Nick1Ø66

I didn't really care for him as a young Eddard Stark, I just couldn't see it.
 
I do however, like him as Elrond. 

It's great

You guys are really testing Jay's patience with your bad dates!

You guys are really testing Jay's patience with your bad dates!

You guys are really testing Jay's patience with your bad dates!

You guys are really testing Jay's patience with your bad dates!

... and proud of it! 
#There'll always be an England#

I agree. It's my favorite Spielberg movie, followed by ET. The guy was firing on all cilinders on the early 80s!

Oh, I forgot that one!
 
Stodgy is the word for it. Again, nothing overtly bad about it, but its a little tedious.

Unpopular opinion: I'm not a fan of Lincoln. I thought that movie was a very boring history lesson, one of those mind-numbing movies that a teacher could play in class while the students sleep. Maybe I'd like it more if I was American, or at least know more about the history of the United States.
 
That said, it's been almost a decade since I watched it, I may give it another chance one of these days.

Favs:
Raiders Jaws CE3K JP SPR SPR was probably Spielberg's last true classic, and a bona fide classic of the genre. But I can't rank it higher b/c, well, it's not better than any of these other films, and frankly I think it loses a little steam in the middle. The bookends of the movie (particularly the beginning) are brilliant though, it's just a bit uneven.
 
And honestly I probably revisit Temple of Doom and Last Crusade more than some of these other films, but I have a thing about not listing more than one film from the same franchise when doing these rankings.

I have a hard time doing this, because with one exception, I don't think Spielberg has made a "bad" film. And I can't really even rank my least favourites, because those are all some degree of mediocrity such that I've only seen them once, don't remember them, and am not interested enough in them to begin to know how to rank them.
 
But his worst film? By far...Crystal Skull. A flat out embarrassment for everyone involved, bordering on artistic malpractice. Spielberg should have known better.  Even his lesser films are at least somewhat inspired, like he was actually interested in telling a story, rather than reeking of the utter laziness & cynicism of this one.
 
I guess I'll just add that Ready Player One was a film he probably should have steered clear of. It's not a great film (though not Crystal Skull level-bad), and ironically, Spielberg was probably the last person who should have helmed that project.

I have a hard time doing this, because with one exception, I don't think Spielberg has made a "bad" film. And I can't really even rank my least favourites, because those are all some degree of mediocrity such that I've only seen them once, don't remember them, and am not interested enough in them to begin to know how to rank them.
 
But his worst film? By far...Crystal Skull. A flat out embarrassment for everyone involved, bordering on artistic malpractice. Spielberg should have known better.  Even his lesser films are at least somewhat inspired, like he was actually interested in telling a story, rather than reeking of the utter laziness & cynicism of this one.
 
I guess I'll just add that Ready Player One was a film he probably should have steered clear of. It's not a great film (though not Crystal Skull level-bad), and ironically, Spielberg was probably the last person who should have helmed that project.

Looks more interesting than any other Phase 4 project so far.

Plus Spider-man 2 is one of the best comic book movies there is

Super late to the GoT party, but finally finished it so wanted to unload some totally unsolicited thoughts (some spoilers, but not sure anyone reading this won't know them already):
 
I really like the music for the most part. Djawadi wouldn't be my first choice of composer (I don't know who would... these days I guess Amazon and HBO would be fighting over Bear McCreary), but the main theme has (rightly) reached iconic status and I was gratified that he used it here and there throughout the series. Never to the point of it feeling overused, but it nicely ties everything together. His finale based choral version is terrific. I'm sure someone has catalogued the other recurring themes and I'm sure I spotted a few, but I can't say I'd especially recognise them out of context. The music for the quieter, more haunting scenes is definitely the more interesting. The action is a bit RCP, but not in a distracting way - I rather think that most of the bigger battles could just have been tracked with James Horner's battle music for Braveheart. It just needs a lot of acoustic percussion and horn calls. The 8th season is much better than its reputation suggestion. I rather wish I didn't know about the controversy but I can see that, based on the pace of the show to that point, the 8th season should probably have had a couple more after it. It definitely felt like; Night King. Gone. Cersei. Gone. Dany goes mad then gone. Everyone agrees on something marginally less tyrannical. The end. Having said that, the two culminating battles (one per season would have been more than enough) are superbly staged with some genuinely haunting moments. The real shame is that Dany's fall into madness/tyranny/whatever would have been far more powerful over a longer period. You only really see the start of it and then it feels they pushed it so she goes OTT quickly so they can wrap the story up. Shame. The directing, at least from a cinematography/imagery point of view, is often exceptional. Interesting to compare it with The Rings of Power which looks undeniably lovely, but is all quite brightly lit and clean/neat/production designed. GoT on the other hand is all shafts of light, dust, snow/ash, light and dark, fire and ice (obvs), with innumerable artfully framed scenes that have a wonderful painterly quality but without standing out or being distracting. The effects are mostly excellent. The dragons, in particular, are perhaps the best on screen dragons I can recall. They look plausible in terms of size and proportions (even if, from a physics perspective, they probably aren't), have a nicely realistic/quasi dinosaur type look and act something akin to real animals rather than just being monsters. The effects for them only really falling down when doing close-ups of the characters riding them when the blue screening looks a touch janky, but that kind of match moving is probably hideously difficult. The set extensions stuff such as the huge castles and so on is almost always brilliantly executed, making great use of the locations and extending them into a plausible fantasy realm. It might get explained in House of the Dragon, but it always struck is as implausible that such a violent and regicidal society could have built so many amazing buildings and other edifices. Sure, they are meant to be heightened versions of real historic castles and churches, but it kinda feels that life is so expendable in Westeros that there never would have been enough societal cohesion to come together to build them. The spin-off should clearly have been Aya going off to explore. Enough with effing prequels. They are blond, they have dragons, they go mad. The end. GoT connections to my life. I have been to both Valetta in Malta (first season King's Landing) and Dubrovnik (rest of the show King's Landing). In the latter, they were filming some crowd scenes and I managed a few photos (despite the security people... but hey, it's a public place). I don't recall seeing any of the main cast alas. I used to work for a company who had a Belfast office next door to where they filmed GoT at Titanic Studios (seriously). I never saw them filming there but colleagues said they often saw some outside semi-studio bound scenes being filmed. The family of one of my former colleagues from said office owned the land on which they filmed (I think) Winterfell. Apparently they did quite well of it... as you can probably imagine.

That was part of the problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy...the Jedi order, the Clone Wars, etc. we're all spoken of as myth and legend in the OT. There was no way the on-screen portrayal was going to be able to live up to whatever people conjured in their imagination while watching Star Wars....and it didn't. At least for me.
 
Shows with contemporary settings, and that are more character driven, especially psychologically complex characters like those in Breaking Bad, are more suited to a "backstory", IMO. How Saul got to be the person he becomes is interesting and even relevant, whereas portraying how Mordor became Mordor just takes away from the magic.

To be fair, there are so many great artworks done of Valinor, that I really wanted it on screen.
 
The writings of Tolkien are so strong and evocative that the myth reading it can't be teinted.
 
What is demystifying Valinor way more than that short image of it with the trees is Galadriel's awful journey there. The mystique of Valinor comes greatly from the fact that there are accounts of people going there and leaving it, but as a sort of metaphor, and you're left imagining how you actually get there. Since they are clearly marked as lands, but it's also a place of myth. 
Showing an actual divorcing wall is just a very dumb idea.
When Theoden says he's going to the Halls of his fathers, of course you don't show him knocking on a huge wooden door. It's metaphorical.
Just like in every movie telling Jesus Christ's life and death, you show him crucified, and not flying up the sky in big fluffy clouds until he hears harps playing.
I'm very grateful the writers don't have the rights to the Silmarillion, otherwise I swear they would take the phrase "Halls of Mandos" and show actual halls of Mandos.
 
I'm angry now.
 
How can you be so stupid as a writer?
I swear, sometimes you just look at people and know they're the reason there need to be instructions printed on shampoo bottles.

Myth

 
Demystified

That was part of the problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy...the Jedi order, the Clone Wars, etc. we're all spoken of as myth and legend in the OT. There was no way the on-screen portrayal was going to be able to live up to whatever people conjured in their imagination while watching Star Wars....and it didn't. At least for me.
 
Shows with contemporary settings, and that are more character driven, especially psychologically complex characters like those in Breaking Bad, are more suited to a "backstory", IMO. How Saul got to be the person he becomes is interesting and even relevant, whereas portraying how Mordor became Mordor just takes away from the magic.

That was part of the problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy...the Jedi order, the Clone Wars, etc. we're all spoken of as myth and legend in the OT. There was no way the on-screen portrayal was going to be able to live up to whatever people conjured in their imagination while watching Star Wars....and it didn't. At least for me.
 
Shows with contemporary settings, and that are more character driven, especially psychologically complex characters like those in Breaking Bad, are more suited to a "backstory", IMO. How Saul got to be the person he becomes is interesting and even relevant, whereas portraying how Mordor became Mordor just takes away from the magic.

Yeah, I don't object to backstory: I do object to those kinds of backstories that demystify more so than illuminate. Creation myths tends to almost always do the former.