Joe Dante

Not sure if this belongs in this section, feel free to move it accordingly if not.

So I'm curious... what do people on this forum think of Joe Dante?

Personally, I think he may be one of the more under-appreciated modern auteurs, a director who manages to sustain a nice juggling act of indulging in pop-culture archetypes and subverting them within the same scope. There's a true love of genre and old Hollywood that runs through the entirety of his work (Scorsese and De Palma do as well, and also share with Dante an encyclopedic knowledge of film and culture, American and beyond), but I think sometimes people find his work too sentimental (I'm thinking primarily of the first Gremlins, Explorers, and Innerspace, films I hold really dear). I think he's often mistaken for a Spielberg lackey a la Zemeckis. Personally, I think he's a far more consistent and inventive director than Spielberg, whose films (at least lately) carry such a strong whiff of 'importance' that it can be suffocating.

There's always a moment, and its often very easy to spot, when his movies just go completely off-the-wall and enter the realm of something, for lack of a better word, magical. That's something only certain directors can do consistently, very few even manage to do it once.

Of course, that's a personal reaction. I wouldn't be surprised if some on here detested his films, or at least ignored them.

Don't wanna write all my thoughts in a single post, hopefully we can get some kinda dialogue going.