Jonas Brothers’ 2019 comeback album Happiness Begins was a major success, topping the charts and spawning the fraternal trio’s first No. 1 song, “Sucker.” So, they’re coming back with more: Earlier this year, they revealed they were working on a new album and later officially announced The Album, which is set for release on May 5. They have a single, “Wings,” dropping this Friday, February 24, and they’ve tapped a noted superfan, White Lotus favorite Haley Lu Richardson, to star in the video.
In a video shared over the weekend, Joe Jonas, on the set for the “Wings” video, says, “Guys, we’re shooting a video for ‘Wings.’ I’m probably gonna get in trouble for showing you this, but it’s going insanely well, and a sneak peek of who’s actually in the video.” Then he cuts to a monitor showing Richardson, dancing around a hotel room.
Sharing the video on her Instagram Story, Richardson wrote (as Just Jared notes), “please hold while i attempt to process this moment.”
All this comes after Richardson’s December 2022 appearance on The Late Late Show, when she spoke about her long-running love of the group. James Corden then FaceTimed Nick Jonas during the show, which left Richardson joyfully overwhelmed.
The Album is out 5/5 via Republic. Pre-order it here.
Although the legendary emcee has reconciled with 21 Savage after the “Rich Flex” rapper questioned whether or not the Queensbridge native remains a fixture in today’s music landscape, saying, “I don’t feel like he’s relevant.” The conversation flooded social media for days. After other musicians like Fivio Foreign took to social media to give Nas his flowers, 21 Savage seemingly walked his initial comments back, stating “he would never disrespect Nas.”
As Nas locks in to work on his next album, King’s Disease IV, in which 50 Cent will appear, his 2001 song “Got Ur Self A Gun” from Stillmatic is receiving love from the Peacock original series. The hype track is the perfect backdrop to the fictional action character John Wick’s fast-paced fight scene montage.
This isn’t the first time the beloved hip-hop icon’s music has been used in a television series or film. But with this track, considering how it samples The Sopranos’ theme song “Woke Up This Morning,” this is certainly a full circle moment.
Next month, Steven Spielberg’s 34th film, The Fabelmans, will be up for seven Academy Awards. This is hardly extraordinary news. You won’t find a safer bet in show business than “Will a new Steven Spielberg film earn multiple Oscar nominations?”
But The Fabelmans isn’t just another Spielberg picture. After several decades as the world’s most famous and successful film director, Spielberg has followed through on a promise he made to talk show host Dick Cavett — with tongue lodged somewhat in cheek — back in 1981 when he was promoting Raiders Of The Lost Ark: He’s made a talky art film. Only it’s not a run-of-the-mill talky art film — it’s the story of his childhood, and his parents’ divorce, and his origin as a natural-born cinematic showman.
This reflective turn in his career has put me in my own reflective mood about the impact that Steven Spielberg’s films have had on my life and the rest of America during his nearly 50-year run at the top of the Hollywood food chain. Join me as I go through the man’s filmography. There are a lot of great movies to get reacquainted with! And also some bad ones!
Trust me: You’re going to need a bigger boat (and by boat I mean “block of time for reading this column”).
34. The BFG (2016)
There are a lot of Steven Spielberg lists on the internet, and they always have the same half-dozen movies at the bottom. What changes is the film that goes dead last. It might be Hook. It might be 1941. It might be Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. But I would rather watch any of those than The BFG. Hook is bad but at least it has that committed Dustin Hoffman performance. 1941 is stupidly loud and loudly stupid but it also exudes an intoxicating 1970s cocaine buzz. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was a major disappointment upon release but now it feels like a fascinating misfire, as nearly all films co-starring Shia LaBeouf are destined to become.
But The BFG? It has the grodiest curb appeal of any entry in the Spielberg canon. More than that, it seems to barely exist. Is there a single person on planet Earth who rides for this movie? Who wanted it in the first place? Did Spielberg, even? The BFG is the kind of project that only a workaholic genius who needs to fill an empty space in his crammed schedule decides to make. And so he did. And here that film lands.
The BFG was released one year after Bridge Of Spies and one year before The Post, two late-period “adult” features in which our hero ruminated on one of the central themes of his 21st-century work — the value of institutional power as a stabilizing influence on American culture, and how that influence appears to be waning in comparison to historical turning points from the previous century. Spielberg, of course, is also an institution, and what he embodies is an old, centrist, crowd-pleasing Hollywood that is also on the wane. With The BFG, he took a break from reflecting on beleaguered institutions; instead, he inadvertently produced a snapshot of one.
A slow-paced adaptation of a Roald Dahl story made with charmlessly cutting-edge and visually unattractive computer animation, The BFG somehow also feels old-fashioned in the worst possible sense. It’s a film uniquely designed to bore the shit out of adults and children alike. It typifies what has been rudely classified as Spielberg’s “flop era,” which refers to the run of movies dating back to the mid-aughts that haven’t captured the public’s imagination in the manner expected of a Steven Spielberg film.
Now, it should be noted that this run does include some certifiable blockbusters, including the aforementioned Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull ($790 million), 2012’s Lincoln ($275 million) and 2018’s Ready Player One ($583 million), along with solid performers like Bridge Of Spies ($165 million) and The Post ($179 million). But “flop era” is more of a state of mind than a literal classification of box-office success. His “flop era” films are said to be missing a certain joie de vivre that typifies his golden era. “What has been lacking in Spielberg’s career for a considerable time is a sense of wonder and awe,” wrote one critic. In light of the commercial failures of 2021’s West Side Story and The Fabelmans, he’s been charged with the very un-Spielbergian accusation of being “a filmmaker for critics and the elite, rather than ‘ordinary’ people.”
The “flop era” piece set off a mini-firestorm among online cinephiles who were gobsmacked that Steven Spielberg of all people is now too arty for the MCU-loving hoi polloi. As a blunt instrument to strike against a movie as heartfelt and moving as The Fabelmans, “flop era” is reductive and blinkered, a numbers-driven dismissal of an artist who long ago proved his box-office bonafides beyond any doubt. But if we’re talking about The BFG, the idea that Spielberg might not have his heart in kiddie-friendly entertainment as he approaches 80 isn’t entirely off the mark.
33. Hook (1991)
Let me say for the record that I am a Spielberg defender, as many of us born in the ’70s and ’80s are hardwired to be. This guy was the auteur of at least two decades of American cinematic popular culture, from Jaws in the mid-’70s to Jurassic Park in the early ’90s. If you grew up in the post-Watergate era, there is very little daylight between your actual childhood memories and the images implanted in your brain, practically by government fiat, from films directed, produced, and/or inspired by Steven Spielberg. He wasn’t just a filmmaker; he was a surrogate father figure who also grew up with you. The kids who cried to E.T. took their first dates to Jurassic Park, and then they went to college and semi-ironically watched James Van Der Beek play the Spielberg-worshipping protagonist of Dawson’s Creek. And now we force our own kids watch re-heated tributes to those memories in shows like Stranger Things, which has created a feedback loop of allusions and homages and flat-out rip-offs ensuring that the fingerprints of Spielberg’s imagination will remain on the next several generations.
So, as a Spielberg defender who knows his filmography like the multitude of faces from my ancient high school yearbooks, I will point out that he has had other flop eras. And these flop eras typically occur at the pivot point between decades, starting with 1941 at the end of the ’70s and then again as the ’80s morphed into the ’90s. Though, again, when it comes to Hook, we’re not talking about a literal flop — it cost $70 million and grossed $300 million, which can only be considered a literal flop by the lofty standards of prime era Spielberg. What Hook has, no matter the protestations of nostalgic millennials, is that flop state of the mind.
A charitable reading of Hook is that it’s Spielberg’s farewell to the man-child image that formed the crux of his artistic persona pre-Schindler’s List. Never again would he so explicitly celebrate the supposed virtue of childishness for the pleasure of ossified grown-ups. (Spielberg’s segment of 1983’s ill-fated anthology The Twilight Zone: The Movie, “Kick The Can,” hits similar notes.) But more than 30 years on, Hook feels aggressively phony. One of the best aspects of The Fabelmans is how cinema’s great man-child reveals that his own childhood was not, in reality, an idealized wonderland of wild imagination, but rather the same hellacious trial-by-fire the rest of us experienced.
32. Always (1989)
Spielberg famously dislikes Hook. “I’m a little less proud of the Neverland sequences,” he said in 2011, “because I’m uncomfortable with that highly stylized world that today, of course, I would probably have done with live-action character work inside a completely digital set. But we didn’t have the technology to do it then, and my imagination only went as far as building physical sets and trying to paint trees blue and red.”
He didn’t put it in these terms, exactly, but the problem with Hook is that it looks the kind of film that Spielberg’s generation of filmmakers — the so-called “Movie Brats” of Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, De Palma, and so on — put out of business in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Those garish, top-heavy, and absurdly pricey musicals and prestige pictures outfitted with phony-looking sets and sleepwalking movie stars. The ridiculous studio-made disasters that nobody wanted to see once they had the option of buying a ticket for The Godfather, Jaws and Star Wars.
The movie before Hook is also like that. A remake of Frank Capra’s A Guy Named Joe, Always came out at the last possible moment when referencing Frank Capra in a mainstream movie seemed remotely relevant. It is also the final and least distinguished entry in Spielberg’s “Dreyfuss trilogy,” in which Richard Dreyfuss once again plays a character accurately described at one point as a “dickhead.”
31. War Horse (2011)
In 2015, I wrote a column likening the “Movie Brats” directors to classic rock bands, an exercise inspired by the most formative cinema book of my teen years, Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. This account of 1970s “New Hollywood” forever informed my love of that era, in part, by focusing on the most “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” aspects of the scene. Even though I’m old enough to know better now, the caricatures from that book still shape my most basic impressions of those directors.
Therefore, I compared Francis Ford Coppola to Bob Dylan, because “his early work was visionary and established a beachhead for those that followed, though by the early ’80s he seemed to have lost his mind.” George Lucas was Pink Floyd, because he started “out as an experimental filmmaker on the fringes” and “then reinvented himself as the epitome of mass-appeal space-themed entertainment.” Brian De Palma was Led Zeppelin, because “he’s bombastic and derivative, but such a gifted stylist and technician that it scarcely matters.”
Spielberg, naturally, was The Beatles, for reasons so obvious they don’t require elucidating. I also likened Martin Scorsese to the Velvet Underground, but that seems less sharp now. Nobody would have predicted this 30 years ago, but at this stage is it possible that Scorsese is at least as commercially minded as Spielberg? Since the turn of the century, Scorsese rarely makes a film without a movie star (and that movie star is normally Leonardo DiCaprio, arguably the most prominent “traditional” leading man of modern times). Spielberg, meanwhile – along with forging long-running partnerships with Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise — has made several films with Mark Rylance, a brilliant actor and singularly weird on-screen presence. The comparison isn’t totally fair, but the gap between DiCaprio and Rylance does illustrate two surprisingly divergent paths for these great cinematic maestros.
And Rylance isn’t even the least conventional star that Spielberg has worked with! That would be the horse from War Horse, the beta Saving Private Ryan, which I saw with my father in 2011 and have not thought about again until I wrote about it here.
30. The Terminal (2004)
Here’s some trivia that might seem shocking initially, and then will make sense if you account for the careers of other aging filmmakers: The last Spielberg film set in the “present” was 2005’s War Of The Worlds. Since then, he’s either made period pieces or futuristic sci-fi pictures. This is noteworthy because for the first 20 years of his career, his specialty was injecting the extraordinary into ordinary modern life. That’s Jaws, that’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, that’s E.T., that’s Jurassic Park. Those films resonate because Spielberg put as much care into the family-based comedic dramas occurring in the background of those films as he did the special effects in the foreground. Watch those movies enough and the background stuff takes on greater importance. If you’re looking for depictions of America’s “divorce” era— in which latch-key kids inhibit a world of TV and BMX bikes away from their harried, barely-keeping-it-together parents — you can’t do much better than those Spielberg classics.
Spielberg’s movies now comment on our world, but they aren’t of contemporary society. War Of The Worlds has that “injecting the extraordinary into the ordinary” quality as Hollywood’s most terrifying post-9/11 movie. Whereas the film preceding War Of The Worlds — one of the corniest in Spielberg’s oeuvre — harkens to a more innocent pre-9/11 time, in which casting Tom Hanks to do a proto-Borat accent while romancing Catherine Zeta-Jones still seems like a swell idea.
29. The Adventures Of Tintin (2011)
His second-best journalism film! Some critics favorably compared this to Raiders Of The Lost Ark, presumably because it’s a chase movie with a cast of colorful bad guys. I guess you could also compare Mad Max: Fury Road to Herbie: Fully Loaded, because they both involve eccentric auto machinery. But that would be a terrible idea, because one film is cool as shit and the other is dorky as hell.
28. Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (2008)
Am I being too nice to this movie? There’s a quasi-consensus that it’s the worst Spielberg film ever made, though that strikes me as an overreaction from the sorts of people who claim with a straight face that a movie like The Last Jedi is responsible for “ruining” their childhoods. Crystal Skull similarly drew ire for allegedly tarnishing the legacy of Indiana Jones, which is bunk. If this movie honestly makes you like Raiders Of The Lost Ark less, I’m sorry, but that’s insane.
Here’s the thing: I have seen this movie most recently than you probably have. And it’s totally watchable! Is it the weakest Indiana Jones film? No question. Is Harrison Ford too old for the part? He is, which is alarming given that it came out 15 (!) years before the forthcoming Indy film. Is Shia LaBeouf’s Marlon Brando posturing embarrassing? Kind of, though I prefer to think of it as Spielberg’s preemptive revenge for Shia’s subsequent trashing of the film.
Is Crystal Skull just plain stupid? Sure it is, but remember that the original intent of Raiders Of The Lost Ark was to make a throwaway B-movie, which Raiders decidedly is not and Crystal Skull unquestionably is.
27. Ready Player One (2018)
The most interesting aspect of Crystal Skull is the subtext. The same year that Spielberg went back to his most storied franchise to make an homage to the silly “alien creature” genre pictures of his youth, Iron Man ushered in a new era of blockbusters based on the one fantasy subgenre — the superhero movie — that has never interested him. (The point of Indiana Jones is that he is not a superhero.) Iron Man didn’t put Spielberg out of commission, exactly, but it did put him outside the center of mass escapist entertainment for the first time in nearly 40 years. But, contrary to the “flop era” critics, it’s worth noting that it’s the world that changed, not Spielberg. Is it his fault that Close Encounters Of The Third Kind now looks like an art film rather than a popcorn flick? No, it is not.
With Ready Player One, the temptation is to read it as a satire of how the monoculture that Spielberg engineered has been twisted into a spiritually bankrupt facade obscuring a venal and bottom-feeding society. But that instinct is complicated by how muddled the execution is — are we critiquing this junk or celebrating it? — as well as Spielberg’s own words while promoting the film. “I have the most intimate relationship with nostalgia,” he gushed in one interview. “I’m livin’ that way, most of my life.” OK then.
I still think there’s some satire in Ready Player One, and it mostly comes courtesy of Ben Mendelsohn’s deliciously oily tech-bro villain. (Rylance, however, is too old to play the nerdy Zuckerberg-cum-messiah figure.) And then there’s the inherent distance that Spielberg, life-long preservationist of film history, has from the worlds of video games and the internet, which lends his depictions of those milieus inevitable traces of cynicism and foreboding. Overall, however, this still feels like a recycled film rather than a film about recycling, which makes Spielberg’s decision to direct it all the more confounding. It’s like if George Lucas had signed on to make Spaceballs.
26. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
The biggest time gap between films in Spielberg’s filmography is the four years that separate this film from Schindler’s List. This speaks to the man’s incredible work ethic, which has only increased as he’s gotten older to a near-impulsive degree. As we have already established, his weaker movies feel like inessential side effects of his constant need to be productive.
In the case of The Lost World, the common assumption is that he was merely doing a cash grab, though in a 2020 interview he said that he considered The Lost World a vacation after the life-changing ordeal of making Schindler’s List. So it’s not so much a cash grab as a cash coast as he eased back into filmmaking. But even if he was coasting, The Lost World is still superior to any Jurassic Park film not directed by Steven Spielberg.
25. 1941 (1979)
The best “bad” Spielberg film. It’s the master at his least disciplined, which iswhy critics who don’t like his other movies tend to perversely vouch for 1941. If you view Spielberg as a cheap manipulator who uses impeccable craftsmanship to make audiences blubber at sentimental drivel, well, here’s a film that is not well crafted at all! How refreshing!
Watch 1941 and you will come away with a new appreciation for the things that Spielberg normally does better than anybody: snappy story rhythms, cleanly laying out action scenes in a logical manner, applying light comic touches that humanize sprawling special effects set pieces. In this movie, he doesn’t do any of that stuff. Do you remember that scene from A.I. Artificial Intelligence where Haley Joel Osment is gorging on vegetables and ends up breaking down his inner robot boy mechanisms? 1941 is like that, only Spielberg is binging on scenes where Slim Pickens attempts to have a bowel movement in front of Toshiro Mifune and Christopher Lee.
24. West Side Story (2021)
To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, Steven Spielberg was so preoccupied with whether or not he could remake one of the most iconic musicals of all time that he didn’t stop to think if he should. Look, there’s no question that Spielberg brings his best pizzazz to this update of the classic “Romeo And Juliet in Manhattan” romantic tragedy. And I give Janusz Kaminski his props for his crazy lens-flare game. But, like Spielberg’s recently announced semi-remake of Bullitt with Bradley Cooper, the question of “why?” hangs over this picture like Officer Krupke looms over the Jets and the Sharks. It’s not a BFG-sized “why?” but it’s still considerable. No matter how handsomely made this West Side Story is, we simply did not need to see Ansel Elgort sing “Tonight”
23. Amistad (1997)
The single greatest year of Spielberg’s career — and possibly any director’s career — is 1993, when he released one of his biggest blockbusters (Jurassic Park) and his most prestigious prestige film (Schindler’s List). Among “flop era” truthers, this is also the year that broke him. Or, at least, it broke his career into two segments, “Before 1993” and “After 1993.” I don’t believe that he was washed after those twin triumphs, but he did falter somewhat in the immediate aftermath. In 1997, the double shot of this film and The Lost World couldn’t help but pale in comparison, though Amistad is a better picture than its critical reputation or box office performance (it’s his second lowest-grossing film of the 20th century) suggests.
Tonally, it veers between stark brutality and unintentional silliness. One moment, we see a horrifying flashback where Africans are cruelly dumped off the side of a slave ship like unwanted cargo. The next, it’s the sight of Matthew McConaughey adopting the de rigueur “period piece” quasi-British accent. The obvious companion in Spielberg’s canon is Lincoln, another film in which the director places his faith in principled men who use the American justice system to achieve racial equity. But whereas the older Spielberg has the confidence to let the material engage the viewer without much prodding, too much of Amistad is larded with obvious “Oscar clip” emotional cues. Let’s just say that if you take a shot every time he puts a solemn choir on the soundtrack, you will be long past sober by the time of that infamous “Give us free!” scene.
22. The Color Purple (1985)
The most interesting critique of Amistad came from Spike Lee, who contrasted the film unfavorably with Schindler’s List, a “great movie” in which Spielberg said (in Lee’s words), “I don’t care if this film just makes a nickel. I want to be truthful.” But with Amistad, “all of a sudden, Spielberg’s commercial hat is on. That’s why we got Matthew McConaughey in the movie.” That criticism isn’t exactly fair, nor is it completely accurate. (The film did bomb, after all.) But it does underline some of the problems with the first “serious” Spielberg movie.
On one hand, The Color Purple is practically as harrowing as Schindler’s List — the unrelenting abuse administered against the female protagonists make the 153-minute running time especially grueling. (If all you know about Whoopi Goldberg is from The View, her incredible performance here will be doubly devastating.) On the other hand, Spielberg’s compositions are frequently gorgeous in an old-school, John Ford kind of way. Which softens the impact of the material in ways that feel simultaneously like a welcome relief and an unwarranted betrayal.
By the way: If you think Steven Spielberg making The Color Purple is a choice that was unremarkable in 1985 and only controversial in socially conscious 2023, you would be wrong. His film was nominated for 12 Oscars and won none of them, which seems like a more severe rebuke than not being nominated at all.
21. The Post (2017)
Good movie. Great cast. Should be remembered as one of the better examples of #resistance era art. But he used a CCR song to score a Vietnam War scene, and the tune in question (“Green River”) came out three years after the scene takes place. Therefore, as a penalty, I must place The Post in the lower half of the filmography.
20. Duel (1971)
It took a while for critics to accept that the most successful filmmaker on Earth could also make the sorts of movies that win awards and inspire think pieces. The irony is that the people most likely to hate on his films in 2023 regard that transition as a mistake.
The polarity between “elite” and “popular” pictures in Spielberg’s work is a false one. In truth, his best movies satisfy both constituencies. But there is something to be said about how Spielberg early on had an uncanny ability to connect with the public’s lizard brains. The part of us that reacts to primal stimuli long before the intellectual section of our skulls has a clue what’s going on.
This is most true of his “killing machine” pictures. Jaws, Jurassic Park, War Of The Worlds — they are all about seemingly unstoppable forces that will hunt you down and murder you and everyone you love unless you can somehow murder it first. Spielberg’s first theatrically released film (which originated as a TV movie of the week) is also a “killing machine” picture. It’s the most stripped-down of these movies, and the most plausible — killer sharks, dinosaurs, and aliens likely won’t penetrate your life, but the Duel scenario is as relatable as road rage.
19. Bridge Of Spies (2015)
No matter what genre he works in, Spielberg remains a die-hard centrist. He subscribes to a viewpoint that values even-handed rationality which, in theory, can convert anyone so long as they are willing to listen in good faith. Wouldn’t you feel the same if you made films that pretty much everybody has seen and, in many cases, loved? Aren’t you obligated to feel that way if your life’s work functions as a metaphor for American populism?
With Bridge Of Spies, Spielberg teamed up with fellow cinematic embodiment of centrism Tom Hanks to produce yet another film in which American institutions are shown to be capable of delivering fair outcomes so long as everyone plays by the rules. In 2015, that put Spielberg at a departure point from the rest of America — Donald Trump had announced his presidential campaign just four months before this film was released. If Bridge Of Spies feels like an old man movie, it’s because Spielberg’s optimism was finally out of sync with the world around him. His competence as a filmmaker remained strong; it was America that was entering its “flop era.”
18. Empire Of The Sun (1987)
Among the general public, it’s underrated. Among Spielberg connoisseurs, it’s probably a little overrated. So, let’s split the difference and put it in the middle of the pack.
Empire Of The Sun is usually lumped in with The Color Purple as one of his pre-Schindler’s List “I’m trying to win an Oscar” movies. But it actually plays better if you consider it the middle (and weakest) entry in his “Lost Boy” trilogy, with E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In all three films, you have a young man — I’m calling E.T. a “young man” — who must navigate the fraught path from innocence to experience in a hostile, foreign world. But while the other two films feel like fairy tales, Empire Of The Sun is more or less a straightforward coming-of-age story, a junior Stalag 17 in which a prison camp acts as a stand-in for the rigors of adolescence.
17. The Fabelmans (2022)
The BFG is a film without an audience; The Fabelmans is a film made without caring if there’s an audience. That’s an important difference, for those eager to lump this in with the “flop era” films. After all this time as our most faithful crowd-pleaser, you might think that Steven Spielberg has earned the right to be a little self-indulgent. Then again, when he made A.I., maybe he could see a bit of himself in the robot boy. He loves us so much, but there’s no guarantee that we will love him back if he’s no longer useful.
The rawness of this movie is what hits you. Seth Rogen has said it wasn’t unusual to see his director openly weeping between set-ups, which you might expect from a guy staging re-enactments of the most traumatic moments in his life featuring his now-dead parents. You feel that intensity on screen. If you watched Marriage Story and wondered what it would be like if Steven Spielberg had directed it, now you know.
My one (minor) criticism: As a child of divorce myself, Spielberg’s indirect films about broken families — particularly E.T. — hit harder than the more literal article. E.T. is universal; The Fabelmans is as specific as movies of this scale get.
16. Minority Report (2002)
After 9/11, people implored Bruce Springsteen to make an album about the tragedy, and he responded with The Rising. I don’t know if Steven Spielberg faced the same demand, but he nonetheless made three films in the first half of the aughts — Minority Report, War Of The Worlds, and Munich — that addressed different aspects of how the terrorist attack changed American life.
With Minority Report, he took on the surveillance state in the guise of a breakneck thriller, and wound up making maybe his weirdest blockbuster. Did this movie need to carve out several minutes for Peter Stormare to do his menacing Peter Stormare thing while operating on Tom Cruise’s eyeballs? Probably not, but I’m glad Spielberg did it. While I personally like it less than his other 9/11 movies, Minority Report stands as one of the better examples of Spielberg’s smuggling cultural commentary into a summer tentpole flick without sacrificing philosophical insight or entertainment value.
15. War Of The Worlds (2005)
Invented for Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, the PG-13 rating can be viewed, in one sense, as recognition that teenagers are able to tolerate slightly higher levels of graphic violence, vulgar language, and sexual innuendo than pre-teens. But that is the less essential takeaway. What really matters is the recognition by the film industry that when Steven Spielberg decides go blue it must not be allowed to affect the overall bottom line. Therefore there is the R rating, and then there is the “Steven Spielberg R rating,” a.k.a. the gentleman’s R, a.k.a. PG-13.
Nearly 20 years after Temple Of Doom, he once again pushed PG-13 to the brink with this bleak-as-hell H.G. Wells adaptation. I am confident that if anyone else had directed War Of The Worlds, it would have received an R. Not that another director would have been permitted to evoke the horrors of the 9/11 attacks so vividly and disturbingly in a summer sci-fi spectacular.
You get the feeling while watching War Of The Worlds that Spielberg is fully aware of this, and he’s ready to flex about it. You don’t think that I can show Tom Cruise killing Tim Robbins, in cold blood, with his bare hands? I’m Steven goddamn Spielberg, man! I will literally spray the American countryside with the blood of 300 million people! Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds!
14. The Sugarland Express (1974)
Upon this movie’s release, Pauline Kael called it “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies.” So why do Spielberg retrospectives tend to put it in the bottom third of his canon? It’s true that The Sugarland Express seems less quintessentially Spielbergian than the films that immediately follow. If you didn’t know who made it, you could mistake The Sugarland Express for a prime-era Altman, Malick or Ashby film. But that’s why I love it. If Jaws is the film responsible for ending the auteur-friendly golden age of ’70s Hollywood, then this film should be viewed as Spielberg working in that vein right before he changed cinema forever.
13. Lincoln (2012)
For what it’s worth, Steven Spielberg didn’t set out to become the Steven Spielberg anyway. “I wanted to be Antonioni, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, Marty Scorsese. I wanted to be everybody but myself,” he told Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. But by the time he made Jaws, he viewed himself as a filmmaker who did not have a style. As he observed in 1977, “Jaws is all content, experiment. Jaws is almost like I’m directing the audience with an electric cattle prod.”
I think I know what he means — Spielberg films are less outwardly stylized than the work of contemporaries like Scorsese and De Palma. But I don’t agree that he doesn’t have a style. He does have one, and it’s purely reflective. His movies tap into an element of the American character from the time they were released. In the ’70s, for instance, there was a strain of anti-authoritarianism — against the cops in The Sugarland Express, against local politicians in Jaws, against the federal bureaucracy in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and 1941.
Forty years later, during the Obama era, he flipped sides. Lincoln is his ultimate “trust in authority” movie, a valentine from one unifier of disparate American constituencies to another. The critical scene in Lincoln is when staunch abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) makes the pragmatic decision on the floor of the House Of Representatives to frame the abolishment of slavery purely as a legal matter and not as a declaration that black Americans are equal to white Americans. In the film, this is viewed as a necessary evil on the way to achieving the greater good of getting the 13th Amendment passed.
“Greater good” thinking was central to Barack Obama, and it is central to the artistic (and presumably political) perspective of Steven Spielberg. In 2012, this might have registered as “no style,” because it was practically regarded as common sense. In the polarized America of 2023, however, Lincoln feels like a time capsule.
12. Munich (2005)
You know what you don’t see a lot of in Spielberg movies? Sex scenes! He didn’t put one in a film until The Color Purple, which surely must be counted among the least sexy movies ever made. (Save for the lesbian love scene that he subsequently admitted he was too squeamish to depict in the same graphic detail as Alice Walker’s book.)
This movie includes one of the most absurd sex scenes from any movie in the last 20 years. That sex scene is one of the main things people remember about Munich, which is a shame, as it stands with Minority Report and War Of The Worlds as an example of Spielberg working his “showman” and “commentator” sides with equal skill. This is an expertly made and exciting political thriller in the mode of Day Of The Jackal, Z, and The Battle Of Algiers, and it’s also an appropriately ambiguous take on the utility of revenge as a response to terrorism. Seriously, it’s fucking mind-blowing — if any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.
11. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984)
Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Spielberg movie (other than Jaws), because of course it is. Generally speaking, however, the bad vibes of Indiana Jones Part 2 have hurt the film’s reputation. Human sacrifice, child slavery, casual racism — there’s a lot here that scans as potentially offensive. I love the story about how George Lucas decided to go with a darker Indiana Jones story for the Raiders sequel because he was going through a divorce at the time. Temple Of Doom is his Blood On The Tracks! Only in this film, a guy literally gets his heart ripped out.
I saw it for the first time when I was 6 and ran screaming out of the theater during the “guy literally gets his heart ripped out” scene. That PG-13 rating couldn’t save me. But whenever I revisit Temple Of Doom as an adult, I always end up cackling with delight. If you can set aside some — okay, a lot — of the broadly sketched ethnic caricatures, and you have a high tolerance for the sound of Kate Capshaw screaming her head off, this movie flat-out rocks. The opening 20 minutes nearly match the opening of Raiders for wit and non-stop action, and the climatic scene on the rope bridge is one of his greatest set pieces. If this movie came out today, it would be overpraised as one of the best blockbusters ever and take the Top Gun: Maverick spot among Best Picture nominees.
10. Schindler’s List (1993)
I understand the rules — you don’t make out during this movie, and you don’t place it at “only” no. 10 on your Spielberg list. Alas, here we are.
Here’s my rationale: This is a great film. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. But from here on out, I’m putting a premium on rewatchability. And, as great as Schindler’s List is, it is not a film I ever feel like watching, even though I own it. I own it out of respect, and I own it because I am a completist. And someday I will actually watch it again when I am in the mood to confront the base brutality of mankind and the moral responsibility we all have to mitigate that violence by any means necessary. Until then, however, I am more likely to watch the next nine films.
9. Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Hanks! DiCaprio! The ‘6os! Lots and lots of awesome lying and conning! This delectable cupcake of a film appeared a bit slight in the early aughts when Spielberg was making the darkest and most violent movies of his career. But it has endured as one of the most reliably entertaining basic-cable films of the 21st century. The sad thing is that a movie like Catch Me If You Can — which is funny and sad and largely devoid of special effects and basically just focuses on the relationship between two troubled men — would probably originate on television today.
8. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989)
Along with rewatchability playing a main role in my top Spielberg selections, I must cop that nostalgia, inevitably, also comes into play. Which would be a liability if we were talking about any other filmmaker. But among Spielberg’s many gifts is the ability to make films that already feel like memories the first time you see them. It’s that weird telepathy he has to create images that exist deep inside our collective imaginations that we didn’t know were there.
This is one of the Spielberg films that’s so embedded in my memory that I probably don’t need to actually rewatch it. It’s the first Indiana Jones movie that I saw in a theater when I was old enough to enjoy it. In the immediate aftermath, it was my favorite of the series, though I eventually downgraded it to second once I grew up a little and learned that the “correct” opinion is that Raiders is the best. And it is the best, though Last Crusade might be closer to my heart.
The make-or-break element in how you respond to this movie is Sean Connery — he’s either a welcome addition or an unnecessary distraction. I, of course, vote for the former, and I suspect that Spielberg felt the same, given that this was his first film where he resolved his daddy issues with a positive outcome. If I may make another Springsteen allusion: Last Crusade is his “Independence Day.”
7. Jurassic Park (1993)
All of my very favorite Spielberg movies are linked with powerful experiences in movie theaters. No wonder the man has been so critical of streaming platforms — his work demands the largest possible canvas, particularly the films that set out to awe the audience.
I saw this on opening night when I was 16. I think it was also the last day of school, though that could be an instance of my memory slightly altering reality for the sake of mythology. Either way, the first sight of CGI dinosaurs was predictably incredible, but more than that it was Sam Neill and Laura Dern doing their “awe-inspired in a Spielberg movie” faces that made the most profound impression.
The “awe-inspired in a Spielberg movie” face only works because he delivers imagery that warrants the face. Am I referring to peak-oily Jeff Goldbum lounging with his shirt open? I can neither confirm nor deny.
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Saw this twice in a theater the summer before I turned 21. Based on those two screenings, I’m putting it here. On the big screen, it ranks with the most emotionally overpowering cinematic experiences I have ever had. At home, it hasn’t played as well for all the reasons you have heard before, i.e. the plot is kind of stock, the characters are kind of stock, and the rest of the movie drags a bit compared with the Normandy invasion sequence. But when I’m on my deathbed, and I think about great cinema — a topic I expect my dying thoughts to dwell on, for real — I won’t remember those home viewings. What I will remember is crying my eyes out in 1998 when Tom Hanks says, “Earn this.”
5. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
The most Kubrickian thing about Spielberg’s collaboration with Stanley Kubrick’s ghost is how misunderstood it was upon release. I remember liking it but not loving it, and subscribing to the conventional wisdom that the coda set 2,000 years in the future was a mistake committed by Sentimental Steven. That take is dead wrong, and not only because the coda was actually Stanley’s idea. If 2001: A Space Odyssey is about man finally meeting God, then A.I. is about how man — I apologize for quoting James Hetfield here — is the God that failed. All we leave behind are the robot boys we discarded rather than loved. The coda isn’t sentimental, it’s tragic.
I’m sorry, I’m blubbering — this movie really levels me. Each time I rewatch it, A.I. hits that much harder. I suspect that becoming a parent made me see A.I. with different eyes. As it is, I am not allowed to operate heavy machinery within 24 hours of watching the scene where Haley Joel Osment is abandoned in the woods.
4. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
Speaking of man finally meeting God, we have the middle film of Spielberg’s Dreyfuss trilogy! I understand that the Dreyfuss archetype hasn’t aged well. As we have established, the man has strong dickhead energy in Spielberg movies. In Close Encounters, he plays with his mashed potatoes, tears the dirt out of his yard, disrespects the eternally beautiful Teri Garr, fails to appreciate the eternally beautiful Melinda Dillion, acts with indifference toward the great Francois Truffaut, and abandons his family and the rest of humankind to travel space with aliens. Nevertheless, Dreyfuss is my favorite of all of Spielberg’s leading men. I can’t get enough of his smug, sunburned face! Dreyfuss is a manifestation of our director’s benevolence — in his universe, even a charmingly selfish weasel is worthy of redemption.
3. Jaws (1975)
Spielberg famously had a miserable time making this movie. Anytime Jaws comes up in interviews, he comes up with yet another anecdote about how impossible the shoot was. My favorite story is about how he killed time between setting up shots on the water at Martha’s Vineyard by listening to ABBA’s “Waterloo,” which was in regular rotation at the local Top 40 station. He thought the song portended personal disaster, but in reality he was just a consummate pop craftsman vibing on the work of other consummate pop craftsmen and craftswomen.
Jaws really is his version of an ABBA hit — a perfectly made piece of commercial art designed to be enjoyed effortlessly by the masses, over and over again, in the summertime for all eternity. Forgive me for overusing the word “perfect,” but this is everything you could possibly want from a big summer movie. It’s his ultimate “killing machine” film, which means it’s the ultimate killing machine film made by anybody. Even the parts that don’t seem to move the story forward — like the scene on the boat where the guys compare scars — are essential.
2. Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
As you have probably realized by now, my top Spielberg movies come from his 1975-82 epoch, when he was busy inventing the modern blockbuster. With Raiders, he mastered the form. You can take away the dialogue, switch the visuals from color to black and white, and put music from The Social Network over it (as Steven Soderbergh did), and the movie still plays like gangbusters. I saw this movie last week with my 10-year-old son and he loved it. I thought he might be scared by the melting faces at the end but he thought it was awesome. I hope to watch it with his kids someday.
A fun fact about this movie is that no studio wanted to make it at first. And that was because Steven Spielberg had a bad reputation for going over budget and over schedule. That wasn’t a problem when Jaws and Close Encounters became smash hits, but it was a liability with 1941. So he had something to prove with this movie. And he proved it.
1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
I don’t know that I can write effectively about this movie. It doesn’t speak to me on an analytical level. I know people who roll their eyes at it, consider it tear-jerky fluff, and dismiss it as less ambitious or profound than movies that cover similar territory like Close Encounters and A.I. Maybe they’re right. All I know is that no other movie — not just Spielberg movie, but any movie — is as primal for me.
I hate myself for using this phrase but: It taps directly into my “inner child” who is still lonely and confused about not having a father in my life. E.T. captures that “lonely kid” feeling and gives it to the viewer in pure, uncut form. And if you have a certain metabolism, this movie will rewire your brain, eradicate your defenses, and turn you into an open wound for two hours.
I don’t mean that it panders to my childhood memories. I mean this movie logs into my heart like a computer virus, locates the emotional damage with extreme efficiency, and engages with it, in a way that no person in my life ever has. This movie is Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting saying, over and over, “It’s not your fault.”
Wait, am I typing this or just thinking it? Forget everything I just said.
There are six parts of this movie that make me cry — not cry, weep — uncontrollably: 1) The first time E.T. and Elliott fly; 2) When E.T. dies; 3) When E.T. comes back to life; 4) When E.T. makes the kids on the bikes fly a second time; 5) “I’ll be right here.” I don’t even need to watch the whole movie to weep during these scenes. Cue any one of them up on YouTube and I’m dead meat. Play the incredible John Williams score and I’m a puddle. I feel like I’m about to cry just thinking about it.
At its best, popular entertainment makes lonely people feel less alone, because ultimately — no matter who you are — you probably didn’t get hugged enough at a critical junction in your past. That’s life, and you get over it and you move on. But hurt is something that all humans share, and perhaps the only way to process that in a healthy way is to get together in a theater with a movie made by a man who was born to evoke emotion on a mass scale with the skilled application of light and sound, and cry it the hell out.
That’s Steven Spielberg. Thank you, sir, for making me feel terrible in order to eventually make me feel much better, so many times, whenever I need it.
It’s been five years since we’ve seen Alden Ehrenreich in a movie. The last one was, believe it or not, Solo: A Star Wars Story. A production that was notoriously fraught, seeing original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller leave the project, only to be replaced by Ron Howard. (By the way, rewatching Solo: A Star Wars Story, it’s a lot of fun.)
So, I’ve always wondered how Ehrenreich felt about this. Think about it, it’s like any job really (well, much much more public), but when he signed on he thought he knows who his bosses would be. Then that wasn’t the case. When taking a job it’s normal to say yes to something because you like your boss. At this point, after all that, if they made more Solo stories, would Ehrenreich even be interested? Also, it’s pretty interesting Lord and Miller are producers on Cocaine Bear.
Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear is gory and funny and, frankly, a blast. When drug smugglers ditch cocaine over Tennessee, the head of the smuggling ring (Ray Liotta) sends his sad sack son (Ehrenreich) and his pal (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to go find it. But, there’s one problem — a bear is eating the cocaine and the Bear really likes the cocaine.
Ahead, Ehrenreich tells us all about the cocaine bear. Doesn’t tell us much at all about his upcoming role in the MCU’s Ironheart, and tells us if he’d be down for more Han Solo adventures or not.
Alden Ehrenreich: Nice to see you. How are you?
Oh, my team just won the Super Bowl, so I’m in a really good mood.
Oh, nice! Congratulations.
Speaking of Missouri, a good portion of this movie was set in St. Louis circa 1985. You are at a dive bar and I’m thinking, if this is really a St. Louis dive bar in 1985, there would be Falstaff beer signs. I remember this from when I was a kid. A new defunct beer. And we get a wide shot and there it is. Even the small details in this movie are great.
Yeah, yeah! Well, they had to turn an Irish pub into a bar in St. Louis, and they were good. They were good.
So I’m curious, when was the first time you heard the words “cocaine bear”?
I’ve now heard them a lot. The first time was my agent calling me to tell me that this movie already was happening. Already in that first conversation you could feel the absurdity of it and that was part of the conversation. That was part of what was attractive about it, was just how zany and wacky and audacious the whole premise is.
Oh, I just assumed, because we all know that story with Solo, but you worked with Chris Miller and Phil Lord before. I just kind assumed they called you.
No, I knew they were a part of it and then I talked to Liz Banks first. And then Phil and Chris and I got together, just kind of generally, and had dinner and they came to my theater space and we talked about the movie then a little bit. I wasn’t in the movie just yet. But yeah, no, so I talked to Liz first.
I’m curious how it goes with Chris and Phil at the time. They basically hired you on Solo and I assume you wanted to be a part of it because of them. Then they wind up not directing it. I’m curious if their attitude was, “hey let’s finally do this.” Because last time you didn’t.
I mean, I’ve always gotten along so great with them and that was one of the real pleasures of that experience. And so it was really special to be able to go and do that again. We really have a great bond and got pretty close. And I shot my first scene – that bar scene was the first scene in the movie I shot. And I knew they were coming to Ireland, but I didn’t really know when. I walked out, we filmed that scene. It’s kind of a big introductory scene and it’s an emotional scene, whatever. I walked outside, it was raining, and it was this little town pub in the corner in this beautiful little Irish town. And they were standing there in the midst of this big set. And it was such a great moment to be back on set with them in this fun, zany kind of way. It really felt like a homecoming in a way.
And obviously, this is Elizabeth Banks’s movie, but like you said, with that history, now you get to actually do some work together with those guys.
It added a special dimension to it and they were really clear with me about that, which was very nice of them. They were like, it was her idea for you to play this character. That came from her, which was very flattering and made it more of a welcoming thing.
I saw it a couple of weeks ago now. I wasn’t expecting it to be as gory as it is, but it’s like fun gory; horror movie gory. Where you’re kind of cheering the whole time. It’s really a fun time.
Good. I’m so glad to hear that. I think that’s one of the great gifts of this movie is we’ve all had this crazy last few years and we’re all in different, to different extents, out back in the world again. And this feels such a great movie to go gather at a movie theater and have this rip-roaring time at. It’s a great movie for that.
No, he loved it. I’m very grateful for the opportunity that I got to work with him, and especially now. Liz had such a great set and he came and he really seemed to be having a ball being a part of this. I mean, he really was having, I think, a really good time. And so it was really nice to be able to work with him and see him have so much fun with it.
Why is this your year? You’ve been doing Brave New World, but this is your first movie since Solo. But you had Fair Play at Sundance and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer coming us. And you’re joining the MCU with Ironheart.
Yeah, yeah. I think some of that is just interesting timing. Cocaine Bear was the first thing I filmed post kind of vaccine era. And I had such a good time and it was the first time I’d done a job that was kind of a few months long. And I’ve told her this, it really got me back in the love of going off and feeling like I could just go do a movie here and do a movie there. And so some of it is just timing where I worked for two years straight basically. And just back-to-back stuff I’ve never done before and now it’s all kind of coming out in a row, which is really gratifying.
And then some of it also was on the heels of this experience. I was like, yeah, I guess it had been five or six years since I had done something that wasn’t a year-long, in a way. So it was like, oh right, I can go do this movie for two months and not miss my closest friend’s wedding. Or I can be in things a little more often because I remember now that this is what normal-size movies feel like. And so it just got me excited and I had a good, really good time.
So right on the heels of this, I was in Ireland and we got the thing for Fair Play and had the conversation with Chloe Domont. And at first, I was like, well usually I like to take time off between stuff and whatever. But I was like, No, I really like this story. So kind of went right into that and then right into Oppenheimer. And then the second I finished Oppenheimer, I directed a 15-minute movie that I wrote. And then while I was in prep for that, I gained 20 pounds for it. And then while I was in prep, I got Ironheart, so I had to lose 20 pounds in two weeks. And then I went in and did Ironheart and then I’m back and now it’s time to start releasing these. So it’s very, very, very grateful to the fact that we’re on the other side of this pandemic. We’re back at work and it’s great to be acting again and making things.
My first physical during the pandemic my doctor was like, “lose the pandemic weight you gained.” Which I did, but yeah, no bread.
No, bread is a big thing.
I always knew that, but I didn’t realize really how bad bread is for this kind of stuff.
Yeah, it’s a big part of it for sure. For sure.
Who are you playing in Ironheart?
I can’t say.
Is it a secret?
It’s a secret, yeah.
Okay. Are you excited?
It’s a great character and there’s a fun element to it that I can’t talk about. It was a really, really fun role.
Is it someone we know?
I can’t quite say that, but kind of.
I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I’m just happy you’re going to be in this.
I am, too. Yeah, the show is really cool. It’s really an interesting corner of the MCU. It’s funny, it’s very touching, and emotional in a lot of ways. And it’s basically about this black girl growing up in Chicago and her experience and it’s really, really interesting.
So here’s what I’m wondering. You seem very happy right now and you’re in all this stuff and as you said you don’t have to spend a year on something. So there’s always chatter about more Han Solo adventures. But I’m always wondering, I know the movie wasn’t the easiest thing, would you even want to do that? Or are you like, “You know, I’m good.”
No, I actually don’t feel that way. If it was the right iteration and the right thing, I would love it. Because, for me, in the first movie you watch him become Han. I got to be Han Solo for the last 15 minutes of the movie, maybe. And so being Han Solo is the fun part. And I have no fucking idea if there is ever a world where any of that happens, and if it happens, great, if it doesn’t, whatever. But it was really great to … that’s what’s appealing to me about it because in a way they built this sort of origin story for when he becomes who he is, but then that guy is the guy that’s really fun and it’s a ball to play that character specifically.
I can almost pinpoint for me when that kicks in. When Han’s trying to bluff a whole army is coming. Then the Millennium Falcon just flies away, leaving him.
[Laughs] Exactly. Exactly! So the first movie, you’re watching him turn into that. So getting to be, I think the original vibe of all that stuff was almost more like an Indiana Jones idea where you would get to watch this guy be that guy over the course of a few movies. Anyway, so that’s appealing about it to me is that character and getting to do that. But who knows?
Also, I think people are getting tired sick of lore and what it all means. I think the lack of that hurt it at first because it doesn’t tie into a lot of the other stuff. And I think it’s gained stature a lot since it came out. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.
I definitely feel that. I’ve always felt like there was this love for it and I definitely feel that now. And yeah, I mean it really all comes down to that character.
Are you still shocked at how the Hail Caesar line has stuck around?
[Laughs] Yeah, it’s so fun. I grew up as such a film lover and a lover of certain lines that stuck around from certain movies. And I just look at my favorite experiences in the world are when I get to work for great filmmakers. And so that experience was so great. My character was so wonderful, and the Cohens are geniuses, so it was great. Yeah, that makes me very happy.
And heaven forbid this happens, but a hundred years from now, when you pass on, that’ll be the headline of the obituary. That line will be the headline.
[Laughs] “Would that it’were so simple.” Yeah, exactly. Right.
The band was supposed to perform at Bluesfest in Australia. However, they shared a statement to social media that they’ll be withdrawing from the lineup due to their inclusion of the band Sticky Fingers, who has been accused of racial abuse, as well as kicked out of a pub for trying to fight a transgender woman.
About their choice, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard said they are “willing to make sacrifices to stand up for your values.” Read the group’s full statement below.
“As a band and as human beings, we stand against misogyny, racism, transphobia, and violence. Surprised and saddened to see Bluesfest commit to presenting content that is in complete opposition to these values.
Given this decision by the festival, we have decided to cancel our appearance at Bluesfest. We are deeply disappointed to be in this position, but sometimes you need to be willing to make sacrifices to stand up for your values. This is, unfortunately, one of these moments.”
You’re probably familiar with the literary classic “Moby-Dick.”
But in case you’re not, here’s the gist: Moby Dick is the name of a huge albino sperm whale.
(Get your mind outta the gutter.)
There’s this dude named Captain Ahab who really really hates the whale, and he goes absolutely bonkers in his quest to hunt and kill it, and then everything is awful and we all die unsatisfied with our shared sad existence and — oops, spoilers!
OK, technically, the narrator Ishmael survives. So it’s actually a happy ending (kind of)!
Basically, it’s a famous book about revenge and obsession that was published back in 1851, and it’s really, really long.
It’s chock-full of beautiful passages and dense symbolism and deep thematic resonance and all those good things that earned it a top spot in the musty canon of important literature.
There’s also a lot of mundane descriptions about the whaling trade as well (like, a lot). That’s because it came out back when commercial whaling was still a thing we did.
In fact, humans used to hunt more than 50,000 whales each year to use for oil, meat, baleen, and oil. (Yes, I wrote oil twice.) Then, in 1946, the International Whaling Commission stepped in and said “Hey, wait a minute, guys. There’s only a few handful of these majestic creatures left in the entire world, so maybe we should try to not kill them anymore?”
And even then, commercial whaling was still legal in some parts of the world until as recently as 1986.
And yet by some miracle, there are whales who were born before “Moby-Dick” was published that are still alive today.
What are the odds of that? Honestly it’s hard to calculate since we can’t exactly swim up to a bowhead and say, “Hey, how old are you?” and expect a response. (Also that’s a rude question — jeez.)
Thanks to some thoughtful collaboration between researchers and traditional Inupiat whalers (who are still allowed to hunt for survival), scientists have used amino acids in the eyes of whales and harpoon fragments lodged in their carcasses to determine the age of these enormous animals — and they found at least three bowhead whales who were living prior to 1850.
Granted those are bowheads, not sperm whales like the fictional Moby Dick, (and none of them are albino, I think), but still. Pretty amazing, huh?
This is a particularly remarkable feat considering that the entire species was dwindling near extinction.
Unfortunately, just as things are looking up, these wonderful whales are in trouble once again.
We might not need to worry our real-life Captain Ahabs anymore, but our big aquatic buddies are still being threatened by industrialization — namely, from oil drilling in the Arctic and the Great Australian Bight.
This influx of industrialization also affects their migratory patterns — threatening not only the humans who depend on them, but also the entire marine ecosystem.
And I mean, c’mon — who would want to hurt this adorable face?
Whales might be large and long-living. But they still need our help to survive.
If you want another whale to make it to his two-hundred-and-eleventy-first birthday (which you should because I hear they throw great parties), then sign this petition to protect the waters from Big Oil and other industrial threats.
Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey had only been with the Food and Drug Administration for about a month when she was tasked with reviewing a drug named thalidomide for distribution in America.
Marketed as a sedative for pregnant women, thalidomide was already available in Canada, Germany, and several African countries.
It could have been a very simple approval. But for Kelsey, something didn’t sit right. There were no tests showing thalidomide was safe for human use, particularly during pregnancy.
When Chemie Grünenthal released thalidomide in West Germany years earlier, they called it a “wonder drug” for pregnant women. They promised it would treat anxiety, insomnia, tension, and morning sickness and help pregnant women sleep.
What they didn’t advertise were its side effects.
Because it crosses the placental barrier between fetus and mother, thalidomide causes devastating — often fatal — physical defects. During the five years it was on the market, an estimated 10,000 babies globally were born with thalidomide-caused defects. Only about 60% lived past their first birthday.
In 1961, the health effects of thalidomide weren’t well-known. Only a few studies in the U.K. and Germany were starting to connect the dots between babies born with physical defects and the medication their mothers had taken while pregnant.
At the outset, that wasn’t what concerned Kelsey. She’d looked at the testimonials in the submission and found them “too glowing for the support in the way of clinical back up.” She pressed the American manufacturer, Cincinnati’s William S. Merrell Company, to share research on how their drug affected human patients. They refused. Instead, they complained to her superiors for holding up the approval. Still, she refused to back down.
A sample pack of thalidomide sent to doctors in the U.K. While more than 10,000 babies worldwide were born with thalidomide-related birth defects, FDA historian John Swann credits Dr. Kelsey with limiting the number of American babies affected to just 17.
Over the next year, the manufacturer would resubmit its application to sell thalidomide six times. Each time, Kelsey asked for more research. Each time, they refused.
By 1961, thousands of mothers were giving birth to babies with shocking and heartbreaking birth defects. Taking thalidomide early in their pregnancy was the one thing connecting them. The drug was quickly pulled from shelves, vanishing mostly by 1962.
Through dogged persistence, Kelsey and her team had prevented a national tragedy.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy honored Kelsey with the Federal Civilian Service Medal. He thanked her for her exceptional judgment and for preventing a major tragedy of birth deformities in the United States:
“I know that we are all most indebted to Dr. Kelsey. The relationship and the hopes that all of us have for our children, I think, indicate to Dr. Kelsey, I am sure, how important her work is and those who labor with her to protect our families. So, Doctor, I know you know how much the country appreciates what you have done.”
But, she wasn’t done yet. Later that year, the FDA approved new, tougher regulations for companies seeking drug approval, inspired in large part by Kelsey’s work on thalidomide.
Reached via email, FDA historian John Swann said this about Kelsey’s legacy: “[Her] actions also made abundantly clear to the nation the important public health role that drug regulation and FDA itself play in public health. The revelation of the global experience with that drug and America’s close call indeed provided impetus to secure passage of a comprehensive drug regulation bill that had been more or less floundering during the time FDA was considering the application.”
Kelsey continued to work for the FDA until 2005. She died in 2015, aged 101, just days after receiving the Order of Canada for her work on thalidomide.
Bureaucratic approval work is rarely thrilling and not often celebrated. That’s a shame because it’s so critical.
People like Kelsey, who place public health and safety above all else — including their career — deserve every ounce of our collective respect and admiration.
Lady Gaga is the latest artist to have an old song revived, thanks to TikTok. Her 2011 hit “Bloody Mary” is at the center of online dance trends after it was in the viral show Wednesday. It’s likely that this resurgence played a role in this new milestone she just achieved.
Pop Crave shared today that all of Gaga’s solo studio albums have reached one billion streams on Spotify. This includes The Fame, Born This Way, Artpop, Joanne, and Chromatica.
Meanwhile, fans are hoping that Artpop, which is a decade old as of this year, is getting a part two soon. One of the producers of that record, DJ White Shadow, spoke about it in an interview.
“She has feelings (like any other normal person), and this ‘era’ was a hard time for her too,” he said. “I am sure she will be okay with revisiting it one day and building on it when the time is right. I will continue to push for those songs you want so badly that LG and I did, and I hope you will get to hear them. Don’t let them die. Continue to get your message to the people in charge. You have the power, don’t give up.”
Kali Uchis is in full album rollout mode. As the singer prepares for the release of her upcoming album, Red Moon In Venus, next month Kali Uchis isn’t holding anything back. Having already released the lead single from the project “I Wish You Roses” a month ago, Kali took to Instagram to share that a second single will be dropping this Friday, February 24.
With the caption, “Moonlight this Friday, from my third album,” the musician shared a lipstick-stained lyric card along with a images of herself. On the lyric card are three stanzas. The first stanza reads, “Forget the small talk / The surface level ain’t much that I cafe for / Putting on my lipgloss / I saw you stare from my peripheral / Yea baby it’s been a helluva day / But I know a place we can escape / Find out how it feels to let go of everything / Be free / To truly know peace.”
True to the, “Love is the message,” nexus of the album Kali expressed, based on the lyrics shared the upcoming song titled “Moonlight,” will fix perfectly amongst the rest of the album’s tracklist.
Fans will surely eat the track up when Kali Uchis and RAYE hits the road for theRed Moon In Venus Tour beginning in April.
Red Moon In Venus is out 3/3 via Geffen. Pre-save it here.
Think about the illustrations you’ve seen of men and women of the Bronze Age who lived thousands of years ago.
Perhaps there’s one you recall from your elementary school text book — in which men are probably depicted hurling bronze spears and strangling lions with their bare hands, while the women are most likely pictured leading children around, sifting through grapes or weaving tiny reeds into baskets (presumably to hold the fruits of their husbands’ labor).
It’s an idealized image for some. Men and women, dividing labor according to their relative physical strength. Women did important work, but entirely in the domestic sphere, in part because they were less equipped to handle difficult manual labor. Each gender in their natural place. A comforting image of the way the world is “supposed to be.”
And according to new research, it’s an image that’s totally wrong in a major way.
According to a groundbreaking new study, Bronze Age women were jacked.
Armed with a small CT scanner and a group of student guinea pigs, University of Cambridge researchers discovered that the arm bones of Central European women of the era were roughly 30% stronger than those of modern women — and 11% to 16% stronger than those of modern women on the the world champion Cambridge women’s crew team, who spend multiple hours a day training to rowing a 60-foot boat as fast as humanly possible.
“This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women,” explained Alison Macintosh, research fellow at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, in a news release.
The paper was published in the open-access journal Science Advances.
Agriculture, it turns out, is hard work. Work that Bronze Age women handled on the reg.
Particularly grinding grain into flour, which requires the use of ludicrously heavy stones.
Based on evidence from societies that still produce bread products this way, the researchers determined the prehistoric women likely spent up to five hours a day pulverizing the edible bits so their villages could actually eat food while the men were derping around trophy hunting hyenas.
“The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women’s arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing,” Macintosh said.
In addition to grinding grain, researchers speculate ancient ladies got up to a range of other muscle mass-building activities…
…including hauling food for livestock, slaughtering and butchering animals for food, scraping the skin off of dead cows and deadlifting it onto hooks to turn it into leather, and planting and harvesting crops entirely by hand.
And, while punching bears and ceremonially tossing boulders at the sun weren’t on the researchers’ specific list, it’s at least possible the women were doing that too.
“We believe it may be the wide variety of women’s work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behavior from their bones,” Macintosh said.
Study senior author Jay Stock said the results suggest “the rigorous manual labour of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies.”
“The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today,” he added.
If nothing else, the findings should complicate the way we think of “women’s work” going back centuries. Since the dawn of time, mankind has had boulders to grind. Animals to wrangle. Big, heavy things to lift, and arm muscles to build. And some woman had do it.
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