PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

The BFG? It's lesser Spielberg but has enough charm to stand apart from 1941 and Always. I'd put Tintin in that category too.

It's a good argument for 1941, but there's nothing remotely interesting about Always. If it weren't a Spielberg movie, it would have been lost to time.

Oh how immensely wrong you are.

But the dogs farted too. Get it?

Phantom inspired me to finally watch 1941.  I wanted to type a couple things but it all flowed so well after that I l just let it all out.


1941

Sometimes the worst movies are the ones that you can write so much about. Look at Honest Trailers for example. The best ones they do are for the really crappy movies, whenever they try to riff on a good one it always falls flat because they have to stretch to find material. Sometimes it takes a few years for a movie to settle into its proper camp but for 1941 it took a few years along with the rise in prominence of its filmmaker. For a while 1941 had been the only Steven Spielberg feature that I had yet to see but because of its reputation it was on my list of 'movies to see at some point before I die' rather than being on my short list. After Phantom got this thread going though I thought it was time to finally see what all the fuss was about. Boy, where to even begin.

I'll start with the structure of the movie. There's a reason I'm starting here which I'll explain further. I don't know if the movie was trying to emulate other war films like The Longest Day but 1941 has what feels like an infinite number of characters across an equal number of settings. Naturally in doing this we don't get to know or understand any of the characters and we just watch as several almost unrelated events play out on screen. Some of the motivations are paper thin at best and nonexistent at worst. Simply put there's not much of an interwoven story here and there's little to connect any of the characters outside of the idea that the Japanese are launching an attack on Hollywood in the days after Pearl Harbor. You can tell they worked from a big, fat script that's equally hollow and lacking any substance. This doesn't bode well for any war movie, even one that attempts to overlap genres.  It's trying to emulate/parody other war films but there's too much missing for anything in the story to work.

Now the reason I brought that up is because the problems that I listed above are much more forgivable in a comedy. There's that suspension of disbelief that makes your critiquing of the movie get pushed to the side somewhat when watching a comedy but therein lies the main, primary problem with 1941 that we already know all about. It's just not funny. It's not funny at all. In any way. There are almost zero laughs throughout the entire movie and I think that opens up the conversation of why the comedy aspect failed so badly. Part of the reason I think is because there was the idea that if they put in enough funny people that will help carry the movie. That right there is a problem because one lesson that Hollywood keeps learning time and again is that a stacked cast alone can't carry a two hour comedy film. We should all know that by now but it hasn't seemed to register with filmmakers even to this day. For every great comedy movie we all love and cherish there are 80 bland, unfunny and forgettable comedies that are churned out through the 'this is funny, right?' meat grinder. John Belushi for example is unquestionably a funny performer but he completely fails here because he isn't given anything to do other than yell and trip over things. That's not his fault, his zaniness and lack of script just weren't a good fit. That brings out the next problem; it's a 'comedy' that doesn't know what kind of comedy it wants to be. Aside from every single joke falling flat, there are attempts at physical comedy and slapstick humor, sexual puns and parodying other films.  These days directors like to go with the 'improv' approach where they just let the camera roll and yell at the actors 'be funny.'  Sometimes it hits, oftentimes it misses very, very big.  I don't think that was really as common back in those days if only because they printed on actual film stock which cost money rather than shooting digital for hours on end but you can tell that 1941 is very scripted and that the comedians here were going by the book rather than being cut lose.  I could be wrong but that's just the sense that I got while watching.  1941 tries to cover all bases and sometimes those choices are extremely questionable. There's a big scene where Army and Navy servicemen fight during a Jitterbug dance off. Spielberg thought it would be clever to play the theme from The Quiet Man over the entire fight sequence, even when cutting back to it from other scenes. The Quiet Man, a movie that was almost 30 years old by the time 1941 came out, has a famous fight scene for a climax so he probably thought slugging that theme in there (no pun intended) was a clever pull. You know, for the old folks in the audience. Whatever. Slim Pickens also has a scene where he's captured by the Japanese sailors and he goes off listing all the items he had in his pocket, another send off of his much funnier and more famous scene from Dr. Strangelove.  Then he tries to poo stuff out of his butt.  Haha!  And that leads into maybe the greatest, most well known issue of the film; Spielberg's self-perception.

I think it's an understatement to say that it takes some balls to parody your own hit movie that was released only a few years prior however that's exactly what Spielberg does. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, maybe some viewers thought it was self-deprecating but we all know that wasn't really the case. We open on a naked woman running on a beach and swimming in the ocean by herself (apparently she's the same actress from Jaws which admittedly is kind of cool). Instead of getting eaten by a shark though she finds herself on a Japanese submarine and is quickly being eyeballed by a randy Japanese sailor. Right out the gate you get the sense that hubris played a big part in the approach to this production. At this point in his career Spielberg wasn't quite a novice, after all he was riding high on the huge success of Jaws and Close Encounters, but he was still a young man. I think most people who more or less conquered Hollywood at that age would probably let that success get the better of them. As Spielberg is an admitted World War II buff and son of a veteran (who actually just passed away a couple weeks ago unfortunately), he probably thought that he could knock a comedy out of the park like he did with the horror and sci-fi genres. As we all know that didn't turn out quite the way he liked and his career really did take a hit. It makes you wonder at what point in the production they knew it was all going wrong. The movie itself seems to give up at a point and eschews obvious sex puns and slapstick for wanton destruction. Things explode, people punch each other, airplanes crash, stupid people shoot anti-aircraft guns through their own houses, and it's all so boring and exhausting. It's a movie that at no point knows what it wants to be or how it intends to entertain on even a basic level. At every point it just fails over and over and over again.

When I was initially tracking this movie down I discovered that an extended version was recently released with over a half hour of additional footage. What could that footage possibly be that would improve upon the movie? It would be like adding an extra mile to the swim for someone escaping from Alcatraz and saying 'Enjoy!'

And for anyone keeping score, Hook is 10x better than 1941 and I think that's a conservative estimate.

D so says Doomsday. This is unquestionably Steven Spielberg's worst film and if it's any consolation to Phantom at least he won't have to wallow in these depths again.

Also, we all know that Hollywoodland didn't get taken out by a drunken John Belushi. It was Neville Sinclair when he exploded into a fireball and crashed Howard Hughes' rocket into the sign, that's common knowledge.

Gone, but not forgotten.

Raiders is my #2 all-time favorite movie so there's nothing bad I can say about it. I've seen it 4 or 5 times in theaters and would do so again in a heartbeat.

Indy 5 though, I'd be shocked if they ever get that off the ground at this point. Good riddance I think.

I'll be waiting.