Special Prize: Steven Spielberg
"War of the Worlds" (2005)
"Schindler's List" (1993)
"Saving Private Ryan" (1998)
"Minority Report" (2002)
"AI" (2001)
I'm not one of those Spielberg bashers. In fact, I have good things to say about every single one of the above movies -- right up until their endings. Seems that in recent years, Spielberg has developed a bad case of anticlimactitis, an alarmingly common affliction among pop-culture artists that causes them to either (a) overstate the themes of the film in case anyone in the audience had missed them ("Minority Report"); (b) chicken out and deliver an unearned feel-good ending ("War of the Worlds"); (c) allow the film to drag on for an additional 45 minutes beyond its organic, satisfying ending and into a protracted, agonized, unconvincing epilogue that turns everything that came before into a pseudo-Freudian nightmare ("AI"); and worst of all (d) take all the artfulness out of a powerful piece of fiction and transform it into a weirdly ritualized, lily-gilding present day with real people doing real things like lighting candles and saluting gravestones, just to underline the film's nobility ("Schindler's List," "Saving Private Ryan"). It's a frustrating trend, one that makes it harder to defend one of cinema's most maligned directors. It also makes you long for the sight of Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider paddling for shore on the splinters of a blown-up fishing boat, great white shark guts bobbing in their wake. Now that's an ending.
Ever since I was a kid I had a soft spot for Alvin and the Chipmunks, go figure 
It'll probably be horrible, but a nice mindless movie after finals will be just what I need.
