On Independence Day some friends asked if I wanted to join them at the theater to see the new Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day. I went with them and we agreed afterward that it's a great movie! Not Spielberg's best but it's definitely tapping into "old school Spielberg" that a lot of us remember from our youth, with a dash of the "mature Spielberg" who has been with us since Schindler's List.
That is how I gauge our greatest living filmmaker. There is the Steven Spielberg that I met at the Boy Scout Jamboree in 1989: the "big kid" who was as giddy as a schoolboy, dancing around in his Scout uniform. That's the man who brought us E.T. and Indiana Jones and Jaws and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. He had a childlike twinkle in his eye and we were fortunate to have him.
Then Spielberg went off to Poland to make Schindler's List. He wasn't the same after that. The twinkle went out of his eyes. The Spielberg who came back was a darker figure, and it reflected in his work. The Jurassic Park sequel was Spielberg attempting a return to form, but it... lacked something. I can't put my finger on what it was, but it did.
It was like that for Steven Spielberg for awhile, until 2001. It took finishing his pal Stanley Kubrick's work with A.I.: Artificial Intelligence to pull him back to the wonder. Even there, I don't think it was a complete return. The Spielberg of fifteen years earlier might have left David inside the amphibicopter, looking at the blue fairy, until his power ran down and everything was frozen around him. That would have been a downer of an ending and yet one with hope. The Spielberg of 2001 couldn't leave David like that, he instead gave him a more concrete ending. One that was completely absent of humanity, it must be noted.
Over the past quarter century it's been coming back in fits and starts, and with Disclosure Day we have gotten as close to the old-school Steven Spielberg as we've gotten post-Schindler. This is definitely going back to Spielberg's fantasy/sci-fi roots, the rich soil that bought forth Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Disclosure Day is a pure Spielberg film, with a script written by longtime collaborator David Koepp. And the cherry on top, a terrific score by John Williams (this is the thirtieth project that Williams has done with Spielberg). It's got all the classic Spielberg cinematic style, and it's pretty obvious that true to form Spielberg chose to shoot this with real film: it's got that beautiful grain look to it. Visually I thought it much resembled the look of 2002's Minority Report, and that's not a bad thing at all.
I'll have to say that I recommend Disclosure Day. It's not a perfect film, but it is a fine enough motion picture made by the greatest filmmaker of our time. Try not to make sense of it as you go along, is the biggest advice I'll give it. Suspend your disbelief at the theater door. Trust me, it will make sense toward the end of the movie.
So that's what we saw on Saturday. My friends already had tickets for Disclosure Day. Had we gotten to the theater without any real plans in mind, we might have seen Young Washington, which debuted the day before. I have heard nothing but amazing about that movie. More than enough to make me want to catch it while it's in theaters.
Young Washington is produced by Angel Studios. I've had my eye on Angel for awhile now and it has been a pure pleasure to watch it grow into a solid, solid mid-tier studio and maybe more than that. Angel is building off of lessons that faith-based filmmaking has long been in the process of learning. Let's face it: the Christian filmmaking community has made some real stinkers over the past fifty or sixty years. Only now, in the last fifteen or so, has it come to realize that the message is little or nothing if it's without a story that sincerely entertains the audience. Sherwood Pictures earnestly began the trend with their movies like Facing the Giants and Courageous, and now others have come along too.
Keep an eye on Angel Studios. They really have become and continue to be as formidable an outfit as there is apt to be for a venture of its size and scope. And it's only going to get better.
But I think that Angel Studios missed a real marketing opportunity with Young Washington. One of the current gimmicks for seeing movies in a proper theater is that they offer the opportunity to have special popcorn buckets. I've seen them in all shapes and sizes. Some amazing to behold and some downright ridiculous (the one for Dune, a plastic sculpture of the sandworm, was... shall we say, "suggestive"?). But they have become very popular and nice collector's items.
Angel Studios should have had a popcorn bucket for Young Washington. It could have been a tricornered hat. Holds your popcorn during the movie, and fashionable to wear afterward!
Yeah, it's a ChatGPT rendition. I'm still sticking with my vow to not produce any AI-"written" work on this blog. And if there is any AI "art" I'm going to disclose that. But I needed a hat/popcorn holder pic and that was the fastest/dirtiest way to have one :-P
