Films

Just watched Lincoln. Afterwards I read through a few reviews; there is an excruciating one by Alastair Campbell where within a couple of lines he turns it in to a critique of David Cameron.
The main thing that surprised me was that Daniel Day Lewis had chosen to make Lincoln sound as if he was Bill Clinton impersonating Grandpa Simpson. Once I had *that *Abe in my head it wasn't so easy to take all of his speeches so seriously.
The opening is clumsy - this is an Oscar film, for Americans, and there is quite a bit of clumsy exposition to make the mechanics of Washington politics comprehensible to foreigners. Those mechanics are what occupy the film. Some reviews call it a political thriller but the thrills were lost on me. Perhaps because the outcome is known the will-they-won't-they get the votes plot is lacking in tension.
I hated the music. Soupy and soaring at the key moments that otherwise, apparently, we are too numb to realise are important and epochal. Spielberg always prefers to make a point visually rather than verbally, which is fair enough, he is a director not a screenwriter, but this is a very verbal film and his adding his directorial tricks to it is a bit corny. He certainly doesn't trust his audience's intellects.