REVIEW: SPIELBERG: A LIFE IN FILM

'Few great film directors are as picked on as Steven Spielberg.For a large segment of the cineaste population, a liking for Spielberg over say, Scorsese, is like saying you prefer McCartney to Lennon, David Hockney to Damien Hirst, pop to rock, sun shine to storm clouds  —  sign of an aesthetic sweet tooth, an addiction to flimsy childlike fantasy over grit and darkness and ambiguity and fibre and all the other things we are taught are good for us in film crit class. I once suggested to a scowling Sight & Sound reader that while a director like Kubrick might be the epitome of the aesthetic will-to-power — bending the medium to do the master’s bidding  — Spielberg’s work was the place you looked to see the medium of cinema left to its own devices — what it gets up to in its free time.  The look of disgust on his face was immediate. Conversation over. I might as well have told him I still sucked my thumb. Partly the is down to his outsized success: he's an unignorable target. That success discomfits our notion of the artist, an ill-notion when applied the movies at the best of times, but particularly someone like Spielberg, athletically slam-dunking one box office record after another in the first half of his career, before omnivorously morphing  in the second half, greedily bent on acquiring the credibility that is naturally accorded someone like Scorsese, the auteur agonistes, tearing his films from his breast like chunks of flesh while wandering in the Hollywood wilderness. Never mind that Scorsese’s reputation for speaking to the Human Condition rests on his strip mining of a narrow strip of gangland and the male psyche. Spielberg is a people-pleaser and nothing attracts bullies more.' — from my review of Molly Haskell's Steven Spielberg: a Life in Film