Spielberg and the 6 Million

[Steelhead]

davemarc asks:

>Is the humble Steelhead suggesting that we *should* equate the work of
>Goebbels with the work of Spielberg?

No, not Goebbels. You might compare it to Leni Riefenstahl, whose films
Spielberg seems well schooled in.

But lil Stevie doesn't have Leni's awful genius. Leni's techniques of
manipulation were much sublter, and, therefore, more strangely powerful.
SS's films are almost universally turgid, poorly paced, clotted with
emotive images in every scene, and sloppily edited (the editor of Jaws, for
example, claims the first and second cuts of that "movie" were almost
incomprehensible until he took it over--this is backed up by techies).

SS is a cheap trick pony. And I'll never, ever, forgive him for what he did
to poor old Ballard.

If you want to see what can still be done with the Holocaust on film,
check out Marcel Ophuls' Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus
Barbie or Claude Lanzman's (sp) encyclopedic Shoah. And, of course, Alain
Renais's masterful Night and Fog remains a chilling masterpiece of brevity,
a cool montage of an unspeakable brutality.

The only redeeming virtue of Schindler's List--which, afterall, glorified a
businessman who utilized slave labor and soft-pedaled the horror chambers
of Auschwitz--was Y. Perlman's haunting score, IM--humble--O.

Pynchon doesn't write about people like Spielberg (Stanley Elkins did) but
he should.

Steely

BtW, those titans of liberalisms, Spielberg-Geffin-Katzenberg-P. Allen-Bill
Gates, are planning to construct the DreamWorks Studio on the largest
wetlands in Los Angeles--perhaps SoCal. And these humble billionaires are
threatening local enviros with SLAPP suits (strategic lawsuits to limit
public participation.) Quite a bunch of guys. Not.