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Spielberg on Privacy, Minority Report
Staring at Nothing writes "In this ABC News story famed Hollywood director Steven Spielberg voices some concerns over the current state of privacy and paranoia in a post-9/11 world. Some of Spielberg's recent movies, like AI and Minority Report have brought us haunting views of the future, but the present may be just as scary. He mentions software being developed to monitor "abnormal behavior" and concerns about originality being misconstrued as dangerous behavior." The story has some minor plot spoilers about Minority Report.
and don't listen to anyone who states their opinion as though it's some kind of fact. I also got back from seeing this movie about an hour ago, and have already decided I consider it the best of the year so far. and I have a feeling a won't be able to forget it overnight.
I'm not going to post a full review here, but suffice to say my only criticisms are that it felt a bit long, and that some of the ideas could have been better developed (there's a LOT of ideas in this movie). but concepts aside, it absolutely grabbed me on a viscreral and emotional level. I knew it had worked for me when I walked out of the theater and took several minutes to fully reacclimate to the normal world--it was almost like culture shock. to each their own opinion, I say.
sean
Maybe that's what he's doing, but the message that you can't trust a pre-emptive police state is written pretty obviously throughout the movie, and it went into production before 9/11. So he's capitalizing on a wider social context than just the current hysteria/paranoia. And why shouldn't he? Don't artists get to criticize society? And does doing a kiddie movie like E.T. automatically and forever prevent him from having anything to say about the world?
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Feel 'free' to add to these. (pardon my pun)
"Now we must choose between safety and freedom, we must not flinch if freedom means anything." - Dennis Burke, USA Today
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." - Somerset Maugham
"My greatest fear is that too many members of the public will embrace the government's call to give up some freedom in return for greater safety, only to find that they have lost freedom without gaining safety." - Nadine Strossen, President ACLU
"Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain." - John F. Kennedy
"Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Dolores Ibarruri
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression." - Thomas Paine
"I know not what course others may take but as for me: give me liberty or give me death." - Patrick Henry
"When the rights of just one individual are denied, the rights of all are in jeopardy!" - Jo Ann Roach
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
OpenSecrets link to Spielberg's soft money campaign contributors
He's just another phony liberal in the great Hollywood phony liberal tradition. When he finds another set of buzzwords and social concerns that'll pull in his target demographic, he'll use them, i.e. don't be surprised if he sounds like Rush Limbaugh someday.
Right now, he's using the right buzzwords for people who pretend to themselves that they still have social concerns while providing the dollars that bought the politicians that enacted obscenities like DMCA passed and worse legislation to follow.
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