The idea is that Trump is over in more ways than one. A seemingly lewd and salacious thrust at first (“alpha dogs never die”), and then you start thinking about it…

Like Steven Spielberg, I also tried my hand at filmmaking in my early youth. A sequence in The Fabelmans triggered the memory. Teenaged Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) is shown directing a WWII action movie with his teenaged high-school pallies. Well, when I was 11 I also rounded up my friends and attempted to shoot a short western in a local park.

I was shooting with my parents’ manual wind-up 8mm camera. I had roughed out some kind of synopsis (the usual good guys vs. bad guys routine). The big climax would’ve shown the bad guy getting shot and falling off a cliff. What happened, to my profound embarassment, is that I over-wound the camera, which caused it to freeze or jam or something. The bottom line is that despite making noises as if it was operating normally, I only got about five minutes worth of footage. I discovered this when the film came back from the Kodak lab.

I was mortified — all that planning and organizing and braggadocious ambition, and it was all for naught. If I’d been braver and more tenacious I would have confessed my technical failure to my friends and asked them to perform the western on another weekend, but I was so embarassed and deflated that I abandoned the idea. A fire-in-the-belly filmmaker would’ve tried again, but I didn’t. I wasn’t encouraged by my parents to give it another go (maybe they felt they’d indulged me sufficiently with the first filming attempt) but it was my fault. If I’d simply manned up and said “Okay, mistakes happen, let’s do it again,” I might have ended up with enough half-assed footage to assemble a half-decent attempt at a short film…who knows? And then I might’ve felt sufficiently encouraged to shoot another one and so on.

But I didn’t. Not trying again was the first significant failure or lack of nerve in my life. But I gradually rebounded on some level, and by my mid teens I was writing my own satiric high-school newsletter. But then I got into trouble with the high school assistant principal for using raw, ribald language, and my furious father was called in for a meeting with this blustery dickhead, and again I felt angry and mortified so my first journalistic enterprise was half-suffocated in the crib. I could have ignored the scolding and kept going, but I didn’t.

I hated my life back then — I hated damn near everything about it. The only spiritual escape valve was watching TV and movies and sneakily drinking beer on weekends. I was so angry and suffering from such a bad case of low self-esteem that I didn’t feel moved to try journalism again until my mid 20s.

Kids really do need support and encouragement from their parents and extended families, especially in their teens. Spielberg was lucky in that sense. The Fabelmans pretty much tells it all.

This is a very nickle-and-dime matter but…

In an 11.9 interview with N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Steven Spielberg recalls his brief meeting with legendary director John Ford — an encounter depicted at the end of his latest film, the largely autobiographical The Fabelmans (Universal, 11.11).

“I was only about 16 when I met him,” Spielberg says, “and I didn’t know anything about his reputation, how surly and ornery he was and how he ate young studio executives for breakfast. That only came later when people began writing more about him. I felt I really escaped that office with my life.”

The slight problem is that Spielberg was born on 12.18.46 and therefore lived his sixteenth year of life between 12.18.62 and 12.18.63. Spielberg’s meeting with Ford, which happened at Radford Studios in Studio City, was arranged by a “second cousin” who was working on the then-upcoming Hogan’s Heroes, which began pre-production in ’64 before debuting on CBS in September ’65.

Let’s presume Spielberg met Ford sometime in the summer of ’64, while he was working as an unpaid assistant at Universal Studios’ editorial department. (He graduated from Saratoga High School in June 1965, at age 18.) He was therefore 17 and 1/2 when Ford instructed him about horizon lines — 17, not “about 16.” Just saying.

“Three Fabelmans Keepers,” posted on 11.9.22.

Closing remark: “It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s made my job incredibly difficult and to be honest with you, I’m getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support, and I hope they don’t take anything away from me. Whoever ‘they’ are.”

Daniel Craig cutting loose in Paris is wonderful…wait, wait, why is he slinking around in some swanky hotel? Get back on the streets, bruh! Feel the joy and rapture. You don’t need Belvedere Vodka…you really don’t.

The most emotionally moving moment in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans comes when we hear the opening passage from Max Steiner‘s score for John Ford‘s The Searchers. It’s a payoff like no other. I beamed and went “aahh, yes…this hits home, feels right.”

HE acknowledges that Everything Everywhere All At Once may end up with a token Best Picture nomination to placate Zellennials, but the less said about that unpleasant possibility the better. With the unseen Babylon and Avatar: The Way of Water in a limbo position, the best films of the year are as follows…these are the 2022 motion pictures that have earned the serious points except for Water and Babylon, which are likely to score highly before long:

1. The Fabelmans
2. TÁR
3. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
5. Babylon
6. Empire of Light
7. She Said
8. Armageddon Time
9. Bardo
10. Close

The early to late ’70s saw the flowering of a revolutionary sexual awakening all over…in showbiz circles, in elite professions, in the major urban areas, in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Hell, everywhere.

And especially for rich, powerful, good-looking actors on the prowl. For them every day was a combination of Plato’s Retreat and I, Claudius. It was madness back then.

Even Average Joes tasted the nectar. From a certain perspective they were lucky to be living and frolicking in one of the most breathtaking nookie eras since the days of Ancient Rome.

In our Salem Witch Trial climate there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by being candid about this. I certainly can’t go there but…

The context of the ‘70s was so dramatically different than the climate of today. We’re living in the midst of #MeToo Puritanism — a very conservative and punitive social movement.

That aside, any adult actor who may or may not have had his way with an under-age teenager…such behavior was selfish and cruel. That was then, but this is now. And criminally is criminality. You don’t mess with jailbait.

So many people today have no understanding of how many people in Hollywood and the pop music world diddled around with jailbait back in the day. They think it was just Warren Beatty and Led Zeppelin. Celebrities, or at least many of them, have little sense of morality when it comes to showing restraint or putting the brakes on. They lead wild lives. But no one seems to understand this. The tabloids present banal addiction and divorce dramas as The Truth. They don’t report on most of what actually goes on.

…or work for the first third or first half, but don’t work as an overall story — an HE riff if I ever devised one!

I recently happened to re-watch Sydney Pollack‘s Random Hearts (’99), a forlorn adult romance that flopped financially and totally tanked in terms of critic and ticket buyer opinions.

It’s about a tentative, uncertain love affair between a D.C. cop (Harrison Ford) and a New Hampshire Congressperson (Kristin Scott Thomas) who meet because their spouses (Susanna Thompson and Peter Coyote, respectively) were having an affair before dying in a plane crash.

Random Hearts doesn’t work because it can’t — you can’t launch a loving, adult, non-obsessive relationship with the shattered spouse of the person your husband or your wife was having an affair with. The thing that Ford and Thomas have (they fall for each other and make love in a woodsy cabin) will always be a weird menage a quatre between two living and two dead people. It’s just not in the cards for things to work out, but Pollack and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke try their best to make it work anyway.

And to a certain extent, they succeed. There are several scenes during the first half that work quite well — they really do. Carefully written, well acted, appropriately steady and somber.

And because of the more or less successful first half Random Hearts doesn’t deserve a 15% Rotten Tomatoes rating — that’s ridiculous!

What other films are at least reasonably good during the first third or first half, only to steadily crack and shatter and fall apart during the second half?