A New Friend

I hadn't thought I'd be rooting through the dustbin of my own opinions, pulling out the folder labeled SPIELBERG and blowing the dust away.  But after reading Thomas Frank's short piece in Harper's magazine I was doing just that, simply to compare.  I had silenced my complaints about Spielberg's work around about 1998 when that damn private's ass was, at long last, saved.  No one wanted to hear my caterwauling that everything Spielberg touched sloughed off all ambiguity.  That he could ring complexity out of the human condition like a laundress rings moisture out of a turtleneck.  I had 'put a cork in it' as suggested by some and resigned myself to a very silent minority.  And here's the tough part.  Lincoln, although problematic in these self same ways, was very enjoyable to me.  That was in very large part due to watching the preposterously talented Daniel Day Lewis ply his ample craft.  But Frank has reawakened my nearly 15 year old file of complaints with his, "Stephen Spielberg, that Michelangelo of the trite" and, "[Lincoln is] like other Spielberg productions, it drops you into a world where all the great moral judgements have been made for you already". Read the article. I can't do it any justice here.