Interesting article about Roald Dahl at The New Yorker. Lots I didn't know about him; he sounds like an amazingly complicated man. My third grade teacher read us several of his books during that year of school, and I've adored him ever since. The Witches was always my fave.
I like my friend Sean's take on War of the Worlds. As usual he hammers out good blog, and for maybe the twelve zillionth time makes me rethink a movie (my original take here). But while I agree with him that the happy ending is so over the top that it very well might be a critique of such happy endings, I have to ask - to what point? What does that serve? Besides being jarring and robbing the film of the horrors Spielberg acheived for two hours? If it's some meta-comment on the criticism Spielberg has taken for happy endings I'm even more annoyed by it, because it shows he was aware of what he was doing, and instead of a big wtf meta-comment I'd really have preferred a big smackdown of the Spielbergian trope and had Dakota Fanning's face melt off or something. I do overstate my case. And to Sean's credit he is discussing the film's flaws, which he finds fascinating, and I agree. But that said I'm a huge Spielberg defender who's getting a little tired of finding his flaws fascinating, a la A.I. How about Steven making a film I can disagree with someone about the film being flawed, period, instead of just discussing the merit of said flaws?
I like my friend Sean's take on War of the Worlds. As usual he hammers out good blog, and for maybe the twelve zillionth time makes me rethink a movie (my original take here). But while I agree with him that the happy ending is so over the top that it very well might be a critique of such happy endings, I have to ask - to what point? What does that serve? Besides being jarring and robbing the film of the horrors Spielberg acheived for two hours? If it's some meta-comment on the criticism Spielberg has taken for happy endings I'm even more annoyed by it, because it shows he was aware of what he was doing, and instead of a big wtf meta-comment I'd really have preferred a big smackdown of the Spielbergian trope and had Dakota Fanning's face melt off or something. I do overstate my case. And to Sean's credit he is discussing the film's flaws, which he finds fascinating, and I agree. But that said I'm a huge Spielberg defender who's getting a little tired of finding his flaws fascinating, a la A.I. How about Steven making a film I can disagree with someone about the film being flawed, period, instead of just discussing the merit of said flaws?
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