OV-er-RA-ted

Two of the most overrated human beings alive today are as follows:

Steven Spielberg

Okay, I just want to say that by including Steven Spielberg, I'm not saying that he isn't a good director. He is. I just don't think he is as great of a filmmaker as some would have you believe. Yes, when you look at his imdb listing you see an impressive lineup: Jaws, Indiana Jones, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan. There is no doubt he has left a huge footprint on the film industry, but people quickly forget some of his failures. Remember the movie The Terminal with Tom Cruise? Of course you don't. It sucked. And Steven Spielberg directed it. And while I like Indiana Jones as much as the next guy, the new one sucked. Plus, he gets a lot of credit for movies he only produced and didn't direct, like The Goonies.

Also, I'll never forgive him for Artificial Intelligence: AI. While we'll never know what Stanley Kubrick's version would have been like, I can pretty much guarantee that it would have been better than that shit. Steven, just accept that you will never be able to make anything creepy in a cool way. Gross, yucky, uncomfortable...sure. But Haley Joel Osment was laughable in that movie, not creepy. For those of you that say something along the lines of "well, no director only made good movies", I'd like to bring Stanley Kubrick back into the conversation. He made all sorts of different movies, and they are all good. Just look at the spaceship from Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

That was made in 1977. And it looks shitty. And totally dated. Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey almost 10 years earlier, and not only were the effects and art direction better than Close Encounters, but he made it before the US had even landed on the moon. Kubrick had to guess what Earth would look like from space, and he got amazingly close. So, in summary, when people want to make some joke to an upcoming film student like "yeah, he's going to be the next...", please don't use Steven Spielberg as your example, use Stanley Kubrick.

Oprah Winfrey

Sure, Oprah has done some charitable things in her time. She gave 276 cars to her studio audience, but people look at her like some sort of saint for it. The cars costed her a total of around $7 million, and think about how much publicity she got for it. She spent $40 million building her girls school in South Africa. But that is a little less impressive when you consider that she made approximately $260 million in the year that school was built.

It isn't the percentage of her income given away that bothers me, it is how self-congratulatory she is about it. Oprah said about the car giveaway stunt: "I felt that it was one of the greatest days I've ever experienced on television, if not the greatest day." Oh, and by the way, every hand-picked poor and deserving person that received a car that day was required to pay $7,000 in taxes on the gift or forfeit the car.

So between those two 'gifts', Oprah has spent about $50 million, and have you ever heard of someone getting so much credit for giving away one fifth of their annual salary? Well, I'd like to compare the big O with another famous billionaire: Bill Gates. Now, Bill Gates is slowly seeing his reputation turn around with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but in the public eye, I think he is still seen more as a ruthless nerd that was fined $800,000 for antitrust violations. Remember that? Well, something you may not remember hearing about is when The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $750 million to the The Global Alliance for vaccines and Immunization in 2005. Or that he has given about $287 million to various HIV/AIDS researchers. That is a billion dollars. And he didn't insist on going to TV to give himself a big pat on the back about it.

After the car giveaway, Oprah said in one of her many self-congratulatory interviews "I wanted it to be bigger than Santa Claus and not to be an act of a fairy godmother, because that's not who I am. Who I am is a person who understands what it means to give back. And what I really wanted for myself and the audience was to feel the intention of the giving." Okay. Or you could just give them the cars because they really need cars. Or maybe dig a little deeper into your annual $260 million to give them all the $7,000 in taxes.