Anti-Climacus

In substantial agreement with this Slate article on Spielberg, the upshot of which is that he's vastly overrated as a director. There's E.T., and Close Encounters (I do not have the problem that a number of detractors have with the movie--the fact that the protagonist is morally questionable has never bothered me), Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a bunch of stuff that's not as good as it could have been. At some point in the 80s it must have been fashionable to compare him to Stephen King (I would imagine)--big, popular creators of mostly genre pieces who occasionally move into the world of 'respectable' art. Now King gets (deserved) accolades for the literary quality of his genre work while Spielberg never seems to have learnt a new trick. (For the record, I saw War of the Worlds when it came out, found it ridiculous rather than serious as it was clearly intended to be, and mostly gave up on him after that)

Then there's the problem of Schindler's List, which had a great impact on me when I first saw it, and has declined in importance amongst other resources about the Holocaust--a subject I occasionally teach, and that crops up from time to time in my work. Though I think Claude Lanzmann's Shoah is generally superior, I'm not going to get into that argument, because a non-fictional documentary and a semi-fictional narrative are not aiming at the same things and so not, strictly speaking, comparable. Even so, Schindler's List has problems with characterization and plot, simultaneously attempting to do too much and too little. But this is well beyond the scope of a post, so I will put the question off to the side--for the moment.