Lance Acord’s four-minute A Holiday Reunion (2019), a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), will reunite E.T. and a now married-with-children Elliot (Henry Thomas) at theater pre-shows over the long holiday weekend, according to Deadline. The Comcast commercial, produced by their advertising agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, premiered as a two-minute cut during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC, before the full edit played on Syfy during their airings of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Thursday night. Spielberg never took creative control of the ad, but was consulted throughout the process and responded favorably to the theme of “connection.”
Tag: steven spielberg
Netflix review: Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993)
The Holocaust film can be like television: when it’s good, there’s nothing better; when it’s bad, there’s nothing worse.
There is Liliana Cavani’s erotic psychological drama, Il portiere di note (1974), the love story between a concentration camp survivor and her guard (yes, you read that correctly), which exploits the Shoah the most offensively this critic has ever seen.
Then, there is Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa (1990), a subtle, sometimes satirical study of racial politics in Nazi Germany.
As for Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), it may be the most well-known of its ilk, but is it one of the greatest?
If you don’t know what to watch next, Schindler’s List is available to stream on Netflix. The historical period drama won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture as well as Best Director, out of twelve nominations.
Steven Zaillian’s Best Adapted Screenplay is based upon the 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, by John Keneally.
It is World War II Poland, and Oskar Schindler (Best Actor nominee Liam Neeson), an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia, opens an enamelware factory in the Kraków Ghetto.
Together with black marketeer Itzhak Stern (Sir Ben Kingsley), the businessman bribes local Nazi insiders and and hires Jews because he can pay them less, effectively saving them from the death camps.
Meanwhile, SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth (Best Supporting Actor nominee Ralph Fiennes) supervises the construction of the Plaszów concentration camp, terrorizing Kraków.
John Williams’s original score, Michael Kahn’s editing, Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography, and Ewa Braun and Allan Starski’s art direction are the rest of the Oscars the movie took home, in addition to its sound, makeup, and costume design nods.
As with any Spielberg vehicle, it is a technical revelation. Its black and white photography contributes to the documentarylike, newsreel realism of its setting, inviting audiences into the Final Solution like few mainstream releases have before or since.
For all its feats of filmmaking, this Spielbergian epic is minimalistic by the director’s standards, which plays to the picture’s strengths.
As a member of the film school generation, his feature-length debut, Duel (1971), is his New Hollywood masterpiece, over Jaws (1975), which would be, if not for the corporatization of filmmaking its groundbreaking “summer blockbuster” status is responsible for.
But these two works force Spielberg to do more with less, keeping him from crossing the line from “crowd-pleasing” to “sentimental” and “saccharine” like he’s known to do, and this sugarcoating would have crippled Schindler’s List.
Still, it has been criticized for peripherizing Holocaust victims in favor of mythologizing a German capitalist. While Schindler’s heroism is indisputable, and came at the price of his safety, he was still an opportunist first, almost more of a sympathetic antihero.
The cast of Jewish characters are dehumanized into an unindividualized horde of props for his redemption arc – one of them would have made for a more sensitive protagonist, such as Stern.
But Spielberg is shrewdly commercial above all else, and Schindler’s List is much too important a moment in cinematic history to fade into obscurity because of a Semitic leading man; as wrong as it is, how many readers out there can say they’ve even heard of Europa Europa?
This is a story the masses need to hear, and it is a story that needs to be celebrated. With far-right ideologues rising to power globally as the memory of fascism dies off with the generation that lived it, streamers would do well to rediscover Schindler’s List.
The first preview for Sam Mendes’s “1917” (2019)
The trailer for Sam Mendes’s World War I film, 1917 (2019), dropped this week, revealing details about the plot and the cast for the first time since Mendes’s production for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners was announced, according to Military Times. Taking place on the Western Front, the picture stars the likes of George McKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Richard Madden. Mendes co-produced the movie with Michael Lerman and frequent collaborator Pippa Harris, co-wrote the screenplay with his colleague from Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and hired Academy Award winner Roger Deakins to be the cinematographer.
Inside New Jersey’s filmmaking renaissance
After the New Jersey Legislature approved tax credits for film and television production and Governor Phil Murphy signed it into law in July 2018, industry revenue could double and local businesses could expect hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Asbury Park Press. Todd Phillips’s Batman flick, Joker (2019), Alan Taylor’s prequel to HBO’s The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Many Saints of Newark (2020), and Steven Spielberg’s remake of the classic musical, West Side Story (2020), are all shooting in the state. Former Governor Chris Christie, in an effort to curb the budget, suspended the film and TV program in 2010 and allowed it to expire in 2015, blocking the 2009 incentive for MTV’s Jersey Shore (2009-2012).
Life After Death 