I never expect much out of Spielberg--or rather I haven't in a good long time--and a remake of War of the Worlds held no interest for me in anyone's hands, but look at the opening of Stephanie Zacharek's review in Salon:

Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is the ugliest little movie of the summer. Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.

Yow.

And a bit later:

"War of the Worlds" is a delusional work of craftsmanship -- it's all visuals with no vision.

So far, it's doing great at Rottentomatoes, though. Only Ebert--and soon Stephanie--with clunkers in the cream of the crop.

Update:

One of my favorites, David Edelstein of Slate, likes it a lot. But then I get the sense from his review that he generally likes Spielberg crap. I just find him really hard to stomach.

Why on earth do I keep watching these Real World/Road Rules challenges?

They're always idiotic. And even the characters I liked on the Real World come off looking bad. Immature even compared to their shows of origin.

Yet I get sucked in, can't let go. I will never allege, however, that these shows are any good. Just that I have trouble resisting.

And they sometimes make me feel dirty too, though in a far more trivial way than the above post. That book has had me on edge all ten days I was reading it.

One paralell, though. CT. Ugh. Not that he's in any way evil like the murderer in True Story, just that he totally had me fooled. He was such a jerk to his housemates on his Real World, but he always kept insisting that he was trying really hard and misunderstood, and I wanted to believe him so badly I did.

Some people can be extremely convincing. Helps when they've got an editor working their cause, of course.

And those Real World editors. They are notoriously dishonest, but the weird thing is how they cop to it, just slightly after the fact. They just finished their RW/RR Challenge series, and end with a reunion/tell-all show, where most of the telling is about how openly, aggressively they distorted the truth? Seriously. It's like a hatchet job on themselves. Or a laugh job on what chumps we are, how easily and effectively they conned us.

Good God. Professional con artists. Loathsome creatures.

And I was just starting to feel clean again.

I just finished True Story: Murder, Memoir and Mea Culpa.

It gives me the shivers.

And I just realized something as I typed in the title. Maybe I don't hate it anymore. Because the first two words are aggressively ironic, though I'm not sure they were intended that way. (The author opens by imploring us of the opposite.)

So much of it was maddeningly boring, but I have to admit it had a powerful payoff. The climax was unexpected (I won't spoil with any specifics), and more revolting than I could have imagined.

Throughout, though, I had a lot of intense distrust of and occasionally disgust for the author--interspersed with intense empathy. But the empathy only made me quiver, because this is the story of a master liar and manipulator, told by an admitted liar and manipulator, and the juxtaposition just made me horribly wary of people like him. What on earth was he thinking?

Maybe I'll feel better about him some day. He's probably a really nice guy, and I really want to believe him and like him--and totally expected to--but after watching how effortlessly and adroitly this murderer could fool everyone around him . . . I'm just not ready to.

Most of all, I just feel sickened by the lying. When you can't believe a person, can't trust them, what do you have? Everything that matters between two people--or between individuals and large groups or institutions like our schools or churches or governments--is based on what we know and believe to be true about them. On truth we take for granted. It's hard enough to know who to get close to, who to spend our time with and develop our feelings for when the truth is laid bare in front of us. When it's not, when a person is full of lies and deceit and deception, when that person shatters our trust in other people . . . That's just the most heinous crime I think they can commit to us. Ugh. Nothing ever ever ever makes me more unsettled than people who shake my ability to trust.