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Spielberg's post-Schindler's List historical dramas


Josh500

Spielberg's post-Schindler's List historical dramas  

47 members have voted

  1. 1. Which is your favourite score?

  2. 2. Which is your favourite movie?



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1. How do you rank these scores? 

2. How do you rank these movies?

 

Amistad (1997)

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Munich (2005)

War Horse (2011)

Lincoln (2012)

Bridge of Spies (2015)

The Post (2017)

 

And why? :)

___________


For me, score and movie:

 

1. Saving Private Ryan 

2. War Horse 

3. Munich 

4. Lincoln 

5. Amistad 

6. The Post 

7. Bridge of Spies 

 

 

 

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War Horse for score, Ryan for film

 

I've never seen Amistad, but I enjoyed all the other films

 

I enjoy all the Williams scores, but rarely listen to Munich.  Bridge of Spies I found an incredibly boring score

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2 minutes ago, Jay said:

I've never seen Amistad, but I enjoyed all the other films

 

 

You should watch it. It's a rather depressing movie (until the end), but rather good. Memorable. 

31 minutes ago, Jay said:

Bridge of Spies I found an incredibly boring score

 

Not just the score, I found the movie almost unbearably boring too.

 

Easily, one of my least favourite Spielberg movies.

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It occurs to me that none of these scores have seen an expansion yet. SPR will be the first.

 

Let's hope War Horse or Amistad will be next in line! 

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SPR doesn't hold up well IMHO. Never thought the score was particularly good. I think it came in #18 in the official JW greatest film scores. But most SS dramas have something good going for them. AMISTAD has perhaps the most horrific scene in all of his films. 

I went Warhorse for both but almost chose Lincoln for film.

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45 minutes ago, JoeinAR said:

SPR doesn't hold up well IMHO. Never thought the score was particularly good.

 

It's not as immediately accessible, undoubtedly, as the other scores, but it's good, great, outstanding, in my opinion, like I said in the other thread.

 

Over the past few years, I've come to elevate this score to be among my top 10 JW scores, along with E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, etc.

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6 minutes ago, JoeinAR said:

top 10 score. Unfathomable. 

 

Well, maybe top 20. I forgot JW also did Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Jaws. :D

 

Still, it's a phenomenal score once you "get" it.

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9 minutes ago, crumbs said:

War Horse for score because it's just so calming, melodic and beautiful. You can tell Williams drew upon something larger than the movie to write it.

 

Doesn't he always? ;)

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Voted War Horse for score, as music I love it more and more every year even though it's a little overwrought sometimes in the film (Plowing, No Man's Land, and Finale are vintage Spielberg/Williams sequences though imo). They're all good, SPR and Munich are probably my favorite as dramatic underscore, really haunting.

 

Movie, I acknowledge SPR's flaws but so much of that movie is just outstanding and still blows me away after probably four or five times seeing it. Munich is rather amazing for the most part and Lincoln is very good. The rest have some fabulous scenes and pretty much uniformly superb technique throughout but not totally my thing.

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Lincoln for OST as the soundtrack has a lot more music than is included in the film. It is a very satisfying listening experience and tells a nice story from beginning to end. I am impressed by all the musically related themes JW wrote into Lincoln and how he weaves seamlessly from one to the next.

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I want to go with Munich for the film. It's Spielberg way out of his element and easily the most interesting of the bunch. The rest are real snoozers.

 

As for the score, like Christopher Lloyd once said in Star Trek III, I don't care which...just not Munich.

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52 minutes ago, Horner's Dynamic Range said:

I want to go with Munich for the film. It's Spielberg way out of his element and easily the most interesting of the bunch. The rest are real snoozers.

 

Also the last time he made a film that wasn't filtered through the prism of his "safe for children" mode.

 

He's got such a penchant for violence when he wants to. Remember all that glorious gore from the 80s, in films he directed or produced? Poltergeist, TOD, Gremlins, etc. Everything he does is so sanitized now, epitomized by that godawful plastic cartoon KOTCS.

 

The closest he's come since Munich would be Lincoln with those battle scenes and the aftermath. The wheelbarrow filled with body parts was pretty gross as well.

 

In closing: more violence/gore = better Spielberg.

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22 minutes ago, crumbs said:

In closing: more violence/gore = better Spielberg.

 

I think it's more like: the more violence/gore = you like it!

 

Because I don't need the violence or gore to like his movies (although I'm not saying I dislike it). Also, the violence in his movies is never needless, senseless violence just for violence's sake, like in Tarantino's movies. It's always to make a point.

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Interesting poll.

 

My favorite of these scores is Munich, though I quite like War Horse as well.

 

As for the films, I haven't seen Amistad, Saving Private Ryan or The Post yet. Of the remaining titles, my favorite film is Bridge of Spies, followed closely by Munich.

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3 hours ago, crumbs said:

In closing: more violence/gore = better Spielberg.

 

Or, to maybe put it a bit less sophomore, he's better when his anger is out in the open. Like it was during the Bush years. It's interesting that now, in more dire times, he has retreated into well-perfumed fodder for retirement-home Oscar voters (The Post et al.) or outright escapism like 'RPO' and so on. It makes you shudder that a filmmakers who obviously considers himself nurturer of democratic values now has nothing better to do than remake moth-ridden musicals (his other project, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, will probably be akin to 'The Post' or 'BOF' with the only added advantage that it finally brings us cinematically outside of the US).

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More than you do about Capra. But of course, let's drop more names of filmmakers who operated in bygone eras and different societies and let's pretend it's a good thing to emulate them in this day and age. Marx may have been right about a lot of things, too, that doesn't mean that you should film 'The Capital', acting as if nothing has happened in-between.

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1 hour ago, publicist said:

Or, to maybe put it a bit less sophomore, he's better when his anger is out in the open.

Completely agree with this. TBH War of the Worlds is my favorite Spielberg film since E.T.

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29 minutes ago, crumbs said:

Violent, depressing and pessimistic. So good! Spielberg is so much better in this mode.

 I don't find WOTW that at, all.

It's certainly his most allegorical film, since E.T., even more so than HOOK (which explores the same issues).

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5 hours ago, Richard said:

 I don't find WOTW that at, all.

 

In what way? How do you interpret the movie? By his own words, the film is a pretty bleak and uncompromising allegory for how Americans reacted after September 11.

 

The saccharine ending is a contradiction to everything leading up to it, but it makes up for it with the best setpiece of any Spielberg film in the last 20 years.

 

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1 hour ago, crumbs said:

 

In what way? How do you interpret the movie? By his own words, the film is a pretty bleak and uncompromising allegory for how Americans reacted after September 11.

 

The saccharine ending is a contradiction to everything leading up to it, but it makes up for it with the best setpiece of any Spielberg film in the last 20 years.

 

 

I find more 9/11 allegory in MUNICH, than I do, in WOTW, right down to the "revenge" theme, and the signposted, and curiously clumsy, last shot.

I see WOTW as a bittersweet story of an estranged father, trying to reconnect with his family. The "war" is just a canvas (albeit, a rather large one), to hang it all on.

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The reason why I love Munich the score....

 

"Thoughts of Home" is one of the saddest, most touching and haunting pieces of JW's career. The desperation and elegance of it cannot be put into words.

 

To say that this piece is underrated around here would be an understatement. Very few people (except me) have consistently mentioned and praised it, at least so far as I know.

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