I like his opening comments about the blockbuster. We do seem to be in a period where the quality of the film is less important than the mass appeal. But even with smaller budgets and modest ad campaigns, you can't really argue that this is a new phenomenon. There have been plenty of crappy movies made in the past. In fact, I get the vague feeling that quality standards move up and down in cycles of some sort.
We thought George Lucas was an infallible genius (because of his own marketing) and now, with the prequels, he's shown himself to be as flawed as most movie makers. He is just as capable of getting caught up in crap and bad ideas as the rest of Hollywood. Now that I'm trying to move beyond the general feeling that I was lied to, I can appreciate what he did as an artist in his lifetime. While I still can't enjoy the prequels enough to watch them multiple times, the originals are easily that good. Also, it's fun to use the prequels as a good case study of what not to do in art (since I'm passionate about the original trilogy's universe).
Hmm. . . otherwise, he seems to be more than a bit harsh with E.T. That film is a classic in my mind. Not that I've ever really enjoyed it all that much myself, but I understand why other people enjoy it and I can't really think of any huge flaws in it. To me it's a movie that helps remind me that the universe isn't always super serious all of the time and that sometimes it's okay for us to get lost in hokey emotions. Basically I like any story which can decently merge lighthearted realism with serious realism and E.T. is fun in that way.
To briefly touch on Spider-Man as well, I'd just like to say that I firmly believe the worst thing about the recent movies were the scenes with Spidey himself. Every scene where he jumps around (and we get more cg eye candy) bores the hell out of me. Those scenes feel disconnected and separate from the rest of the films. It is because of this that I actually think Spider-Man 2 is the best film of the bunch: if I'm going to be bored to death by cg bullshit, I might as well try to enjoy the non-super-heroic parts of the film and Spider-Man 2 is pretty darn good there. The first is almost as good (in my mind) since the Spidey parts are watchable (by comparison) and the pedestrian scenes are also okay. (Spider-Man 3 is easily the worst because it threw out any plausibility or likability for the characters in their normal lives and the hero scenes were also fairly unlikable.)
Hmm, this also makes me think about special effects. I think the neatest part about special effects in older movies were the real thought and work that went into fabricating them. Of course special effects are designed to fool our senses and heighten the drama of a story, but in and of themselves, when they were made out of something real they were much more impressive. I know cg is expensive, but it seems to totally lack that endearing quality where you wonder "how did they do that?" There aren't any physical constraints anymore. They just have a guy sit in front of a screen and tell a computer what to render for him. I can't be wowed by that and can't understand someone who would.