u/Big-Calligrapher7199

Now, it's interesting, putting the Tom Hanks factor aside, this does demonstrate that Steven Spielberg has had a hunger to make a romcom for a while. Also interesting: Spielberg and Hanks kind o' made a romcom... kind o'... with The Terminal. But I get it: The Terminal's not really a straight romcom, and I imagine Spielberg's itch to make a romcom has not entirely left him.

What do we think? Tom Hanks enjoyed his 70th birthday a month ago. Would you want to see an AARP romcom for Boomers? Maybe Tom Hanks opposite Tina Fey? Or, would Spielberg be on surer ground with stars who have not arguably "aged out" of the genre, in terms of commercial appeal?

I've long thought that Spielberg has been too hard on himself for decades regarding his inability to make a classic comedy. He needs a strong screenplay, but Spielberg films are teeming with pretty grand comedic moments, including the unlikeliest candidates such as Schindler's List and Lincoln. Spielberg's preternaturally gifted blocking and such would doubtless be a huge benefit to him in creating the comedic timing necessary for a film such as this to take off.

What are your thoughts?

From the goofy cops ramming their cars into anything but the protagonists of The Sugarland Express to the mayoral incompetence in Jaws to the U.S. military being pretty easily bamboozled by a few rogue elements in the final act of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Indiana Jones escaping the clutches of the Third Reich like it is going out of style to the hilarious and poignant fecklessness of the authorities in E.T. to our little hero being able to practically dance around the Japanese authorities of the P.O.W. camp in Empire of the Sun to Nazis being pretty easily misled by Jews thinking on their feet in Schindler's List to Jon Anderton repeatedly making fools out of both the cop pursuers themselves and the entire security system of Precrime in Minority Report--complete with his eyes still allowing him entry hours and hours after he's become the most hunted man in the U.S.--to the exploits of the heroes of Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal being chiefly about defying the confines and regulations of authorities either pursuing them or trying to keep them contained, to Rudolph Abel almost humorously being able to get the FBI agents to authorize him destroying the incriminating evidence of his spycraft early on in Bridge of Spies... One could go and on and on.

Okay, sure. Maybe it bends credulity too much for the WARDEX crew to be so easily distracted, or not see the cybersecurity expert-turned-fugitive when there's so much clearing near the farmhouse, or maybe they should have been more dubious concerning the fate of Daniel and his girlfriend after the car flew off of the cliff into the river, and there are probably several other examples of them being humorously shortsighted and ill-prepared.

But whatever real-world excessive stretching here of our suspension of disbelief, I cannot help but see WARDEX as being perhaps the apotheosis of what Spielberg has been saying about people in short supply of empathy and too doggedly dogmatic, the large, teeming herds people who are not evil, not wicked, just, ultimately, in need of listening, like the cop who pulls over Margaret (Emily Blunt) early on in Disclosure Day. From Carl Hanratty's by-the-book tenacity bein turned almost into a weapon against him to the agents of Catch Me If You Can and Bridge of Spies both being pretty easily misdirected and outwitted, to the Mossad and CIA both being depicted as brutish and callous, whether in Munich for both or Bridge of Spies for the latter... Spielberg has what one could perhaps call a libertarian/distrust-of-big-central-authority streak, and these days it is logical that much of that would cover Non-Government Organizations, too, as Minority Report rather brilliant envisioned how capitalism and fascism would work hand-in-hand in an endless bombardment of the senses in the pursuit of greater and greater sales to make the gross domestic product keep going up, up, and up.

So, yeah. A lot of the WARDEX stuff "pushes it," no lying. But it all also feels very much at home in the Spielberg canon, and it feels like it's been kind of radically misunderstood by a lot of people who aren't viewing it, even in its excesses, as one of those oft-revisited themes of his...

I just revisited Always after 21 have passed since the last time (first time) I watched it. It's on Netflix right now, by the way. Quite convenient if you have Netflix.

Anyway... For literally two decades, of all of the Spielberg films, Always was the film I most, I guess, "soft-dreaded" revisiting. On first viewing I found it probably his worst movie: excessive in certain ways and lacking in a lot of others... Some forced comedy (don't get me wrong, there is still a little bit of "let's milk this for all we can to get a laugh" going on, some of which feels self-consciously cartoony), and the love story/stories kind of unconvincing.

Well, I'll say this. I don't think it's a perfect film, but... Damn, after ingesting 20 years of new Spielberg films, and finally circling back around to Always, I found it to be a charmer. Obviously the film's most direct antecedent is A Guy Named Joe directed by Victor Fleming, but that first act (roughly the first 45 minutes) is most attitudinally this big, wonderful riff on Howard Hawks, capturing that almost Only Angels Have Wings-like milieu. And it... really works? Maybe not every last detail, but the warm cinematography (shout-out to Mikael Salomon), the deliberate choices of pop song ballad standards, winning performances from Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter, some clever Spielberg staging of sight gags as well as a handful of breathtaking shots... The film had me this time.

That first stretch is so potent, it propels the film forward, and I found myself taken away by it. All right, so John Goodman's character is a big ball of cheesiness on some level, and he apparently can't figure out that oil is being smeared upon his face, leading to the ridiculous (but somewhat funny) moment in which his lit cigar is actually burning up in his mouth... On that front, I think you could make the case that Goodman's Al Yackey isn't quite as oblivious as he appears to be, that he almost fronts that as a defense mechanism to almost constantly "play the clown" to help defuse the tension of these guys' job, but the film probably could have used one more scene of--humorously--"groundedness" with the character.

I kept thinking, "Who is the gorgeous strawberry blonde?" Of course! Marg Helgenberger!

Keith David seems so overqualified for his role as "Powerhouse," making me wonder if there was some left in the editing room, ha.

I love the scene where Brad Taylor tries to, like Spielberg protagonist Jim before him, save someone and "bring them back," and here he succeeds in saving the bus driver, who briefly stands next to Dreyfuss's ghostly Pete on the road.

Anyway, I think time is kind of quietly doing right by this film, which will never be ranked among the big heavyweight titles of Spielberg's filmography, but, flaws and all, I found genuinely charming and involving, and really worth a new look as it touches upon so many Spielberg themes.

Since it's Independence Day, why not?

New Year's Day: Minority Report

Can't think of any Spielberg film that has New Year's in it, aside from maybe Catch Me If You Can, and I'm saving that for Christmas. But Minority Report is all about the future, both in terms of timeline vs. us here, and one's own future, and so many of us look to New Year's Day as the day from which to plot the rest of our lives, year after year. Plus it's kind of like the New Year's-themed 1947 fantasy film noir Repeat Performance, about changing one's fate... I'll stick with this.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Amistad

Valentine's Day: West Side Story

Easter: Ready Player One

Hey... The main characters are all chasing an egg throughout the film, and it did come out around Eastertime in 2018!

Mother's Day: The Fabelmans

Memorial Day: Saving Private Ryan

Father's Day: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Independence Day: Jaws

Labor Day: The Terminal (maybe Spielberg's most class-conscious film: about an immigrant who's taken in by a ragtag group of blue collar workers at John F. Kennedy International Airport)

Halloween: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

Thanksgiving: The Color Purple

Hanukkah: Schindler's List

Christmas: Catch Me If You Can

Feel free to offer thoughts, tweaks, and your own list(s)!

If you have the least bit of imagination, it's obvious what comes after the final word of dialogue uttered, anyway. Spielberg and Koepp want you to exercise your brain a little.

HUGE SPOILERS WARNING HERE.

The "cardinal" shows up. Margaret becomes transfixed while her boyfriend Jackson is a bit shocked and amused. After Jackson shoos the bird away, he sits back down at the table. Within seconds Margaret begins speaking in Russian. She's continuing the conversation they were having, about her wanting to go to a bigger media market, and how he does not want to move from Kansas City. She brings up New York or Chicago as possibilities, but just as quickly short-circuits the conversation by saying that it's never a good day for them to talk about such things. Jackson's great failing as a boyfriend is--you guessed it--he has trouble listening. He even preemptively shuts down the audition Margaret had (she was, objectively speaking, terrible, overenunciating words and being overdramatic about the perils of the conflict that could bring the world to nuclear war), upsetting Margaret.

It takes Jackson's bluntness to snap Margaret out of her cardinal-induced ranting in Russian. She has no idea what Jackson is talking about, as he's unsure if she was speaking Russian or Polish or what. He's more than a little bit disturbed and worried.

Moments later, after being pulled over by the cop... And, do note: it's only after the policeman whips off the sunglasses that she can "read" him by looking in his eyes... She gets to the news station studio, and before long she finds herself speaking Korean.

So it has been established by that point that she is capable of speaking the languages of the powers that are instrumental in leading the world into a nuclear conflagration (plus English, which would cover the U.S., Great Britain, and other English-speaking languages).

Once she says, "Listen..." as a plea, is it not obvious that she addresses both the Russian and Korean governments in their respective tongues? This is Disclosure Day bleeding into something of a new take on The Day the Earth Stood Still. The aliens are terrified of what these humans, so richly endowed with empathy, are nevertheless close to the brink of a possible civilizationally-catastrophic conflict.

People complaining about the ending being a letdown just aren't doing the simple cinematic math problem, which is fitting for a film about the universal language of mathematics!

If you have the least bit of imagination, it's obvious what comes after the final word of dialogue uttered, anyway. Spielberg and Koepp want you to exercise your brain a little.

HUGE SPOILERS WARNING HERE.

The "cardinal" shows up. Margaret becomes transfixed while her boyfriend Jackson is a bit shocked and amused. After Jackson shoos the bird away, he sits back down at the table. Within seconds Margaret begins speaking in Russian. She's continuing the conversation they were having, about her wanting to go to a bigger media market, and how he does not want to move from Kansas City. She brings up New York or Chicago as possibilities, but just as quickly short-circuits the conversation by saying that it's never a good day for them to talk about such things. Jackson's great failing as a boyfriend is--you guessed it--he has trouble listening. He even preemptively shuts down the audition Margaret had (she was, objectively speaking, terrible, overenunciating words and being overdramatic about the perils of the conflict that could bring the world to nuclear war), upsetting Margaret.

It takes Jackson's bluntness to snap Margaret out of her cardinal-induced ranting in Russian. She has no idea what Jackson is talking about, as he's unsure if she was speaking Russian or Polish or what. He's more than a little bit disturbed and worried.

Moments later, after being pulled over by the cop... And, do note: it's only after the policeman whips off the sunglasses that she can "read" him by looking in his eyes... She gets to the news station studio, and before long she finds herself speaking Korean.

So it has been established by that point that she is capable of speaking the languages of the powers that are instrumental in leading the world into a nuclear conflagration (plus English, which would cover the U.S., Great Britain, and other English-speaking languages).

Once she says, "Listen..." as a plea, is it not obvious that she addresses both the Russian and Korean governments in their respective tongues? This is Disclosure Day bleeding into something of a new take on The Day the Earth Stood Still. The aliens are terrified of what these humans, so richly endowed with empathy, are nevertheless close to the brink of a possible civilizationally-catastrophic conflict.

People complaining about the ending being a letdown just aren't doing the simple cinematic math problem, which is fitting for a film about the universal language of mathematics!

Anyone notice how Disclosure Day opens with a mass of people (with the arena of thousands serving as microcosm for the entire world) utterly enthralled by the showbiz violence of a professional wrestling match. The only party not continually standing up in adulation of the performers is the film's secondary protagonist, the one we meet first, Daniel, and the Wardex henchmen confronting him.

The opening serves as foretelling of the ending. The film concludes with the world finding itself fixated upon a geopolitical conflict that could lead to an earth-scarring nuclear war. Inverting the beginning, that which was ignored by everyone else in the arena in which the wrestling match was transpiring here takes center stage and is broadcast to everyone in the world at the same time.

Disclosure Day appears to be making a rather scathing comment on how people tend to become cheerleaders for nations either at or nearing war, rooting on babyfaces, booing heels, seemingly perpetually stuck in diametric opposition with one another. Conflicts created from religious differences, racial differences, battles for resources, what-have-you.

It very much feels like a film made out out of COVID (the frenzy of people grabbing as much toilet paper and canned goods and whatnot at the gas station market), a film made in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the mayhem in Gaza that has followed. The film wants to keep reaching for optimism but it is wreathed in a chilly worthy-of-a-paranoid-'70s-political-thriller cynicism. In a lot of ways it's almost a sequel to Spielberg's Munich as much as it is to other works, both sci-fi and not.

Going to Chicago in about a month. Does Nick Fuentes have any insights into which pizzeria is the best? Best bakery? Best steakhouse? Also, best museums to attend? Best tours to take, if any? Bless everyone here!