Trailer for War Horse

[the5thghostbuster]

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/50203

It looks beautiful, the music is fantastic...but I am still not sold on this. While Richard Curtis' involvement gives me hope, I fear that Spielberg's tendency of over romanticising his subject matter is back in full force. It ruined Empire of the Sun, and that is the vibe I am getting here.

[Andrew Forbes]

I'm the opposite. I have faith in a mature Spielberg, but Richard Curtis wields sentiment like a blunt instrument of death. And I don't see much opportunity here for the irreverence that makes some of his funnier scripts bearable.

"I'm just a horse, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love me."

But this looks potentially heart-ripping.

[JoshRode]

I'm the opposite. I have faith in a mature Spielberg, but Richard Curtis wields sentiment like a blunt instrument of death. And I don't see much opportunity here for the irreverence that makes some of his funnier scripts bearable.

"I'm just a horse, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love me."

But this looks potentially heart-ripping.

Ahahahaha! I'm going to quote you on that. Actually, I guess I just did.

How can you fail to trust Spielberg at this point? Yeah, he can be a touch...I dunno, schmaltzy, I guess, but he's never gone totally over the edge. For the most part. Usually.

[Steve T Power]

Does anyone ever attack Capra for being a sentimentalist? No.

[Andrew Forbes]

Does anyone ever attack Capra for being a sentimentalist? No.

Well, that's not really true at all, but you are right that Spielberg catches more grief about it.

[Steve T Power]

Does anyone ever attack Capra for being a sentimentalist? No.

Well, that's not really true at all, but you are right that Spielberg catches more grief about it.

some of us like sentimentality! Some of us are emotionally healthy normal folk. Some of us haven't been worn down to cynical and jaded husks of barely human by today's hostile society! We like happy endings!

[the5thghostbuster]

Does anyone ever attack Capra for being a sentimentalist? No.

Well, that's not really true at all, but you are right that Spielberg catches more grief about it.

some of us like sentimentality! Some of us are emotionally healthy normal folk. Some of us haven't been worn down to cynical and jaded husks of barely human by today's hostile society! We like happy endings!

It is not that I don't like sentimentality, its that I don't like Speilberg's brand of sentimentality. My problem with Spielberg is that I don't buy into his sentiment: it comes across as forced and artificial at the best of times, and completely wrong in a number of his films.

Let's take Empire of the Sun, shall we? The original novel is a tale of survival, but it is about as far from a fun time as you can get. It's bleak, its depressing, and the end sure as hell doesn't leave you with any sense of comfort. Somehow, Spielberg reads the book and decides its going to be a boy's adventure film, with wiz-bang moments of wonder, and an ending that completely misses the point of the original text. This is not to say that Spielberg needed to be faithful to the novel, but the horrors of such camps are covered up so much that the whole thing rings false.

In every other film he has ever made that tries to go for real emotion, they ring just as false. Everything is so over produced that nothing ever connects to anything remotely human, and the only ones that have ever worked (Jaws and Duel) are pretty much stripped to the bone efforts that lack the sheen of his latter films.

[Steve T Power]

Empire Of The Sun is one of my favorite movies of the 80s, and J.G. Ballard wrote Crash, So i passed on Empire of the Sun in novel form.