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.

6:24 pm: I’m in my seat (E9) for a 6 pm showing of Wakanda Forever…God help me. I intend to tough it out no matter what.

Trailers put a deep scowl on my face. Movies for ADD morons. Nobody hates animation and those highly paid digital animators more than myself. If the ghosts of John Calley, Irving Thalberg, Daryl F. Zanuck or Dore Schary were sitting beside me and watching this shit…words fail.

I’m clutching my leather computer bag to my chest for warmth — November jacket weather outside and the AMC guys have the a.c. on.

9:50 pm: I lasted with Wakanda Forever for 90 minutes. I. Could. Not. Stand. Another. Minute.

I started to disengage when it got into the backstory of the Yucatán aquatic blue people. I knew I had another hour-plus to go. I just couldn’t do it.

Friendo #1: “The blue Yucatán people is the worst part. They should have lost it. The whole movie is obviously too long.”

Friendo #2: If you bailed at the 90-minute mark, you missed the best part.”

HE: “Good! Fine!”

I accepted the death of Matt Damon‘s “Colin Sullivan” in The Departed, but I wanted Leo DiCaprio‘s “Billy Costigan” to live. Up to no good and loyal to Jack Nicholson‘s demonic “Frank Costello,” Sullivan earned that bullet in the head. But Costigan had performed cunningly and bravely — he deserved to live. Plus William Monahan‘s screenplay got that famous Chinese laundry saying wrong — in the film Costello says “no tickee, no laundry” but the actual line is “no tickee, no washee.”

I don’t mean this literally, of course. There are always exceptions to the rule. But I do regard Millennial- and Zoomer-aged critics askance. Too many of them have bought into the bullshit. Too few of them think and write like men, and I mean that in the Robert Ryan / “Deke Thornton” sense of that term (i.e., “We’re after men, and I wish to God I was with them”).

In fact, IndieWire’s Samantha Bergeson didn’t write the Citizen Kane pullquote in her 11.10 review of Lindsay Lohan’s Falling for Christmas, although she does bend over backwards to be kind.

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.”

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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