Spielberg

RMN: Noel, what do you think of Always?

I have to see it again. I saw it long after it had been drubbed by the critics, and thought: hey, it's pleasant enough, funny enough, and Spielberg uses those big-scale setpieces (the training sequences where planes dump their load off-target, for one) lightly and wittily enough. Also have to see the original, A Guy Named Joe. For some strange reason I've lost the need to see every heaven-makes-excursions-on-earth picture ever made (my favorite, for the record, is Michael Powell's Stairway to Heaven aka A Matter of Life and Death). But I remember liking Always.

On Spielberg, I've pretty much made it clear that in some ways I think he's overrated as a filmmaker, just as in some ways he's sadly underrated.

He has his place in the filmmaking world (more than what I can say about many directors who just don't deserve to sit behind a camera); his works (many of them) have value and are worth looking at, if not always taking seriously.

At the very least, even his very worst films are worth looking at, for the visual ingenuity he displays. That's what I think, anyway.