Contact
vs.
Saving Private Ryan
if i had i my way, neither of these would move on. at least Contact had the nice critique of Reason. SPR pretty much only stank it up.
i'll write more later, i just thought i'd get the verdict out.
Round 1 complete!
i'm not ever going to feel like writing this one up so i might as well just barf it out.
both are
way too long
C 2:33,
SPR 2:50 - i can imagine this material (really any material) needing that much time, but execution was nonsense in both cases. both films rely way too heavily on syrupy scores to evoke emotion, horribly so in
SPR, where the music seems to cue certain emotions in discordant ways (sorry, i don't remember where it happened, but remember being struck by it). both films lazily bank on easy plot devices to evoke emotion -
C opens with the motherless Ellie (what's sadder than being motherless?), nicely played by Jena Malone, losing her father at age 9 - seriously? that's just CINECASTing lazy! i couldn't even tell you what spielberg was trying to evoke in
SPR, it's a freakin' war movie, we expect everyone to die, i just never cared. at all. i actually went into SPR expecting to have the typically conflicted experience of a masterful film-maker tugging all the right strings to sucker me into balling, only for a short-lived 20min, at about the 1:30 mark, did i get into the film (around when Damon showed up). it kinda blows my mind how bad this movie is.
SPR opens and closes with the freaking hideous Ryan family trip to the national cemetery. trying to bank on the revisit gimmick in
Schindler's List, this bit of fiction just irked to high heaven. then, we are dropped into one of many hideously long and utterly uninteresting combat scenes. seriously?! what is the freaking point of a 15min combat scene? over and over? is this really going to give me a better sense of what it was like for the soldiers? of course not. just a wasteful, masturbatory nearly two-hours of combat enactment. while we get a sense of several characters, they are developed very thinly. of course we can't really get to know them over the nearly three hour running time because they are mostly just in CINECASTing battle. and yes, i get it is a war movie, but who the CINECAST cares? the film gestures to an anti-war message, but of course it isn't. it is more a love letter to Country and the bitter pill that is essential - claims the hyper-individualist, super-rich Spielberg. CINECASTing gag me! then, of course, is the ridiculous pro-war statement of the meek, justice-oriented Upham (Jeremy Davies) closing the film by getting his man on and becoming a lustful killer. clearly, this film pisses me off like few films do. all the worse because i would expect the film to be well crafted, but it awkwardly jumps from combat to combat. i suspect Spielberg had some consultants that he felt compelled to appease and "honor" by listening too much to them about needing more battle scenes. whatever the reason, POC!
Contact, from the bits i noted above, mostly tries too hard. a few nice cast members - Jena Malone, Jodie Foster, David Morse, and John Hurt as the eccentric Hadden (i guess Skerritt also filled his role nicely); McConaughey just didn't work for me, kinda emphasized the cheese that this film was. Kent Clark? really? not clever, not funny, just lame. oh, did i just use the slur
lame? i guess i was in the mood since
Contact lazily falls back on the trope of the extra-sensory lame person - you see, Kent is blind. Ohhhhhh. Ahhhhhhh. a blind person super in touch with his ability to hear, as well as being super, extra compassionate to Ellie the Super-Scientist Outcast. just lazy. as i briefly noted in my first "write-up",
Contact moves on only because it questions the sanctity of Science with important unprovables like Love, Family connection, and human contact in general. i'll be shocked if this clunker makes it out of the next round.
[sorry for the super-cranky vibe. i
really didn't like
SPR and mostly didn't like
C, it was a chore to revisit them with the required write-up :p ]