Check Book: Olivia Craighead's Hot Takes

Plus our Spielberg rankings!

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IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

10 MOVIE HOT TAKES FOR 10 YEARS OF BLANK CHECK: An Olivia Craighead Guest Column

Note from the editor: This was supposed to be in our Blank Canvas zine, but we ran out of space!

“10 Hot Movie Takes for 2025, Ranked by How Seriously I Take Them” by Olivia Craighead

10. Everyone needs to stop asking for an already famous actor to play James Bond. Let’s get some hot random guy in there, and stop telling Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Dev Patel that they should chain themselves to Amazon for the next decade.

9. Gwyneth Paltrow (the actress) will be back. This is more of a wish, but I’m all in on Marty Supreme.

8. Let’s keep our hearts open to James Gunn’s Superman. As an addendum to this take: David Corenswet has the juice. As a further addendum: We can keep our hearts closed to Marvel.

7. Criterion should release the unedited closet videos. Put all 30 minutes of Francis Ford Coppola going off about Jacques Tati on the Criterion Channel or something.

6 .I need more onscreen kissing. Much like in Challengers, your movie won’t really be sexy to me unless all the characters makeout at least once. How much fun would it have been if the goons in Anora shared a smooch?

5. If you don’t agree with a stranger’s Letterboxd review, you don’t have to try to fight them in the comments. Some things are better left screenshotted and sent to your real life friends.

4. Put movies in the theater! Me not being able to watch Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy with 100 other sobbing women has turned me into the Joker about this.

3. If the final cut of your movie is over two hours, you should lose at least 10 minutes. Realistically, let’s make that 15.

2. Writing and directing is out! More directors should put energy toward finding their Tony Kushner.

1. You should be brave and tell the person in the theater who’s talking/texting/taking a photo of the screen to cut it out. Be the old person at Film Forum you want to see in the world.

FINAL SPIELBERG RANKINGS

Griffin Newman:

1. E.T. The Extraterrestrial

2. AI Artificial Intelligence

3. Schindler’s List

4. Catch Me If You Can

5. Empire of the Sun

6. Bridge of Spies

7. Jaws

8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

9. Raiders of the Lost Ark

10. The Fabelmans

11. Saving Private Ryan

12. Jurassic Park

13. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

14. Lincoln

15. The Adventures of Tintin

16. Duel

17. Sugarland Express

18. Minority Report

19. West Side Story

20. Munich

21. War of the Worlds

22. Amistad

23. The Post

24. The Color Purple

25. Always

26. The Lost World: Jurassic Pakr

27. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

28. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

29. War Horse

30. Ready Player One

31. The BFG

32. The Terminal

33. 1941

34. Hook

David Sims:

1. AI Artificial Intelligence

2. E.T. The Extraterrestrial

3. Minority Report (aka “Colin Farrell, kiss me”)

4. Schindler’s List

5. Jaws

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

7. Jurassic Park

8. Saving Private Ryan

9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

10. Lincoln

11. The Fabelmans (aka “Seth Rogen’s Cuck Brigade”)

12. West Side Story

13. Bridge of Spies

14. Catch Me If You Can

15. War of the Worlds

16. Munich

17. Ready Player One

18. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

19. The Adventures of Tintin

20. The Post

21. Empire of the Sun

22. Duel

23. Sugarland Express

24. The Color Purple

25. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

26. Amistad

27. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

28. War Horse

29. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

30. The BFG

31. Hook

32. Always

33. The Terminal

34. 1941

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• In a 1993 Newsweek profile, Steven Spielberg (perhaps a little dubiously) claimed that he had never heard the word “Holocaust” until college. Despite having face-to-face interactions with a number of survivors thanks to the English lessons his maternal grandmother taught to Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Cincinnati, Spielberg said that his parents avoided making direct references to the Holocaust at home. Instead of using that term, Spielberg explained that Arnold and Leah would usually refer to Nazi Germany’s genocide of the 1940s as “those murdering sons of bitches,” as in, “Those murdering sons of bitches broke that Jewish pianist's fingers so he could never play the piano again.” When a much-older Spielberg later visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in preparation for Schindler’s List, he was startled to find that his primary emotion was not sadness or fright but the same kind of anger with which his parents had obliquely described the Holocaust decades prior: “I was deeply pissed off. I was all ready to cry in front of strangers, and I didn't shed a tear. I was just boiling inside. Freezing day, and I was so hot. I felt so helpless, that there was nothing I could do about it. And yet I thought, well, there is something I can do about it. I can make 'Schindler's List.' I mean, it's not going to bring anybody back alive, but it maybe will remind people that another Holocaust is a sad possibility.”¹ As Spielberg’s friend—and soon-to-be frequent leading man—Tom Hanks explained in a 1994 New Yorker profile, the other emotions then came flooding back to Spielberg after the release of the film: “We were out walking around on Friday, and a young girl approached him, and she said, ‘I just had to tell you,’ and she talked to him about ‘Schindler’s List.’ And within forty-five seconds this girl had emotionally come undone, because she was saying, ‘My Nana used to tell me stories,’ and she had connected this movie to her grandma. And Steven, as best he could, reassured her. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I made this movie so that people like yourself would realize . . .’—something that was very appropriate and not very astute. And then she collected herself and she went off. And then we walked across the street, and Steven came emotionally undone. It took him a while to collect himself. And I assume it was because, just as that girl was not prepared for the power of what she had seen Steven do, Steven hasn’t been quite prepared for the emotional power of what he has done.”²

• As mentioned on this week’s episode, Oskar Schindler wasn’t the only real-life figure on which Spielberg wanted Liam Neeson to model his performance: there was also Spielberg’s close personal friend and mentor Steve Ross, the by-turns philanthropic and, well, complex Time Warner CEO. According to Spielberg, “Steve Ross gave me more insights into Schindler than anybody I’ve ever known. If Schindler were alive today, he would be running Time Warner.” To help Neeson find the character, Spielberg provided the actor with his own personal supply of home movies starring Ross, telling Neeson to “[s]tudy his walk, study his manner, get to know him real well, because that’s who this guy is.”³ Around this time, however, Ross was slowly dying of cancer, and he would pass away a few months before the start of the Schindler’s List shoot. One of the more curious things I learned while researching this miniseries was that, in the midst of Ross’s struggles with his health—and between the back-to-back shoots of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List—Spielberg assembled a cast full of famous faces for an It’s a Wonderful Life-style short film that imagined what their lives would have been like without Ross’s influence. Here’s Spielberg, with the details on the short: “I dreamt this up when we were in Hawaii, filming Jurassic Park. We had [Warner Bros, executives] Bob Daly and Terry Semel as hobos, looking for food in trashcans. Clint Eastwood, instead of being the legend, was a stuntman, an extra. ([Producer] Joel Silver shoots him—and actually kills him.) Quincy [Jones] was Clarence, the angel. Chevy Chase was God. I was in a mental institution, totally enclosed in a straitjacket, just my fingers free. I was putting together in shaving foam the face of E.T. and not quite knowing what I was trying to express. I said, ‘He came to me… he came to me… he was a six-foot-three E.T.!’”⁴

• In the decade between Steven Spielberg’s 1983 meeting with Schindler’s Ark inspiration Poldek Pfefferberg and the actual release of his film Schindler’s List in 1993, the director—fearful over the weight of the project and his own capabilities as a filmmaker—attempted to transfer stewardship of the film over to a number of other famous directors, including, according to most sources, Sidney Pollock, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski, and, most seriously, Martin Scorsese. Sometimes thrown in amongst these names is an aging Billy Wilder, who had not directed a film since 1981’s Buddy Buddy. But as Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly in 2011, the situation with Wilder was different than those other names—and more heart-breaking: “Billy, who was my friend for a long time, knew I was making Schindler’s List. Billy made a call very late in the process. We had a locked script and we were getting ready to go to Poland. He said, ‘You’ve had this book for a long time. I know you’ve had it since it came out in the early ’80s, and I would love Schindler’s List to be my last film, because I know how to tell that story, because I lost family in the Holocaust, and I feel that my existence is inexorably tied to that period. As a Jew and as [an Austrian] Jew, I need to make this picture.’ When I told Billy that I was going off to Poland in four months to shoot the picture, he was devastated. I was devastated that he didn’t know that I had been publicly preparing the film for almost a year. So it was a difficult meeting. But he understood, and one of the first phone calls that I got when Schindler’s List started to screen was from Billy Wilder. It was a great phone call.”⁵

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Everyone: We’ve still got art from Blank Canvas on sale via Mutant! Don’t you want to own a custom figure of the fucked up baby from Trainspotting???: https://www.madebymutant.com/blank-canvas-exhibition

David Sims, Host: “Bad movie week for me—I didn’t even enjoy my John Ford movie this week, Rio Grande, that much even though Maureen O’Hara is serving in it. I did however enjoy The Shadow which I watched for a different podcast. Big sets! Billowing drapes! A very scummy hero! Orientalism! What on earth was happening in the mid 90s??!!!”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I finally scrubbed in and completed my shift at The Pitt this week. Some parts of it were gross and I had to avert my eyes (anything related to broken bones), but mostly it was a life-affirming and deeply affecting fifteen hours. Charge Nurse Dana is my favorite, followed closely by Dr. Mel King. I still don’t like Santos even after her redemption arc (sorry).”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “My recommendation for this week is Turkey & The Wolf in New Orleans. The most delicious fried bologna sandwich you can possibly imagine. Worth the trip from the quarter and worth exploring the surrounding neighborhoods and the rest of non-bourbon street New Orleans.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Some new video games I’ve been enjoying lately: Haste, a platforming rogue-lite that takes the propulsive movement of the great 2011 iOS app Tiny Wings into the third dimension; Blue Prince, the mysterious puzzle rogue-lite that’s driving me and every other nerd with a notebook crazy right now; and Monster Hunter Wilds, which I finally rolled credits on and I am enjoying even more now that Nata is FINALLY in the background. (He belongs in the damn trash.)”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I recommend Reacher. The whole Reacher-verse. I’ve read maybe a dozen of the books, seen both movies, and just finished the third season of the show. I’d recommend all of it besides the second movie. The thing about Reacher is: he big. If that sounds like your thing, check out Reacher today!”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

We wrap up our Early Spielberg series with David Ehrlich on Schindler’s List.

And on Patreon, we are wrapping up our Picard Trek Series with Galaxy Quest, and by Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Warvan, you shall be entertained.

Listen to our Spielberg Companion playlist compiled by Nate Patterson:

Nate is a fundraiser with City Harvest, a food rescue nonprofit in NYC. Help provide food for our neighbors and make a donation!

COMING SOON:

We’re still awaiting official artwork, but here’s what the Amy Heckerling schedule will be:

Apr 27 Fast Times at Ridgemont High
May 4 Johnny Dangerously
May 11 European Vacation
May 18 Look Who's Talking
May 25 Look Who's Talking Too
Jun 1 Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning*
Jun 8 Clueless
Jun 15 Loser
Jun 22 28 Years Later*
Jun 29 I Could Never Be Your Woman
Jul 6 Vamps

And over on Patreon (ditto re artwork), we’ll be kicking off Superman next month:
May 1 Superman: The Movie
May 11 Mailbag: Live at OnAir Fest*
May 21 Superman II
Jun 1 Superman III
Jun 11 Look Who's Talking Now*
Jun 21 Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
July 1 Superman Returns
July 11 Man of Steel
July 21 Superman (2025)

1. Newsweek, December 19, 1993.

2. New Yorker, March 13, 1994.

3. Premiere, January 1994, in Steven Spielberg Interviews, ed. Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm.

4. Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, 538.

5. Entertainment Weekly, December 2, 2011.