I’d forgotten that Gabriel LaBelle‘s Sammy Fabelman (aka young Steven Spielberg) conveys a joy face** while twirling around twice.

I’d also forgotten that John Williams‘ score sounds a little too peppy and jaunty — a tad reminiscent of Franz Waxman‘s Rear Window score at the very end.

Honestly? I’m kinda okay with the center-horizon shot. Or at least I didn’t find it “boring as shit.”

The Fabelmans has my favorite ending of the year, the fact that this is verbatim what John Ford said to Spielberg makes it even better lmao pic.twitter.com/28JTdTsbzu

— anish🇦🇷 (@sithshailaRRR) December 14, 2022

** the satisfaction that any fledgling director would feel after meeting and getting instructed by a showbiz legend.

Speaking as a decades-long admirer of James Cameron gutslammers, I need to honestly say that I really don’t want to see three more Avatar films…truly, no foolin’. I decided this after seeing Avatar 2: The Way of Water late Friday afternoon. A riveting experience, for sure, but I realized midway through that I might not want to see it a second time. Because it left me with a feeling of aural, visual and spiritual exhaustion that I don’t want to re-experience.

And given Cameron’s stated plan to churn out three more Avatar flicks between now and 2028 (for a grand total of five), I really don’t want to return three more times to that aftermath feeling of being rocked and jolted and pulverized with little to show for it emotionally.

Because Avatar 2 isn’t Titanic. The first Avatar wasn’t either, but it told a great story (four-act structure) and felt like such a major visual event that it seemed extra-historic. Avatar 2 is more of a power-punch workout that an emotional massager or meltdown. I realize that Avatar 3 is more or less completed and there’s no ducking it, but three will be enough, fellas. C’mon, Jim, let it go…move on to something else.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Is James Cameron’s Vision for the Avatar Franchise a Dream or a Delusion?” (12.18):

Excerpt #1: “After the original Avatar, when Cameron laid out his master plan to make four sequels to it, my honest thought was, ‘Has he lost his mind?’ Not because I thought the plan was commercially unfeasible, but because I couldn’t wrap my own mind around why the director of Titanic — a timeless and awesome film, because it was one of the most moving experiences in the history of popular cinema — could be saying, with the power to do anything he wanted, ‘I’d like to spend the next 20 years making Avatar films.’

Excerpt #2: “We already have a movie culture that’s drowning in imagistic sensation and action overload. Cameron, in movies like The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was one of the virtuoso architects of that blockbuster aesthetic. He’s now competing against the very cinema-as-sensation mystique that overpowered the rest of movie culture, even as he raises the ante on it. I felt a note of magic during the middle hour of The Way of Water, which plunges us into the ocean with a kind of virtual-reality immersion. But the film’s extended action climax? That felt like something out of Die Hard VIII: Die Harder on a Boat, only rendered in 3D. At a certain point I thought, ‘So what?'”

9:40 pm: I tweeted a reply to Zoe Rose Bryant as follows: “Hey, Zoë, I’m a straight white dude, okay, but Jordan Ruimy’s parents are North African so he doesn’t quite qualify. Oscar death to EEAAO!”

Bryant, whose award-season sentiments are basically or mostly “everything is wonderful…every film, every performance…love it all!”…Bryant has bravely blocked me so my tweet doesn’t exist on Twitter. So here it is.

What Zoe meant, in part, is that despite his ethnic heritage, Jordan sounds like a “white dude.” He has that “white dude” attitude. Meaning that he doesn’t seem to understand movies as fully as she does.

I was sitting in seat E5 during yesterday afternoon’s Avatar 2 screening. The “show” started at 2:15 pm, but as we all know that meant the film itself wouldn’t start until at least 20 minutes of trailers had unspooled. As it happened the film didn’t begin until 2:40 pm. During the 25 minutes of trailers two seats to my left were empty, but I figured the purchasers would show up at the last minute. They didn’t, and after a while I started to say to myself “hey, this is pretty good…maybe I can move over and stretch my legs.”

At 3:07 pm the seat purchasers finally showed up. 27 minutes after the film had begun. The fact that both were overweight had nothing to do with anything, of course. Avatar 2 seats are expensive, and they had to have reserved them a good 10 days in advance. How undisciplined and chaotic does your life have to be to cause this much delay? This wasn’t just another movie –it was an opening-day showing of one of the biggest films of the year. Did they forget? One of them couldn’t get out of the bathroom? I gradually pushed these thoughts out of my head, but it took a while.

Avatar 2 runs 192 minutes — add on 25 minutes of trailer promos and you’re talking 217 minutes. That’s obviously part of the exhaustion factor — it’s grueling to be bombarded with loud, floor-vibrating, super-sized images for three hours and 37 minutes. Lawrence of Arabia runs ten minutes longer (227 minutes) but that film doesn’t rough you up like Avatar 2 — it’s visually vast and eye-filling, but huge portions are dialogue-driven.

Pre-Elon Musk Twitter may not have done the right journalistic thing by suppressing the sad, pathetic saga of Hunter Biden during the ‘20 ejection, but I’m glad they did it regardless. Because the Hunter Biden scandal is nothing, as I explained early last September:

My God, Avatar 2: The Way of Water rerally romps and stomps like nothing I’ve seen in a long while, and the astonishing CG realism (which I couldn’t settle into at first — it took me 10 minutes to find my way into it) is quite the thing, and there’s no beating that last 50- or 60-minute aquatic pitched-battle, breaching-whale, pulse-rifle-burst, arrow-piercing “woo-woo!” destructathon.

A family that fiercely fights together loves all the more…The Poseidon Adventure meets a return-to-Titanic sinkathon + The Abyss drowning trauma + weeping death scene + the wildest, craziest, most vigorously sustained battle lollapalooza ever…worth the price and then some…pays off like a motherfucker.

James Cameron is a drop-dead brilliant action director…let no one ever challenge that statement.

And I’m now determined to practice my Navi cat howl-Māori battle cry.

But so much of Avatar 2 is padded all to hell & is too fucking long, man…it could’ve easily, EASILY been 45 minutes shorter. The narrative pretty much stops in the middle section and becomes a bloated, ultra-costly real-estate video + a tricks-of-under-the-sea survival instructional + Club Med acqua-blue travelogue for glorious Pandora Shores.

The tech is marvelous and bracingly real & every last dollar seems to be on the screen. But there’s something oddly oppressive and even un-entertaining at times about being vigorously assaulted & smothered by so much CG dough…truckloads & truckloads of cash spent by the ultimate wizardly maestro of wildly expensive holy shit superfuck blockbusters. The film is a titanic grand-slam CG toy factory spendathon…whew!

I like the “family is a fortress” theme but my God, I was exhausted when it ended. I’m not altogether sure I want to see it a second time. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was right when he called it thin. Pic seems to take as much as it gives.