Views from Crestmont Drive

• Steven Spielberg, his obsessions, my takes on some of his films, and the upcoming film Disclosure Day;
• NYT’s M. Gessen on how the White House identifies dangerous “aliens” with immigrants.

It’s hard to criticize a beloved film director like Steven Spielberg, even though I’ve never been a Spielberg fanboy. Too often his movies are crippled by sentimentality, even in otherwise very serious productions. Glancing down his film list, here, I may like his second feature, Duel, as much as any of them, in part because it was filmed in areas I knew well from my bicycle riding and drives to the high desert, but mostly because it’s existential and symbolic, and utterly without any kind of sweet ending. I liked Empire of the Sun, except for the scene in the middle that makes it look like a stay in a Japanese prisoner of war camp is a lot of fun. Saving Private Ryan worked until the over-the-top scene in he cemetery at the end. Was there a problem with Schindler’s List? Well, yes, it’s when Schindler breaks down over the thought that he could have saved so many more! Give me a break.

And I thought his two acclaimed early science fiction movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, were childish nonsense, both indulging in cheap skiffy tropes and bogus ‘evidence’ of alien interventions. Those World War II pilots turning up inside the mothership? Please. (I didn’t like Stars Wars either, on similar grounds, so feel free to dismiss my opinions on pop culture sci-fi.)

I fear that his much-anticipated new movie, Disclosure Day, is more of the same. He was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning this morning.

CBS News, Ben Mankiewicz, today: “Disclosure Day” director Steven Spielberg on aliens: “I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here.”

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