The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#26 Post by knives » Mon Jan 11, 2016 11:47 am

How does he do such? If anything the strong look against the fourth film, how appropriate is it we're having this conversation here for now, seems a bit bizarre since a few elements aside it's a pretty smart way of continuing Jones into the two futures they had to deal with without betraying the two pasts also.

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dustybooks
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#27 Post by dustybooks » Mon Jan 11, 2016 1:00 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:How Spielberg could stray so far from everything that made the earlier films work is inexplicable to me.
I felt like the film was kind of a fun joke on itself, playing up the silliness of the entire conceit and the constant cries for a return to the franchise. It was ridiculous in a way that I could appreciate. I honestly am not sure how else one could have made a truly satisfying new movie in that series, but I'm kind of an oddball (for one thing, I actually like the movie in the title of this thread, though I don't strongly disagree with any of the knocks against it).

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#28 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jan 11, 2016 2:53 pm

Temple of Doom has always showed the best and worst of Spielberg. The action scenes and set-pieces are one marvel after another, the scenery and photography is gorgeous, and the whole Gunga Din exotic adventure/EC horror nightmare atmosphere is carried off perfectly. But the movie is nearly sunk by the terrible, hackneyed writing. It's a series of unbearable cliches--stupid cutesy one-liners, repeated stock-phrases in place of themes, bad comedic hijinks. It's a movie I periodically watch because I get excited remembering how good it is, and am quickly disappointed at how bad it is, too. Last Crusade has the opposite problem: hits the right notes regarding the comedic side-kick elements, but is visually bland, with mediocre action scenes. I haven't seen KOCS since it came out, but my opinion back then was that it was no worse than the other sequels. My memory is not currently being kind to it, however. Did Shia Laboeff really play Tarzan with a bunch of monkeys in that one?

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the second greatest film Spielberg has ever directed. That thing is magic.

beamish13
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#29 Post by beamish13 » Mon Jan 11, 2016 3:14 pm

dustybooks wrote:
DarkImbecile wrote:How Spielberg could stray so far from everything that made the earlier films work is inexplicable to me.
I felt like the film was kind of a fun joke on itself, playing up the silliness of the entire conceit and the constant cries for a return to the franchise. It was ridiculous in a way that I could appreciate. I honestly am not sure how else one could have made a truly satisfying new movie in that series, but I'm kind of an oddball (for one thing, I actually like the movie in the title of this thread, though I don't strongly disagree with any of the knocks against it).
I think that, much like The Lost World, Spielberg was simply indifferent to the material, and did it because he was locked into making another film for Lucas (which I think may have resulted from Lucas helping with Jurassic Park's post-production while he was off shooting Schindler's List). The Lost World, incredibly, has several scenes directed by David Koepp, and it's even been rumored that Joe Dante was brought in to help.

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misterjunior
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#30 Post by misterjunior » Tue Sep 17, 2019 4:25 pm

Hadn't watched this in many years until last night and my memory of it had been blandly negative, but I absolutely loved it this time around, and thought it served as a prescient look at the looming xenophobia- and bigotry-fueled immigration crisis we would be dealing a decade or so later (and still going), and a film that underscores the cliched but important note that we (speaking as an American citizen) are a nation of immigrants and that we're stronger and better for that, not weaker. Most of the characters are immigrants and most of those who aren't are persons of color and we spend time with them and form a bond with them that mirrors the friendships at the heart of the film, so The Terminal's message of the value of the United States' fundamental diversity is clear if not stated explicitly. And despite being "the Comedy with the quirky premise where Tom Hanks does a funny accent" on the surface and in the (bad) marketing campaign, one of the things that strikes me most about the movie is the way that everyone in it feels like a real person with believable motivations and goals; even the film's nominal "villain," the Stanley Tucci character, is not an altogether "bad person," and the film is all the better for its willingness to trust the audience to understand, accept and, ultimately, share its perspective, rather than beating us over the head with its points.

I was also thoroughly impressed with the set Spielberg and company built for the film. It evoked for me memories of Play Time, and was pleased to read that, in fact, Spielberg had cited the influence of Tativille and that movie on him for this project. Like the best films-- or at least my favorite films, including Play Time-- The Terminal feels as though its world is alive and fully functional rather than just being a facade with nothing behind it; we see LCD boards twinkling with flight departures and arrivals, hear airport announcements on a PA system, see various real businesses and eateries and so forth with employees and shoppers and diners, people going up and down escalators and waiting to go through security and hurrying to catch flights as they carry or roll luggage behind them, and on top of that the architecture of modern airports is recreated perfectly: fountains, glass facades and windows and doors, staircases and escalators, railings and balconies... I never would've guessed that this was not a real airport, and the way the extras behave is just like what you'd see if you turned a camera on in any major airport in the world. The difference is that Spielberg knows where to put his camera and where to point it in order to best tell this story. I really loved the scene where Hanks is preparing for a date with the Catherine Zeta-Jones character (I really enjoyed her in this, playing against type as an anxious bookworm flight attendant; the whole cast is really good though) and needs some new clothes for it so he's window shopping at Hugo Boss and the camera is pointed through the front window at a couple of suits and Hanks stands such that reflected in the glass you see his head/face atop one suit, then the other.

The way the film deals with Hanks's character's acquisition of English also has an authenticity to it that is uncommon for films of this (or any other, really) type, too. Rather than just having him able to speak English from the outset or playing it for laughs for the entirety of the film that he never gets past Borat-style totally fractured English or, maybe worst of all, just goes from barely speaking the language to completely proficient with a "1 month later" intertitle or just without any mention, we see the process of him picking up the language by reading news crawlers and latching on to specific words he recognizes and using contexts, reading food menus and comparing a book in his native tongue to the same book in English, etc. It doesn't change anything about the film in a particularly huge way, I don't suppose, but I think it does help us better empathize with the Hanks character's experience and, in so doing, the experiences of people who come to the US from elsewhere, generally.

On the heels of having been blown away by a recent revisit of Amistad (which I had a more positive opinion of before, but not to the degree I do now) as well, I'm really feeling the 'berg of late. I also had the pleasure of seeing Duel on the big screen at my local second-run theater on Sunday, so that was also nice.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#31 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Sep 17, 2019 5:29 pm

Testing my memory here: Does it end with Hanks getting in a cab, asking where he wants to be driven, and responding "Home," to which the driver nods and departs? I remember seeing this when I was a freshman in college, very very high off of Catch Me If You Can, and wanting to throw my shoe at the screen.

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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#32 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Tue Sep 17, 2019 5:30 pm

Yes

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#33 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Sep 17, 2019 5:31 pm

I think I still have some lingering trust issues elsewhere in my life because of that.

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misterjunior
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#34 Post by misterjunior » Tue Sep 17, 2019 9:25 pm

What bothered you so much about that?

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#35 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:04 am

Aside from the fact that it's extremely corny, the driver wouldn't have any idea what to do with that information

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HinkyDinkyTruesmith
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#36 Post by HinkyDinkyTruesmith » Wed Sep 18, 2019 12:07 am

I'm so glad to see love for this Spielberg film, but I also want to emphasize a key element that misterjunior misses that is certainly integral to the entire political message of the film: surveillance. Between this and Catch Me If You Can (not to mention his two 2005 features), Spielberg is clearly grappling with questions of surveillance, and living in a surveillance state, where there is an eye on you at all times, where wherever you go, they will find you, they will catch you, so on, so forth. This is heightened by the Other presented in this film, which Tom Hanks manages to make into a real human being despite his Mary Sue, hapless qualities. But, this is certainly a Spielberg that has been undervalued, precisely for the ways in which he submerges this complex meditation on the (then forming) surveillance state that the United States was becoming in response to 9/11, and in response to the destabilized Middle East that the wars undertaken in response to that event created, under a weird screwball comedy. It also fits in with Spielberg's career-long fascination with the art of negotiation, which emerges as early as The Sugarland Express, comes up here with the incredible goat medicine scene, and reaches its fullest expression with the back-to-back Lincoln and Bridge of Spies.

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misterjunior
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Re: The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004)

#37 Post by misterjunior » Wed Sep 18, 2019 2:26 am

Good observations. And yes I've seen The Terminal referred to as one of the best films about life in a post-9/11 America/world, and I think it is great in that respect also. I watched War of the Worlds not too long ago and was struck by that movie's evocation of 9/11 imagery as well. In fact I read that Matt Zoller Seitz considers those two along with Munich to be the three best films concerning 9/11.

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