Well, I personally liked War of the Worlds quite a bit, and think that the fast majority of what Spielberg makes does turn out well. There are a few high calibre directors about that usually make excellent films. Spielberg, Del Toro, Jackson, Ridley Scott, James Cameron. Michael Bay, for as much flak as he catches is an excellent director: he might not make thinking movies, but for the genre he makes, he is a good filmmaker... we can't always have high drama... even the Greeks followed up their tragic trilogies with a Satyr play.
Also, I think sometimes people are too prone to criticise the industry for making movies 'for the masses' (is thiis such a bad thing?) or, the worst complaint I have ever heard regarding Hollywood, that they can't make anything original. There are several strong points against that. Firstly, many of their greatest works are adapations. Secondly, there really is no such things as an 'original' and, indeed, some of humanity's greatest works have been 'borrowed.' Take Hamlet. Take any of the ancient Greek plays which borrowed stories wholesale from an existing mythic corpus. These are amongst our proudest literary and artistic achievements, yet by the standards many these days employ, they would be considered unoriginal. How often did we hear the Oedipus story retold in antiquity? Just from what exists we have Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes (part of a larger trilogy that's lost) and Sophokles' Theban plays. The terrors in the house of Atreus? Both Sophokles and Euripides wrote a play called Elektra, and both took numerous forays into the story. As did Aeschylus.
The point of this is I think the vast majority of lay comments made regarding filmmaking are made out of ignorance of art. They consider that the only art is in innovation, and entirely overlook adaption and, indeed, alteration, which is the very engine of artistic development. Worse, the fans that wish for something to be exact, and start to grumble at the changes. That tires me to no end. They want such a dry and static translation of the things they obssess over that as soon as they see alterations to their beloved source they complain. We saw this with Lord of the Rings. Yes, mistakes were made in making it (ie. the Elves), but good heavens, this is what happens in art, and I think it is no less a movie for how it was made. Maybe even more so.
So sorry if I've gone on a bit of a rant. But as soon as I hear about 'Hollywood doing things justice' and things like that, it really hits a nerve for me. The movies must be judged on their own merits, NOT in comparison to the source. This is something people must be mindful of. After all, if we were so mindful of that, well... we might as well throw out all of literature, as I've already said. The greatest writers always mess with the source to such an extent that any ardent fan of it might be appalled.
I don't know though. I am a fan of very few Japanese things, Chrono Trigger and the like being amongst those. I sometimes wonder if fans' devotional love to the source material does cloud their perception of the whole matter. The only times, I think, where high fidelity is and should be kept is where the intricacy of individual words and such construction is what is important. Hamlet, or the Iliad, or some such thing, which loses what it is when you alter it (even in those cases, though, something altogether new can be crafted, so the alteration is not inherently bad...). But in cases such as this, fans' complains about it being wrecked mainly have to do with cursory and accidental details, it seems.
