Shakespeare adaptations, and by the time I realised I had a piece to finish, an hour had gone by, I had read or re-read over fifty pieces, and was yearning for more. That was the great power Roger had over his readers: he made the reader curious and interested. He had a deliberate writing style, and, as Glenn Kenny observed, despised bullshit: he WAS a schoolboy AND he knew what he liked. He was a man of ideas, some of them very complicated, but he always managed to get them across simply, and without condescension. His prose was simple yet true, and in a profession that more and more frequently values the convoluted and fake, it had its fair amount of detractors. They were wrong, of course, and Roger’s continuous popularity was a testament to his endurance.

Roger was also a friend. But as time passes, and as people ask me, friends as well as the press, about the sort of friendship and relationship I had with him, I find myself hesitant to answer the question. Roger was a very private person about subjects he wanted to keep that way, but, generally speaking, he was very open. He was a friend to all who came knocking. I exchanged daily emails with him, wrote for his website, attended his film festival, visited his house. He made me feel welcome, but this had nothing to do with the length or depth of our acquaintance or the fact that I was one of his Far-Flung Correspondents. He was just a welcoming sort of guy, which is what I always tried to communicate to people who asked me for his email address. “You don’t need my introduction,” I’d tell fellow writers. “If anything, he probably knows your work already.”

It’s been five days since the world found out about Roger Ebert’s death. Writers have been competing in the eloquence of their tributes, and even though I am not one to judge the particular way a person mourns, I have found certain aspects of this deluge rather off-putting. I simply think it an incongruent way to mourn the death and celebrate the life of a man who despised cant and abhorred schmaltz (though he enjoyed having fawning admirers). Just look at his obituary of Studs Terkel, his hero: “He was the most widely and deeply loved man I ever hope to know.” Roger knew the meaning of the phrase “too much of a good thing.” He was a measured man, who kept things simple. He loved the movies, he loved his wife, he loved his family, and he loved his friends. He was a kind and generous soul, who lived a full and happy life. He will be missed. Every day. /eom

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV,
a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s
Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog. Occasionally, he updates his personal blog Cerebral Mastication.
In addition, his writing appears on various film and pop-culture sites
on the blogosphere. He also believes in the transformative potential of Twitter.

Ramble On: THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

From one perspective, it’s ironic that the film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books have been so successful; they owe their success to technological progress, and yet an argument against such progress is one of their underlying themes.

Rambling along country roads in England, for instance, was much better in the past. Back then, as you meandered about, puffing on a brier pipe, the world was a sunny paradise. Birds chirruped; cows chewed cud contemplatively; and portly farmers grunted surly, friendly greetings. These days, some chump in a Land Rover will no doubt mash you into the nearest clump of gorse, upbraid you in crude “estuary” English, and speed off.

In Britain during the past century, there was no shortage of people who could tell you how things were sliding downhill, fast. The past was better, merry, mirthful; dirtier in some respects, but good, honest dirt for all that. And we, with our plastic flowers and cement grass, have left our soul behind in yonder merry medieval ditch.

I have always found this narrative fairly hard to fathom. Tooling around in medieval times, wooing the odd damsel, and banging out a few ale-drenched Chaucerian stanzas may sound great fun, but on closer examination of only a few historical statistics, the Chaucer and the damsels pale into insignificance. Fact is, if you were around in ye olden days, you would probably be dead, since child mortality rates were astronomical. Other illnesses were so little understood, they didn’t even have the right names! (Anyone for the bloody flux?)

The reverence for a supposed golden age ruined by progress is a recurring theme in human history. The Romans had it, no doubt the guys before the Romans had it too. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose children’s story The Hobbit has now been adapted to the screen as a trilogy by Peter Jackson, also subscribed to this philosophy, along with his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. As the twentieth century progressed, Tolkien would be embraced by the alternative society as a sort of prophet of doom, accurately predicting the harrowing bleakness wrought by modernity.

To this day our hemp-wearing chums will knowingly roll their eyes and talk—at length—about Tolkien’s prophetic abilities (in theme, at least). Machines ravaged the earth only a handful of years after he wrote The Hobbit, in the carnage of the Second World War, they pronounce. But machines are operated by people. Human cruelty can be catalogued as far back in history as you want to go. The twentieth century has no exclusive rights on the charnel house.

And, most tellingly, neither of Tolkien’s books that have now been adapted into live-action features, The Hobbit or its cinematic precursor The Lord of the Rings, would have been possible without advancements in film production. Both were turned into feature animations of varying success in the 1970s, and John Boorman had long planned bringing the latter to the screen in the same decade, but it was technological progress that allowed Peter Jackson, et al to successfully tackle such densely—and idiosyncratically—crafted works of fantasy. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a rousing success, hugely popular with both audiences and critics, garnering billions of dollars at the box office, with the final film, 2003’s The Return of the King, sweeping the Oscars. Jackson and his films put the fantasy genre on film culture’s map.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Before Jackson’s trilogy, fantasy in film had been about as cool as a tweed g-string. When I was young, it was, speaking bluntly, rubbish: fascinating for the Dungeons and Dragons set or habitual devourers of superhero comics, but to be avoided like the plague by people with any taste (I can say these things—I used to belong to the D and D set). But the Lord of the Rings films changed something, and people started talking about not just them, but also the fantasy genre, in hushed, awed tones. For better or worse, the genre and its fans owe a debt of gratitude to Peter Jackson and technological wizardry.

This tradition of marrying fantasy with high-tech hermetics and portentous narrative continues in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which promises to be the first part of a new trilogy, fashioned from a book that a particularly slow reader could devour in a lazy afternoon. Despite his initial protestations, Peter Jackson returned to the director’s chair vacated by Guillermo Del Toro, whose sole contribution seems to be an afterthought-like screenwriting credit. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a dense picture, but perhaps not as densely conceived as it could have been (the original plan only included two installments). It neither disappoints nor enchants. If anything, it leaves the viewer wondering what all the fuss is about Tolkien.

I have recently watched Fellowship of the Ring, and found it once again to be utterly delightful. It remains my favorite of Jackson’s Ring Cycle, mainly because I love the quaint, rather English scenes set in the Shire before the plot kicks in. The Hobbit, judging from its advance publicity, promised more of the same. And it delivers. To a point.

The Hobbit opens with not one but two prologues, the first showcasing how Erebor, the greatest dwarf kingdom in Middle Earth, was overtaken by the treasure-hungry dragon Smaug, forcing the dwarfs into a nomadic existence. The second works, assumingly, as a bookend to the earlier films and a narrative device connecting them to The Lord of the Rings, as old Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) sits down to write his memoirs. This takes us back to sixty years previously, when Gandalf, once again played by Sir Ian McKellen, who knocks on the younger, and much more timid, Bilbo’s (Martin Freeman) door to enlist him on an adventure with 13 dwarfs, who want to reclaim their mountain kingdom from the dragon. The dwarfs (I refuse to use “dwarves,” Tolkien’s in-universe plural for dwarf) are led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), who remains unconvinced of Bilbo’s talents, which Gandalf says will make him useful as a burglar. Hesitation, though, is overcome by all parties involved, and the group set off on their quest, in which they come across elfs, goblins, and many other creatures, the knowledge of which once assured the relative longevity of my virginity.

Peter Jackson, who, along with Del Toro, also wrote the screenplay with long-time collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, has put together a fine, if uneven, almost paradoxical, film. The Hobbit is long and feels long, but it has a new challenge for the characters every few scenes. Tolkien’s original book is highly episodic, but Jackson overcomes this with a deft, natural-seeming touch. Having said that, the film leaves one with a sense of incredulity. Unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, whose titular band ends up in tatters, The Hobbit comes to a close, after almost three hours, just as it is revving up.

Indeed, so much of the film is filler that it amazes me to hear there will be an extended version for home video. Short of having the dwarfs sing the full version of the Lonely Mountain song (which is, admittedly, a terrific moment) or showing the fat dwarf wiping his arse, one wonders how a film that spends ten minutes showing a wizard trying to resuscitate a hedgehog left anything on the cutting room floor.

The film has many high points, though: Martin Freeman is great as Bilbo: the sense of underhanded sarcasm in his delivery of even the most sincere lines is welcome in a series devoid of such thespian frivolities. Sir Ian is equally delightful as Gandalf, thanks to a higher screen time than he had as Gandalf the Grey in Fellowship.

The film’s scope is perhaps even greater than The Lord of the Rings, if not wholly logical (at one point the group is in the middle of verdant greenery, in the next cresting a snowy mountain overpass). Accompanied by Howard Shore’s instantly hummable main theme, the visuals are stunning. The effects look magnificent, especially during the Erebor scenes in the monologue as well as a later battle between stone giants. Even Gollum (Andy Serkis) looks much better than he did in the earlier films; the game of riddles he embarks on with Bilbo is the film’s single most wonderful sequence.

In the end, though, Jackson’s film remains a bit of an enigma. It cannot be dismissed as either a vanity project or a mere commercial endeavour. It’s grand, yet it also feels small. More than that, though, the film’s central philosophy is muddled. It advocates leaving one’s creature comforts behind and venturing out into the wild, and yet its reasoning for this, in Jackson's interpretation, remains the eventual restructuring of a once-stationary order. The film argues for progress, only to inhibit its natural inclination: the destruction of boundaries. What’s best: localization or globalization? At least Tolkien and his kin thought the old ways were better. Jackson hasn’t quite made up his mind.

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog. Occasionally, he updates his personal blog Cerebral Mastication. In addition, his writing appears on various film and pop-culture sites on the blogosphere. He also believes in the transformative potential of Twitter.

‘SHOULD WIN’ VIDEO ESSAY SERIES: Best Director Martin Scorsese, HUGO

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play presents "Should Win," a series of video essays advocating winners in seven Academy Awards categories: supporting actor and actress, best actor and actress, best director and best picture. These are consensus choices hashed out by a pool of Press Play contributors. Follow along HERE as Press Play decides the major categories including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Documentary. Important notice: Press Play is aware that our videos can not be played on Apple mobile devices. We are, therefore, making this and every video in this series available on Vimeo for these Press Play readers. If you own an Apple mobile device, click here.]

Narration:

This year's Oscar race for Best Director features an especially strong roster. The five nominees are Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris, Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist, Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life, Alexander Payne for The Descendants and Martin Scorsese for Hugo. Four of them did magnificent work this year, one of them less so, but in the end there will only be one winner.

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is not a love letter to nostalgia or a trite piece of idol worship. Instead, it's a mature artist realizing his own folly. It's a melancholy film, yet Allen's direction is full of hope, with the final choice of the hero underlining the pointlessness of living in the past and the necessity of having to trudge on. Michel Hazanavicius' supreme achievement in The Artist is making people talk about the silent era again and argue about whether the film accurately represents it. Terrence Malick's canvas is as wide as they come in The Tree of Life, where he explores life, death, the universe and everything in a spasmodic stream-of-consciousness narrative. He finds the personal in the expansive. The theme of loss permeates the film. Malick arranges the beautiful movements with grandeur. The Descendants is perhaps Alexander Payne's most conventional movie to date. Loss, once again, is prominent in this family drama deftly directed by Payne with a loving eye for the minute details in the grand scheme of life.

But this year's Academy Award for Best Director should go to the master, Martin Scorsese. In Hugo, Scorsese shares with the audience his eternal love of movies through a magnificent palate of colors and exuberant motion made all the more fantastic by an exemplary use of 3D. But despite the added dimension, Hugo is the rare 3D film that works without it; the opening title sequence alone is a marvel of direction. Scorsese also displays a knack for physical comedy that one wouldn't have expected. Generally, though, Scorsese's direction manages to put a sense of wonder front and center. His love of films and filmmaking may be the hidden true subject of every film he has ever made. In a strange way, Hugo might be Scorsese's most personal film to date.

Kevin B. Lee is editor in chief of Press Play. Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog.

‘SHOULD WIN’ VIDEO ESSAY SERIES: Best Actor Brad Pitt, MONEYBALL

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play presents "Should Win," a series of video essays advocating winners in seven Academy Awards categories: supporting actor and actress, best actor and actress, best director and best picture. These are consensus choices hashed out by a pool of Press Play contributors. We'll roll out the rest of the series between now and Friday. Follow along HERE as Press Play picks the rest of the categories including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Documentary. Important notice: Press Play is aware that our videos can not be played on Apple mobile devices. We are, therefore, making this and every video in this series available on Vimeo for these Press Play readers. If you own an Apple mobile device, click here.]

Narration:

Brad Pitt is one of the biggest movie stars in the world. But he is also a fantastic actor. His phenomenal range has allowed him to play delirious and zany, as in Twelve Monkeys, but also understated and restrained, as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Those films brought Pitt a Best supporting actor and a best leading actor Oscar nomination respectively, but both times, he went back home empty-handed. This year, Pitt is once again nominated as best actor in a leading role Academy Award for his performance in Bennett Miller’s Moneyball. Press Play believes that he deserves the Oscar, and, in this video essay, we will tell you why.

In Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the legendary general manager of the Oakland A’s, who reinvented the way baseball players were hired during the 2002 season. There is real mystery to Pitt's take on Billy Beane. He loves the game, but knows the game is changing. He knows he has to get wins in order to keep his job, and is more than willing to modernize for that reason. But he also knows there is something you can't calculate about the game of baseball. The scenes of Pitt driving to work or sitting in the locker room show a man who is constantly trying to figure out the odds and knowing deep down that there are some things you can't figure out.

Brad Pitt’s performance is an almost old-fashioned, movie star one. In another universe, one could imagine Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant taking the part. He brings to the role an assured quality on overzealous, yet understated, lust for ultimate success that was forged in the fires of years and years of failure. He's charming and cheeky and funny, and very good looking (despite the hideous early naughties’ haircut and lumbering fashion sense). Pitt brings a subtle comedic take to what could have been a rather boring central role; his various dealings with other managers, his scouts and players, betray genius-level timing and mimicry.

Pitt plays him as a nexus of frustration: he never made the big time, so he tries to make up for that lost opportunity. He is clever, though: he knows that he is unable to see the forest for the trees as evidenced in the final conversation with Peter Brand, a composite character played by Jonah Hill; as well as the earlier exchange with his precocious daughter, but that's what obsessive-compulsive people are like. They know what they're doing is irrational, but they have to keep doing it.

Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog. Ken Cancelosi is writer/photographer living in Dallas, Texas.

‘SHOULD WIN’ VIDEO ESSAY SERIES: PRESS PLAY picks the Oscars

OSCARS 2012: PRESS PLAY contributors argue for their favorites

OSCARS 2012: PRESS PLAY’S staff picks their favorites

After last week’s announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees, a handful of Press Play contributors gathered together via email to discuss the highs and lows in some of the major award categories. Below are some of the highlights of the conversation, and as always, we encourage you to keep the discussion going. The site's consensus picks for the films and individuals that should win be announced next week, starting Monday.

Matt Zoller Seitz: Has anybody seen A Better Life, for which Demián Bichir was nominated as Best Actor? That seemed out of left field. I feel like Gary Oldman might be a lock for that one, what do you think?

Glenn Close and Rooney Mara nominated for Best Actress is interesting, too. Some thought Close's work was too stunt-y. Mara seems a total surprise for me, as her character is so not Academy-friendly (in terms of looks and demeanor), and Mara is not anywhere close to a known quantity.

Ali Arikan: Rooney Mara has been lauded by the critics and the industry, and the studio had been hyping her since the summer, so I'm not at all surprised that she got a nomination. Despite the fact that the Millennium books are terrible, people seem to love them, and Lisbeth Salander has become an iconic character. Plus, she also did sterling work in a solid film. What is interesting, however, is that either she or Glenn Close edged out Tilda Swinton for We Need to Talk About Rosemary's Omen. I thought she would be a lock.

I am happy about Moneyball, a film I thought I would hate, but ended up loving. I am one of the few in "our circles" who felt The Tree of Life was lacking, and I don't think it deserved a Best Picture nomination over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Extremely Loud and The Help are just risible. The latter was always going to be in there, but I thought Bridesmaids might have snuck in instead of Extremely Loud. Either way, having nine nominees obviously shows that the field is still pretty wide open.

Matt: I like The Tree of Life best of the Best Picture nominees, though I know opinion in this thread is mixed. It's the most unconventional of any nominated film, so much so that I am pleasantly surprised that it became a sort of event when it hit theaters. I think more films that experimental should be made at the Hollywood level. There are not too many directors holding down the fort for that kind of experience, not even Malick's fellow '70s movie brats Spielberg and Scorsese.

Aaron Aradillas: I would argue that in their own ways, both Hugo and Tintin are experimental films. I mean, if it wasn't for their directors, I seriously doubt a studio would've rolled the dice on 'em.

Sarah D. Bunting: Margin Call got a Best Original Screenplay nod. Shut up, Oscars. Barf.

Ali: I also second Sarah's barf. Ewww.

My feelings about Melissa McCarthy mirror Scott Tobias' thoughts on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I disliked Bridesmaids, but I despised her performance.

Aaron: I've yet to fully grasp the dislike for her performance. I know it exists, but I don't get it. I don't remember anyone being offended when Kevin Kline won for making a mockery of being a dumb, sexist man.

Nick Nolte is terrific in Warrior, but it is clearly a great performance of something he does well. He makes look effortless what Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton huff and puff and make look so tiring. Besides, Nolte did a better version of this in Affliction.

Christopher Plummer gives his career performance. There's no fat on it. Unlike The Insider, where he's a hoot, Plummer doesn't push it in Beginners, and that's why he leaves such an impression on those of us who love the movie. The way he embraces life at such a late date is funny, touching and ultimately quite sad. Ewan McGregor's character never acknowledges it, but he learns his father's final lessons and that's what leads to the movie's astonishingly hopeful and romantic ending. He is finally his father's son. Plummer's presence is felt in every scene. It be McGregor's story, but it's Plummer's film.

I'm a fan of Midnight in Paris, but Woody Allen's screenplay is not entirely original. It's kind of a variation on The Purple Rose of Cairo. Margin Call is a script written about how we're living right now. It trumps Mamet by not getting all tangled up in being clever with its verbal scenes.

Mara's my second choice in the Best Actress category, but Viola Davis is the only lead actress who literally has to create a character from scratch. The other performances all have something already existing that they're working off of.

Ali: I am not basing my dislike of McCarthy's performance on a curve. It was too easy, without any nuance and did not add anything to a film that definitely needed some sort of a breakout-star factor to make it less boring (and, you know, funny). So, I'd love to hear the case for her.

Aaron: The beauty of McCarthy's performance is there isn't a trace of self-loathing or self-doubt that would probably get in a dozen other comedies with a character like hers. She is the most confident and aware person in the circle of Bridesmaids.

I'm willing to make a gentleman's bet that Meryl Streep will not win Best Actress. I think Viola Davis is going to "surprise" everyone and take it home.

Kevin B. Lee: If anything, Davis is the odd sober person surrounded by a carnival of sass, crass and crazy in The Help. Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain are like intrepid migrants from John Waters-land, while Davis anchors it in gravity and respectability ‒ she's the whipped cream atop the shit pie. I'm not sure whether she saves the movie or adds a layer of Oscar-mongering disingenuousness to what really should be an all-out camp farce. But her final scene standing up to Bryce Dallas Howard is a feat of acting gymnastics, going through a series of emotional states in lightning succession.

In contrast, The Iron Lady is pretty much all Meryl Streep (and everything that implies, good and bad). But it's an MVP performance; she actually made me like Margaret Thatcher for two hours.

Lisa Rosman: The Help is a tepid movie at best, offensive at worst, but as is so often the case, the performances far outstrip the film. Viola Davis never gives up an inch ‒ she may cater less as an actress than anyone else in Hollywood ‒ but so much goes on behind the eyes that she ignobles what could be a wretched role. And on that note, I love Rooney, but this is not the film for which she should win an Oscar. It's a one-trick-pony role and though she does it well, it doesn't have enough shades to win a golden naked man.

I hate hate hate hate the idea of McCarthy winning this. The role is not just unfunny; it's mean-spirited and she executes it more poorly than she's done anything else in her career. (Wherefore art thou, Sookie?) Nay, for me it's Janet McTeer, who does everything that Close herself fails to do in the otherwise craptacular and super outdated Albert Nobbs. It's a finely tuned performance that brings real pathos and humor and at least three dimensions to the kind of person that Hollywood always, always gets wrong.

The rest I am less adamant on. I love Malick but The Tree of Life is not legible in ways that actually matter to me. Scorsese should take Best Director for Hugo, but I can understand why others do not agree. Gary Oldman should, of course, take it; it's a terrific performance, and Tinker Tailor the Thief Cook should get Best Adapted Screenplay. I don't love any of the Best Picture nominees but think Moneyball comes closest to being what I want a big movie to be. And sorry for the barfers, but I love Margin Call for Best Original Screenplay.

Aaron: I'm for Brad Pitt. I think he gives a star turn and acting powerhouse at once. George Clooney is great (and I have no problem if he wins), but he was going deeper into a character he does best: the good-looking asshole who is brought up short by life.

There is real mystery to Pitt's take on Billy Beane. He loves the game, but knows the game is changing. He knows he has to get wins in order to keep his job and is more than willing to modernize for that reason. But he also knows there is something you can't calculate about the game of baseball. The scenes of Pitt driving to work or sitting in the locker room show a man who is constantly trying to figure out the odds and knowing deep down that there are some things you can't figure out. Also, Pitt is a great subtle comic performer in the scenes where he's making deals or bossing around others in the room. Like Jesse Eisenberg, he is a natural when it comes to Aaron Sorkin's writing.

Kevin: I think Pitt's performance falls under the same school of acting I endorse. (Clooney, on the other hand, is on autopilot).

Aaron: Clooney's not on auto, but I'll leave it at that. I do know Pitt is happy as can be to be nominated in the same category as Gary Oldman. His death scene in Fight Club is inspired by Oldman. Pitt says on that film’s commentary, "No one dies like Gary!" It should also be noted that Pitt gets a slight advantage in that his work in both Moneyball and The Tree of Life show how wide a range he truly has.

Lisa: I actually agree Clooney's not on auto, but I disliked the conceit of the casting of that film immensely. (Alexander Payne loves to get notoriously charismatic actors to play schlubs; it underscores his misanthropic view of "average people.")

Ali: I, too, am for Pitt, even though I liked Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Doo-Dah Doo-Dah more than any other American film this year. Goldman is magnificent as George Smiley, closer to John le Carré's vision than Alec Guinness' portrayal, and he explodes with understated pathos (paradoxically) the one time he shows his emotions (the incredible Soviet national anthem scene where he sees his wife having it on with Colin Firth).

That said, I have a problem with his voice and accent. He sounds like a constipated baboon trying to do an impression of Ian McKellen. It was but a minor quibble when I first saw the film, but after three times, it's just grating. (For what it's worth, Tom Hardy gives the best performance in that movie.)

As for Brad Pitt, first of all, his is an almost old-fashioned movie star performance. He's charming and cheeky and funny, and hella good looking. (Yes, I've just used "hella" ‒ I am a 14-year-old kid from 1998.) I have no idea who Beane is, so this is my estimation of the character as he is seen on the screen: as Aaron said, here is a person who decides to ride the waves of change. Pitt plays him as a nexus of frustration; he never made the big time, so he is trying to make up for that lost opportunity. He is clever, though. He knows that he is unable to see the forest for the trees (the final scene with Jonah Hill, the earlier conversation with his daughter, etc.), but that's what obsessive-compulsive people are like. They know what they're doing is irrational, but they have to keep doing it.

Also, the final shot shows him in full command of his face ‒ an incredibly important skill for a screen actor.

Matt: What about this Demián Bichir fellow? Nobody's really mentioned him as a contender….

Aaron: A Better Life is good, and he's really good, but not award-worthy, especially when you consider someone like, say, the criminally underrated Steve Carell or Kevin Spacey's triumphant return to good acting in Margin Call. If one is going to label his nomination the Indie Nod, I much prefer Michael Shannon. Take Shelter is far from perfect, but Shannon is amazing.

The biggest problem with A Better Life is the character of the 14-year-old son. The actor is pretty bad and the character, as written, is pretty thin. An old-school Mexican dad would not put up with half the shit this kid gives him. Compared to the father-son dynamic in A Bronx Tale, A Better Life comes up short.

Can I make my case for The Help one more time? If the best 9/11 movies are not explicitly about 9/11 (Zodiac, Munich), then why can't one of the best films about race today be a movie about recent history? The outcry from so-called open-minded liberals was telling in that just because the movie was supposedly playing it safe by telling a story we all can agree on that it wasn't also making people think about the here and now.

Race is the one truly unspoken-about issue in this country. When it is spoken about, it is in an obvious safe way. The Help is about the moment when an open discussion was needed in order for change to occur. What the movie also makes clear is that discussion needs to be ongoing. And that is simply not the case right now.

Just because the movie delivers its "message" in bawdy, emotional, mass-appeal entertainment doesn't make it unworthy of praise (or awards). The Help not only attempts to keep recent history fresh in our minds, but also old-fashioned awards-worthy entertainment alive as well.

TRAILER: Terrence Malick’s TREE OF LULZ (Hey, it could have happened. . .)

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!

— Maud Muller, by John Greenleaf Whittier

Annals of film history are filled with masterpieces that never were. Cineastes spend many a sleepless night thinking of Stanley Kubrick’s unproduced epic on Napoleon’s life. Film historians still search every nook and cranny to possibly locate Orson Welles’ first cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. Then there is the original script for John Huston’s Freud: The Secret passion that a little known philosopher by the name of Jean-Paul Sartre wrote; and Aldous Huxley’s Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll, which was an amalgam of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and the biography of Lewis Carroll, of which Walt Disney said: “[The script] was so literary I could understand only every third word.” There are many, many more, and probably none of these intriguing projects will ever get to see the light of day.

But don’t despair, gentle reader. As a late Christmas present, PressPlay is proud to offer you a glimpse of another masterpiece that could have been. Drown your cinephile sorrows in this.

— Ali Arikan

Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of Fandor, a new video on demand website featuring the best of independent and international films. He is also a film critic and award-winning filmmaker. In addition to editing Keyframe, Kevin contributes to film publications and produces online video essays. Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish news portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents. Ali is also a regular contributor to The House Next Door, Slant Magazine’s official blog.

VIDEO ESSAY: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG, Chapter 5: Father Figures

VIDEO ESSAY: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG, Chapter 5: Father figures

[Editor's Note: Press Play is proud to present Chapter 5 of our first video essay series in direct partnership with IndieWire: Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg. This series examines facets of Spielberg's movie career, including his stylistic evolution as a director, his depiction of violence, his interest in communication and language, his portrayal of authority and evil, and the importance of father figures — both present and absent — throughout his work.

Magic and Light is produced by Press Play founder and Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz and coproduced and narrated by Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipknot TV, Press Play contributor, and one of Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. The Spielberg series brings many of Press Play's writers and editors together on a single long-form project. Individual episodes were written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and cut by Steven Santos, Serena Bramble, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz and Kevin B. Lee. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 1: Introduction, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 2: Blood & Pulp, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, Chapter 3: Communication, click here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, Chapter 4: Evil & Authority, click here.]

Narration:

Steven Spielberg is the product of The Greatest Generation — a Baby Boomer raised on idealized images of the nuclear family, progress, and American might. He is also a child of divorce — a dreamer from a broken home. Spielberg’s attempt to reconcile these two biographical facts—the mythic ideal of the family, and the reality of its dismantling—has been at the heart of many of his films. Spielberg’s movies often focus on a real or makeshift family unit, banding together to fight an outside force that threatens to tear it apart. At the head of this makeshift family, there is often a father figure imparting wisdom to his charges, or being forced to confront his shortcomings as a protector. Often both.

null In Jaws Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody is the father figure to a tightly-knit summer community being terrorized by a Great White Shark. The scene where his son mimics his gestures tells us he’s a loving, good father who will do anything to keep his family – and his community – safe.

The film’s second half shows Brody becoming part of a makeshift family of shark hunters, with World War II veteran Quint taking over as protector of the landlubber police chief and the rich-kid, know-it-all oceanographer, Hooper.

The trio of Quint, Brody and Hooper feels like a makeshift family unit: an impetuous, sarcastic younger brother, a tougher, wiser older brother, and their boozing, cantankerous, tinpot dictator dad.

At first, Brody and Hooper question Quint’s methods as well as his manner. The old sea captain is a gruff taskmaster. He’s slobblish, domineering and rude. He is also quite mad.

null But when the men sit around drinking and talking we learn the source of Quint’s insanity. He tells them of how he survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the naval vessel that an atomic bomb that helped the United States defeat Japan in World War II. They were ultimately successful — but the mission is famous mainly for having its crew picked off by ravenous sharks.

Quint’s ordeal trumps anything Brody or Hooper will ever experience. And it seems to make a deep impression on them. Although they never stop resenting Quint’s sourness or fearing his craziness, they appreciate his toughness, and learn to work with him. They are members of the younger generation learning to respect a seasoned elder because they are, so to speak, all on the same boat.

And when the father dies horribly — leaving the boat adrift at sea, and the mission figuratively adrift – it is up to the sons to complete the mission.

In Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller is an unofficial father figure to a mostly young group of Army Rangers. He’s given the public relations-burnishing task of finding and extracting the last surviving member of a group of brothers who were all killed fighting the Germans. Miller wonders if this mission is worth the price. For every man he’s lost in his command, Miller figures he’s saved maybe 10, 20. Now he’s been asked to put his entire platoon—his family—in harm’s way to save just one.

Miller hopes that Ryan is worth it – that he goes home and invents a longer-lasting light bulb or cures cancer. But he puts the thought aside for the same reason that parents try not to think about whether the incredible effort they’ve invested in their own, flesh-and-blood children will yield a saint, a felon, or something in between. One cannot know such things — and the end result of parenting isn’t the point of the exercise. You do it out of love. And duty. And you hope for the best.

When the men finally find Private Ryan he doesn’t want to go home. Why? Not out of some abstract sense of patriotism, but for immediate, personal reasons. Ryan doesn’t want to leave HIS surrogate family – his fellow soldiers.

Miller and the rest of the rescue team decide to stay and help Ryan secure a tower. It’s practically a suicide mission. And it ends with Miller making the ultimate sacrifice.

null The Spielberg who made Saving Private Ryan in the late 1990s was a family man in his 50s. Detractors questioned Miller’s final admonition — asking, in effect, “Well, what if Private Ryan went home and DIDN’T accomplish anything special?” But that’s really not the point of that moment. It is a purely personal, human moment between Miller and Ryan that transcends war or even politics. In Spielberg’s films, every life is worth saving, provided that the saved person goes on to continue to be – or to BECOME — a decent person, and do the best he can with the gift he’s been given.

It’s probably worth pointing out that the Spielberg who directed “Saving Private Ryan” was a different person from the wunderkind of the 1970s. He was no longer the ambitious, single, childless twentysomething who directed Jaws, and who placed his sympathies with the brother figures that were caught between a bad father and a hungry shark.

The late’90s Spielberg is convinced that a son must earn his place in the world — and that it is the father’s responsibility to teach him that lesson. The weight of that conviction gives Saving Private Ryan a momentous quality, as well as a certain dour heaviness. It imparts a sense that a grave lesson was learned in World War II, and that this movie exists to teach it again — for the benefit of people who weren’t around to hear it the first time.

Whether in his serious movies or his pop fantasies, Spielberg often pivots the story on the father figure, be it real or surrogate. It’s not something as trite as Spielberg having Daddy Issues. More likely he is still uncovering something new about the nature of being a father.

For Spielberg, the presence and goodness of the mother is, with very few exceptions, a given. She will always protect and nurture. Fathers do that too. But they can also abandon the child, or be inexpressive when trying to impart knowledge. In Spielberg’s world, mothers are usually instinctive caregivers, healers, and teachers. They know what to do. Fathers are eternal students. They must learn, and keep learning.

null In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg shows a father driven to near madness in the pursuit of his dream. Roy Neary exhibits the behavior of a young artist who’ll stop at nothing to make the vision in his head a reality.

The movie contrasts Roy Neary’s destructive obsession against the plight of Jillian Guiler, a single mom. Like Roy, she has been implanted with a vision of extraterrestrial contact. But her motive in going to Devil’s Tower is quite different. Where Roy wants to make his dreams come true – expressing the selfish drive of an artist — Jillian wants only to rescue her kidnapped son.

The contrast between the two storylines is striking. We watch a mother desperately try to hold her family together. Meanwhile, a father abandons his own family to answer a higher calling. Close Encounters is clearly the work of a young artist. Spielberg has said on several occasions that he made the movie today, he would not have had Roy Neary abandon his family to pursue his vision. Whether that’s indicative of deeper wisdom or a sort of creeping personal and artistic softness is impossible to say. But it’s definitely a change that came with age, and that is reflected in Spielberg’s attitude toward parents and their children – and grandchildren.

In any event, the film’s narrative momentum and sense of craft are so overwhelming that we do not judge Roy for what he does. Instead, we root for him – or at the very least, live vicariously through him, as he does something that most of us would not be brave enough – or obsessed enough – to do.

The image of Roy walking into the mothership to be a part of a new family could stand in for Spielberg in the mid-seventies: A young man leaving home to become a part of a filmmaking family, ascending from relative obscurity to become the most popular storyteller of his time.

But it’s a bittersweet moment, thanks to our awareness of what Roy has given up, and what his children have lost. He has chosen visionary fulfillment over personal responsibility.

null Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. feels like a continuation of Close Encounters – and not just because the story originated in Spielberg’s daydreaming about what might have happened if one of the aliens from Close Encounters got left behind. The film’s hero, Elliott, is the middle child in a bustling suburban home guided by a single mother. The absence of the father is conspicuous, and important. At time it feels as if we’re seeing what happened to the Neary family in Close Encounters after Roy lost his mind and ran off to Devil’s Tower.

In E.T. Spielberg uses the fanciful story of a boy and his friendship with an alien creature as his way of dealing directly with the trauma of divorce. The absence of Elliott’s father, the fact that his family will never be whole, permeates every scene of E.T. Elliott learns the hard lesson early that nothing can last forever.

When Eliott befriends E.T., it’s as if he’s found an equal – a pet that reveals himself as a playmate. But really their friendship is compacted account of how all children will eventually be asked one day to look after those who nurtured and protected them. The relationship between the boy and his alien illustrates the phrase “the child is father to the man.” And as the tale unfolds, both E.T. and Elliott learn it. E.T., like Elliott, feels abandoned by his family. But E.T. quickly assumes the role of friend of protector – and in some strange way, a mentor — of Elliott.

By the end of the story, the roles have switched. Elliott takes on the responsibility of reuniting E.T. with his family at the landing site. But at the same time, though, E.T. also reveals a depth of maturity and wisdom that we might not have suspected earlier. The crowd-pleasing shot of the rescued alien appearing in the back of the hijacked government van suggests an almost mythic power and wisdom. E.T.’s pose is vaguely Christlike. But the wrinkled visage and tattered robe suggest confident, loving grandfather who’s seen it all.

The final scene shows Elliott re-experiencing the heartbreak that comes when a family must separate. But he seems better able to handle it. It’s an intensely sad moment, but also resigned and mature. Elliott seems tougher now. And wiser.

null Throughout his films you can track Spielberg’s evolving feelings about the terrors, pleasures and responsibilities of fatherhood. In Empire of the Sun, based on J.G. Ballard’s novel, the preteen hero Jim is wrenched from his family as violently as any Spielberg hero, and must learn to survive on his own. He finds an unexpected ally – a sort of Humphrey Bogart-like, scoundrel-mentor – in Basie, an American steward stranded in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

The film’s title is a bit of a pun: Son, S-U-N, is a reference to the sun on the flag of Imperial Japan. But it also describes the suddenly parentless hero’s empire – an immense, splendid, and very dangerous backyard for him to play in, and grow in. Empire of the son … S-O-N.

Even in Hook we are treated to the sight of the eternal child Peter Pan coming to grips with being a father, and learning to nurture the child within the man, but without neglecting his adult responsibilities.

Later films show Spielberg to be impatient, even resentful, at the sight of fathers neglecting their duties. You can sense his anger in wanting deadbeat dads to get a clue — a comeuppance.

In War of the Worlds divorced dad Ray Ferrier can hardly be bothered to look after his kids for a weekend.

When an alien invasion occurs, he is confronted for the first time in his life with the prospect of caring for others. Ray has never been reliable. Now, he must reunite his children with their mother. If he can do that then maybe he will earn the right to be a father.

In Minority Report Chief Anderton is a far cry from Chief Brody. This gifted cop watches over the people of D.C. not out of concern, but suspicion.

But there is a reason for his wanting to know the whereabouts of everyone under his authority. It stems from his failing as a protective father, which led to the kidnapping and murder of his only son.

Anderton was a good husband and dad, but a moment of distraction led to the loss of his family, and deep depression, and then to drug addiction.

In Jurassic Park, the childless hero’s discomfort with children is a running joke throughout the film’s first half. In an early scene of paleontologist Alan Grant lecturing about how dinosaurs evolved from birds, he even seems to take pleasure in terrifying the youngest members of his audience.

Alan is awkward and hesitant – fearful, even — when he suddenly finds himself the protector of two kids.

But by the end of the film, his parental instincts are in full bloom and he seems at peace with his responsibilities.

The film’s screenplay has an extremely conservative point-of-view on the matter. Parenting is depicted not just as an important job that perpetuates the species, but a symbol of evolution.

This is driven home in the film’s final shot, which shows the hero, his girlfriend and the two children being airlifted away from an island of primordial terror. The movie cuts from shots of this makeshift nuclear family, safe at last and relaxing, to shots of pelicans soaring through the sky. The meaning is clear: the willingness to take responsibility for a child, even one who’s not your own, is a marker of true maturity. Alan Grant began the film as a dinosaur. By the end he has evolved into a bird.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play, the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish new portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents. San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television. Steven Santos is a freelance TV editor/filmmaker based in New York. He has cut docu-series for MTV, The Travel Channel, The Biography Channel, The Science Channel and Animal Planet. His work can be found at http://www.stevenedits.com. He also writes about films at his blog, The Fine Cut.

VIDEO ESSAY: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG, Chapter 4: Evil and Authority

[Editor's Note: Press Play is proud to present Chapter 4 of our first video essay series in direct partnership with IndieWire: Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg. This series examines facets of Spielberg's movie career, including his stylistic evolution as a director, his depiction of violence, his interest in communication and language, his portrayal of authority and evil, and the importance of father figures — both present and absent — throughout his work.

Magic and Light is produced by Press Play founder and Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz and coproduced and narrated by Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipknot TV, Press Play contributor, and one of Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. The Spielberg series brings many of Press Play's writers and editors together on a single long-form project. Individual episodes were written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and cut by Steven Santos, Serena Bramble, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz and Kevin B. Lee. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 1: Introduction, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 2: Blood & Pulp, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, Chapter 3: Communication, click here. To watch Chapter 5, Father Figures, click here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 6: Indiana Jones and the Story of Life, go here]

Narration:

The antagonist, in Steven Spielberg’s films, has many faces. It can be government scientists involved in seemingly shady plots.

It can be unstoppable behemoths such as the shark in Jaws or the tanker truck in Duel. Warped ideologies, as in Schindler’s List. Or the tangled and self-defeating allure of vengeance, as in Munich.

What’s essential is that none of these could truly be considered “evil” in the classical — or theological — mould. You can’t blame the T-Rex for being a T-Rex in Jurassic Park. You can’t blame a Martian for being a Martian in War of the Worlds. They are what they are. And even in the most menacing moments, even the most outwardly inhuman antagonists display qualities that could even be described as, well, almost human.

Evil, in Spielberg’s movies, is almost purely elemental. As strange as it might sound, it seems almost value-neutral — a menacing force that is simply there, like the terrifying, almost Biblical storms that gather in the skies of many of his films.

The human version of this element is authority. In Spielberg’s movies, evil, such as it is, always comes back to the use or abuse of power. The relative good or evil of people in a Spielberg film can be discerned by looking at how they use whatever authority they have in a given situation – how they tap into, and apply, power. This is how morality is measured. It is how good or evil is measured. In the words of WH Auden, “Evil is unspectacular and always human; And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

Individual villains in Spielberg’s films are, if not totally guiltless, then definitely warped. Indiana Jones’ French nemesis Belloq, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is an overly-ambitious careerist, his reason for shacking up with the Nazis.

The American billionaire Walter Donovan does the same in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for greed and glory: he is a cartoon villain in the mould of Montgomery Burns.

Even in The Color Purple or Schindler’s List, central villains have a certain complexity.

Amon Goeth, hideous as he might be, is a deranged, damaged person, and clearly not wired right – a pathetic alcoholic with a bloated beer belly.

Albert Johnson, a drunk and violent letch who goes by the nickname Mister, transfers his resentment of the old south and Jim Crow on his household. The casual viciousness of the system is an unseen force that seems to amplify his worst qualities, and Celie bears the brunt of his self-loathing.

Both Goeth and Mister are monsters and emotionally twisted; and, evil does manifest itself — but only through characters that are morally and psychologically defeated. They’re in with the power structure set out by society; even though they’re just individuals, in another sense they ARE authority.

It is often society’s authority that is the true enemy in the Spielberg canon. Many of Spielberg’s antagonists are but human extensions of it. The true evil in Munich is that the state of Israel feels entitled to do anything it feels is necessary to avenge the murder of its athletes by Palestinian terrorists. As the story unfolds, it turns into a classic case of what soldiers call “mission creep.” A mission with a clearly defined, and perhaps morally defensible objective keeps getting new and more questionable duties tacked onto it.

Over time it becomes harder and harder for the heroes to tell who they’re killing — and what (if anything) the targets had to do with the original Olympic massacre. And yet they’re expected to do what they’re told without question or doubt, because the government’s representatives tell them it has to be done, and to question authority would be an offense against the motherland. It’s yet another example in Spielberg’s films of authority slowly clenching its iron fist around the individual. Nobody in Munich is evil – not the assassins, not their handlers, not the PLO targets they’re hunting. But they all are collectively responsible for evil acts.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Belloq is not Satan: Like Vichy France itself, he’s cowardly, weak, and opportunistic. And he has willingly let himself be corrupted by the system.

Goeth is a sadistic son of a bitch, but he’s been given total power by the system — and, as such, by Nazi Germany itself.

Spielberg’s slave-era drama Amistad pointedly avoids giving us a single, cartoonish, Mandingo slave master that we can direct our righteous ire against. The villain is a corrupt, debased and complacent system that everyone has grown used to, and that treats humans as property – a system that must be recognized as such, and resisted. Here, as in Schindler’s List, the representatives of corrupt authority are rather bland, even borderline faceless people. They embody Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.

Even the hero’s fellow Africans are implicated in this. Without their greedy viciousness, the noble Cinque would never have ended up in chains.

We see the government operatives clandestinely eavesdropping on the little suburb in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial — a vision of terrors to come.

Saving Private Ryan offers a different riff. Every single GI in the group searching for the titular soldier — including the leader of the outfit, Captain Miller — gets killed because of a PR exercise. They are literally dying for a symbol.

In Jaws, it is the mayor’s decision not to shut down the beaches after the first shark attack that leads to more tragedy. Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel is like a high seas adventure version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People – a play in which the citizens of a small resort town discover that the runoff from a tannery is polluting the waters of the local baths, and collectively decide not to hurt their bottom line by doing something about it. There is one authority figure in the Spielberg canon who is particularly fascinating in this respect: John Hammond, the industrialist who created Jurassic Park.

Hammond is outwardly pleasant, but ultimately very dangerous. The character comes across as a benevolent Santa Claus or old Walt Disney figure, but is actually a genial Dr. Frankenstein. And he is ultimately responsible for every maiming and killing that happens on his tropical islands.

This sympathy for Hammond – unique to the film since the character is a right bastard in the original novel – seems to betray something of Spielberg. Despite the filmmaker’s inherent distaste for authority, it is undeniable that he is one of the most powerful men in the film industry.

Frankly, Steven Spielberg IS Hollywood. Could it be that he sees himself not only his everyman heroes, but also as the figures of authority, even the seemingly malevolent or destructive ones? The ambiguity would be very much in character for Spielberg.

John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park, at first seems a charming old man who just wants to dazzle people and make them happy. But if you total up the body count of all the films in the series, he seems infinitely less adorable. Hammond is a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Walt Disney, purveying spectacular wildlife attractions that end up killing the customers.

Yet the man behind this film series, director-producer Steven Spielberg, never condemns him outright. We get the sense that he understands him and even sympathizes with him – that he sees him as a kindred spirit.

Steven Spielberg is, of course, an authority figure himself, so it should not surprise anyone that he’d have sympathy for this particular devil. He is the most financially successful filmmaker in the history of motion pictures. Many of the top-grossing movies are ones he directed or produced. He is co-owner of his own studio, and has licensed his characters and situations to theme parks and toy manufacturers. He is not just a filmmaker but a mogul … a brand .. and a cultural force. As such, his portrait of authority figures always contains a certain amount of empathy and understanding, whether the character is kindly but destructively clueless impresario like John Hammond, or a more overtly repulsive and menacing character, like some of the ones presented in the first part of this essay. Even the mayor of Amity in Jaws seems more pathetic than purely evil – a man whose moral sense was suffocated by the almighty dollar.

Spielberg’s knowing and often mordantly funny depictions of commercialization and branding flow into this as well. The filmmaker consistently manages to have it both ways — imaginatively presenting some of the comical or oppressive aspects of commercialism, while showcasing actual products and corporate logos within his films. The richest and most contradictory example of this is the slow pan across the merchandise in the original Jurassic Park.

The logos are identical to those of the Jurassic Park franchise itself. The movie is advertising itself and critiquing itself at the same time. It is a pat on the back that doubles as a warning: Let the buyer beware.

Over time, Spielberg has maintained the mentality of an independent filmmaker — an auteur director standing apart from the very system that he of course embodies as a producer, a studio boss, a multiple Oscar winner, and all-around purveyor of stuff.

This manifests itself onscreen in Spielberg’s complex and often conflicted portrait of the individual’s relationship to authority: be it the government of a small town in Jaws; the Jim Crow south in The Color Purple; the blandly menacing futureworld societies of Minority Report and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence; and military and law enforcement agents in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can, which impede, manipulate, control or pursue the film’s heroes.

Spielberg’s heroes survive, and sometimes triumph, by being tough, smart, and lucky. Most of all lucky.

But for the sympathetic characters to survive – for their narratives to have a personal tipping point – they also require the help of a sympathetic person in authority.

This type of character is the flip side of the more menacing or corrupt authority figures we talked about earlier. He is a regular fixture in Spielberg’s films – a reliable type. He’s inside the power structure, such as it is. He draws a paycheck from the establishment and does its bidding. And yet he maintains an outsider’s mentality and responds — perhaps nostalgically, perhaps even a touch guiltily — to true victims, rebels, and heroes.

This type of character cannot help but admire the pluck of a resourceful hero, fugitive or troublemaker – and feel sympathy for the beleaguered, the exploited, and the dispossessed.

We can feel his empathy and understanding even when he’s acting in concert with the forces that make life hell for the good guys. And when the chips are down, when it really and truly matters, he does the right thing.

The UFOlogist Lacombe in Close Encounters might be the first major character in a Spielberg film that fits this description – the ally within the establishment. It is Lacombe who spies the escaped UFO obsessives heading for the Devil’s Tower but refrains from tipping off the army. It is because of Lacombe that Roy is able to don a red jumpsuit and join the other extraterrestrial pilgrims. It is because of Lacombe, a government agent, that Roy ultimately gets his wish, and walks up that ramp into the mothership.

In both Close Encounters and in E.T., the military and the government scientists initially seem sinister – and inasmuch as they impede the progress of our heroes, they are definitely forces to root against. But their faceless, threatening appearance early on eventually gives way to a more nuanced portrait. Once we’ve gotten a closer look at them, we can see that they’re just people — and that they’re as curious as anybody.

The fifth column, the inside man, is often critically important to the Spielberg hero’s success. During the finale of E.T., all that Keys needs to do to bring down the alien ship is to get on his walkie-talkie. He doesn’t. Instead, he watches the ship land and the alien depart. He is happy – privileged – just to be there. He’s a cleaned up, respectable version of Roy Neary – what Roy would have turned into if he’d stayed on earth and joined the government.

Indiana Jones should have been caught and killed on that steamship in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He survived only because the owner of an African freighter intervened — supposedly a no-good scoundrel who’s only in it for the money.

The mutineers in Amistad only get a shot at freedom because one of the most influential men in America — former president John Quincy Adams no less — decides to take up their cause.

In Catch Me if You Can, the FBI agent Carl Hanratty offers a lifeline to Frank Abagnale JR, who seizes on the opportunity, thus saving himself from life-long imprisonment.

And in Minority Report, Spielberg turns the tables on an essential wheel in the machine, the supercop John Anderton — who realizes that a conspiracy is afoot, kidnaps the precog Agatha, and becomes a hounded fugitive, and an enemy of the state.

Oskar Schindler deserves a special mention as the ultimate Fifth Column. He is a subversive infiltrator deep in the heart of the Nazi apparatus, fueled by the moral impetus to do the right thing, even though he is almost completely inscrutable, and justifies his goodness on mercenary grounds. Initially, Schindler is a cad and a dandy; an incorrigible womaniser; an exploiter of slave labour; a boorish bully; and a member of the Nazi party.

Earlier in the film, Schindler is an opportunist, in cahoots with the National Socialists not out of ideological sympathy, but merely because they happen to be the ones in power. He is a cut-throat capitalist, and his first act of rescue is for blood-curdlingly self-serving, business reasons.

Later, in 1942, Schindler witnesses the initial stages of Operation Reinhard in Krakow, the annihilation of the city's Jewish ghetto. These visceral scenes of liquidation, degradation, and execution are haunting; and leave an indelible mark in Schindler. This moment of truth is not met with angst-ridden introspection: Schindler proves himself, and changes, through his deeds. Through bribery, collusion, and deception, he sabotages the Nazi war effort while saving 1100 Jews from the savagery of the Holocaust.

Of course, this sort of miracle could only be achieved by someone who was in with the overall authority of the powers-that-be. That Schindler is a member of the Nazi party, that he is an insider, is necessary to the success of his plans. Schindler mitigates the machine from the inside by using his own connections. He is a businessman of fine-standing with the National Socialists, who hardly bat an eyelid as Schindler pulls the run under them in order to save his Jewish workers. In the grand scheme of things, only a wanton, libidinous, money-grubbing and wholly-inscrutable industrialist – and dyed-in-the-wool authority figure — could have flown under the radar of the Nazi machine and pulled off that sort of a miracle.

VIDEO ESSAY: MAGIC AND LIGHT THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG Chapter 2: Blood & Pulp

VIDEO ESSAY: MAGIC AND LIGHT: THE FILMS OF STEVEN SPIELBERG, Chapter 2: Blood & Pulp

[Editor's Note: Press Play is proud to present Chapter 2 of our first video essay series in direct partnership with IndieWire: Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg. This series examines facets of Spielberg's movie career, including his stylistic evolution as a director, his depiction of violence, his interest in communication and language, his portrayal of authority and evil, and the importance of father figures — both present and absent — throughout his work.

Magic and Light is produced by Press Play founder and Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz and coproduced and narrated by Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipknot TV, Press Play contributor, and one of Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. The Spielberg series brings many of Press Play's writers and editors together on a single long-form project. Individual episodes were written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and cut by Steven Santos, Serena Bramble, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz and Kevin B. Lee. To watch Chapter 1: Introduction, go here. To watch Chapter 3: Communication, click here. To watch Chapter 4: Evil & Authority, click here. To watch Chapter 5: Father Figures, click here. To watch Chapter 6: Indiana Jones and the Story of Life, click here.]

When you think of the films of Steven Spielberg, violence may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But Spielberg’s films wouldn’t be Spielberg’s films if he didn’t show and imply violent actions. Violence is just another color on Spielberg’s palette and he’s not shy about using it, either to excess or with moderation. And the presentation of the violence reveals a lot about Spielberg’s sense of what the audience can handle, and how far he can go as a director.

In fact, you can tell what kind of Spielberg film you’re watching based solely on the way he shows violence.
As a child, Spielberg used to worship the violent Grand Guignol violence of EC Comics – specifically such lurid titles as Shock Suspense Stories and Weird Science. But he also gorged himself on 1950s network television and old Hollywood movies, which for the most part had a much more circumspect attitude toward violence.

Look over his filmography, and you’ll see the tension between those two tendencies – excess and moderation. But you’ll also notice that he lets one tendency take over when it shouldn’t. Spielberg modulates the tenor of the violence he employs to suit the content of his films.

There’s no explicit gore in the director’s early made-for-TV films Something Evil and Duel. Instead, it’s mostly about implication.

Three years after Duel came Jaws, which defined the term “blockbuster hit.” The film famously opens with a swim at dawn, and the shredding of a helpless bather. The scene strikes the perfect balance between evident agony and visible damage to the body. We don’t see the shark’s teeth digging into the girl, but we do sense the shark’s power. The level of brutality is shocking yet perfectly judged, and for this type of film, it’s necessary. For the mass hysteria and panic in Jaws to be immediately shared by characters and viewers alike, there has to be blood in the water. And boy, is there.

Note that the film amps up the violence incrementally as the story goes on, each death a bit more front-and-center than the last, in much the same way that Spielberg keeps the shark mostly off camera at first, gradually unveiling it in bits and pieces.

Contrast this with the sheer excess of some of the violence in the Indiana Jones films, which Spielberg made with his old friend, producer George Lucas.

The original Indy movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is filled with acts of violence both implicit and explicit. Its finale is as over-the-top violent as the psychokinetic insanity of such films as The Fury and Scanners.

The heritage of pulp becomes even more apparent in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is almost certainly the pulpiest of the four Indy movies.

In scenes such as the opening – in which Indy uses a shish kebab skewer in a unique and uncomfortable way – Spielberg shows us he’s ready and willing to serve up cartoonish and wildly exaggerated mayhem.
The Temple of Doom is adorned with skulls and skeletons in various stages of decomposition, reminding the viewer of the dated but effectively excessive tone that Spielberg is adopting here.

The banquet scene in Pankot Palace is particularly grisly and over-the-top. At one point Kate Capshaw’s squeamish American is served a bowl of soup that suggests the palace’s kitchen is being run by the Crypt Keeper from EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.

And yet the Hitchcockian subtlety of Jaws and the gleefully boyish excess of the Indy films are but two of Spielberg’s violent modes. He finds other ones in his historical dramas – especially the ones that deal with war.

Empire of the Sun – an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s uses violence in a very different way than Saving Private Ryan because, where Saving Private Ryan is about the chaos of being in war – the actual EXPERIENCE of combat – Empire of the Sun is about the disappearance of life as the film’s young protagonist once knew it. It’s a subtle distinction, and this is – for all its scope – a subtle movie, as evidenced by the power that Spielberg wrings from a single, relatively minor act of violence that doesn’t even draw blood.

In Empire of the Sun, James Graham, the film’s young British protagonist, soon realizes that the sanctity and the familiarity of his home have disappeared. His maid, whom he used to boss around, slaps him when he catches her stealing furniture. He can’t process what this action means. He just stands there stunned and lets the maid walk away, averting her eyes so that they don’t meet with his as she steals his furniture.

A similarly direct and gritty approach can be seen in the combat and atrocity scenes of Spielberg’s violent historical dramas.The D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is the apex of the de-humanizing nightmare that its characters endure. The entire point is to put you in the middle of it and show you everything, even things no person should see. Spielberg goes so far as to make the bullets whizzing through the air and water visible. That more than can be said for the individual faces of the American soldiers, who for the most part are depicted as cannon fodder – bodies hurled up on a German-held beach to die by the thousands. The selective shakiness of Spielberg’s camera adds another layer of surrealism to the experience of watching this volatile scene.

This is a far cry from the gun battles in the Indiana Jones pictures, which take place in roughly the same era and have similar firearms, some of them wielded by Nazi Germans.

Even if you were to compare two of Spielberg’s strictly fantasy-based films, Jurassic Park and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, you’d find that you’re seriously different territory just by looking at the way he depicts violence.

By the time Spielberg made Jurassic Park, the MPAA had created the PG-13 rating thanks to films like Joe Dante's Gremlins, which Spielberg executive produced, and Spielberg's own Temple of Doom. These films and others shepherded by Spielberg wrap fundamentally lurid material in family-friendly package. But the science fiction films – like the Indy films, for the most part – are very careful not to go too far, too soon. They’re a bit like Jaws in that respect – a comparison made official by the opening kill in Jurassic Park, which is staged in a manner very similar to the bather’s death that opens Jaws.

Spielberg is so adept at balancing gore against human distress that in his films, as in Hitchcock’s, you often think you’re seeing more than you actually are. For example, it’s hard not to misremember that, during the scene in which Wayne Knight's opportunistic programmer gets spat on by a dinosaur, nothing that grisly is explicitly shown. He's screaming loudly though, and there's gunk on his face and his shirt, and John Williams's score is blaring. But in terms of what’s actually shown it’s a pretty restrained scene. The whole movie is more restrained than we may remember. In fact, the most horrendous violence in the film is not shown at all. The scene in which an unseen pack of raptors massacres a living cow happens off-screen, and is more unnerving because of it.

When Sam Neill describes to a snot-nosed kid how raptors used to gut their prey and ate them alive, the full brunt of the horror is conveyed verbally, without any images to assist it.

Artificial Intelligence is also set in a pulpy, theme-park-ride-friendly fantasy setting, but the film is decidedly darker than the Jurassic Park films, or almost any Spielberg films for that matter. And as a result, the violence here is pointedly less rambunctious. During the Flesh Fair scene, David the boy robot watches as outmoded robots get torn apart, shot through hoops of fire and dismantled in various different grisly ways. The Flesh Fair is supposed to be a carnival: a three-ring circus and so-called "celebration of life" that requires the death of inorganic robots to thrive.

On some level we may be aware that if the violence inflicted on these robots were inflicted on actual humans, we would probably turn away from it onscreen. That subliminal awareness plays into the movie’s central preoccupation: at what point should a biologically non-human person be considered, for all intents and purposes, human? If it feels synthesized feelings, are they not still feelings? Shouldn’t simulated pain still be considered pain?

The most upsetting scene in Artificial Intelligence might be the one in which David is abandoned by the side of the road by his distraught foster mother. The moment when he realizes what she's doing is heart-breaking. David's squeals of panic are so tortured that you're afraid that something bad is about to happen – something that will hurt both him and his mother. The juxtaposition of this scene with the Flesh Fair sequence is a good reminder of how good Spielberg is at juggling his role as both carnival barker and humanist. His movies are often dominated by trauma and violence: to appreciate his work, you just need to know when sit back and revel in an unreal, bloodthirsty spectacle, and when to avert your eyes.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut. Video editor Richard Seitz has worked for 20 years as a sound designer, audio engineer, composer, and dialogue editor for video games, television, short films and theatrical trailers. Game titles include The Hulk 2, Battlestar Galactica, Van Helsing, The Hobbit, Predator and Diablo 2.