war of the worlds [2005]

okay, don't hate but i'm not the largest fan of steven spielberg's films.  a few early ones, like jaws [1975] and duel [1971] are awesome.  his more recent work is, to my taste, rather schmaltzy.  that does not detract from spielberg's talent as a filmmaker.  he's very, very good.

which brings me to this flick.  i'm kinda live-blogging as it is playing as i type.  i'm up late, as usual.  we'd come home after seeing a play tonight with our good friends b. and c.  the play, a musical, was quite entertaining about love gone wrong , then right, in a north florida trailer park.  now i'm having a beer and watching spielberg's revision of director byron haskins' classic h.g. wells' adaptation from 1953.

i've pressed the pause button [we have a dvr which is great because we can record our favorite programs and pause live tv for a while when we want to] at the scene where tom cruise loses his son on a hilltop when the u.s. military is getting its ass handed to it by the invading aliens and tom and his daughter take refuge in tim robbins' house.  robbins turns out to be an utter psycho that endangers cruise and daughter so cruise kills robbins because of. . .um. . .i'm not sure.  i mean cruise could leave robbins to his insanity and his house.  but he doesn't.  out of desperation cruise knocks off -- conveniently off-camera for despite the dire circumstances of an alien species systematically killing off earth's dominant species this is still a family film -- robbins. 

but then that's why i'm watching the flick, other than the terrific special fx.  spielberg does great at creating these large tableaux of human drama.  the panic and horror in the crowd scenes are fantastic, master classes of filmmaking.  the scene where cruise is trying to drive thru a crowd of people to get to a ferry but is stopped by the crowd is beguiling.  spielberg's thing, or theme, is ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances.  he does that very well.  makes watching some of his more sentimental films bearable when crowd scenes are boiled down to the scale of individual drama.

good movie?  i'll leave that up to the individual viewer.  good, bad, whatever.  films are finally drawn to individual tastes.  i like this film for the crowd scenes.  i'm still not a cruise fan.  he is a good, but overrated, actor.  at least he is to me.  but what do i know.  whenever i watch a cruise film -- and surely each film he is in is a cruise film -- i'm humbled by his charisma, good looks and his abilities as an actor that i have to rethink my own opinions about him and the choices he has made as an actor.

i'll leave that out of this piece for the moment.  i'm going to hit the play button and watch this movie for as long as i can.