The Fabelmans: A Review - The Naked Truth Is That Emperor Spielberg Has No Clothes

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terrible, self-indulgent, truly awful film that features poor performances, an abysmal script, and dreadful direction.

This past year has been a boon for self-indulgent film directors and a bane for movie audiences, as auteurs have shat out a bevy of sub-par autobiographical movies about their childhoods and the magic of cinema.

First there was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s atrocious Bardo, followed quickly by James Gray’s artistically anemic Armageddon Time, and then there was Sam Mendes’ universally panned Empire of Light (which, to be fair, is less blatantly autobiographical), and finally there is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

I’ve seen all of the above except for Empire of Light. What has been alarming is that each of these films I have seen has gotten progressively worse than the one I saw before it. Armageddon Time is shlocky, politically correct garbage, but Bardo is simply an astonishing cinematic atrocity. Bardo is supremely awful, but it’s at least visually and narratively ambitious if not audacious, which is in stark contrast to Spielberg’s newest flatulent film The Fabelmans.

The Fabelmans describes itself as a coming-of-age drama, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, that chronicles aspiring filmmaker Sam Fabelman (a stand in for Spielberg), a precocious young man in love with moviemaking, as he navigates his childhood and teen years growing up with a scientific father, Burt, and an artistic mother, Mitzi.

The Fabelmans is easily the worst of the Spielberg’s late-stage movies, which is quite an accomplishment considering the garbage he’s churned out over the last twenty years or so. This film is, quite frankly, so bad as to be an utter embarrassment. I watched a screener of the movie with my wife and we laughed out loud numerous times AT the movie, but never with it. The movie is such an amateurish, after-school special level production that we literally stopped it on multiple occasions and turned to each other and asked “what the fuck?”

At one point in the film, aspiring director Sam Fabelman is watching the footage of a movie he’s shot with his Boy Scout troop, and he shakes his head and mutters to himself in disappointment, “Fake. Totally fake.” Too bad Spielberg didn’t have the same discerning eye at 76 that he did when he was 14 as The Fabelmans rings so egregiously phony that I actually pondered “how could Spielberg watch this and agree to release it?”

There are so many scenes and sequences in this movie that are simply mindboggling for how appallingly awful they are. Just when you think the worst scene is behind you a new cinematic and dramatic atrocity steps in to take its place.

There’s the dinner scene which is staged and acted like the worst high school play you’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. Then there’s the masturbatorial scenes where audiences of Boy Scouts and family are overly amazed to the point of ecstasy at Sam Fabelman’s “brilliant” movies that aren’t brilliant. And then there’s the ultimate cringe worthy scene where Mitzi Fabelman does her best Corky St. Clair “Penny for your Thoughts” from Waiting for Guffman imitation as she “dances” in a see-through nightgown in front of a campfire and car headlights while on a camping trip.

Then there’s the scene where Sam edits the footage of this camping trip and discovers a family “secret”, which is shot like it’s from a bad pre-teen show on Disney Channel. Then there’s the scene where family friend Benny gives a camera to Sam as a going away present, which is staged with all the grace of monkeys having a shit fight at the zoo. Then there’s the scenes of gay, neo-Nazi, Schindler’s List wannabe, anti-Semites who bully Sam in high school which all feel like they’re from the worst episode of Happy Days you’ve ever seen. And on and on and on.

There is literally only one scene in the entire film which crackles with any life or dynamism, and that’s the last scene of the movie. This exuberant scene only goes to remind how badly mismanaged the dismal and dull preceding two-hours and thirty-minutes truly were.

Spielberg has always been addled by his addiction to a saccharine sentimentality, and The Fabelmans is no exception, except here the sentimentality is, to reference another Christopher Guest movie, turned all the way up to 11. Unfortunately, this sentimentality has blinded Spielberg to the stark lack of craftsmanship across the board in this movie.

John Williams score and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are banal, underwhelming and shockingly second-rate. Tony Kushner’s (and Spielberg’s) script is so inelegant and so lacking in cohesiveness and humanity, as to be cinematic malpractice.

Speaking of cinematic malpractice, there’s a scene in the film where Judd Hirsch, who compellingly plays a sort of crazy-genius grand-uncle, is spewing contrived pieces of wisdom to young Sammy Fabelman, and yet throughout the scene you can see his mic pack bulging through his wife beater t-shirt. This is a $40 million movie, not some $1,200 student film…how the hell does that level of shoddiness make it to the screen?

The performances are just as abominable as the rest of the work on the film.

Michelle Williams is an actress I like, but her Mitzi, featuring a haircut from hell, is one of the most hollow, disingenuous and grating pieces of acting I’ve witnessed in recent years. Everything is so mannered and so contrived that it feels like watching a toddler ham it up in grandma’s clothes to entertain the family after rowdy Thanksgiving dinner.

Paul Dano is an actor I greatly admire, but his performance in The Fabelmans is so vacuous and devoid of any inner life or intention as to be remarkable. Dano is dead-eyed as he mechanically utters his lines like he’s auditioning for a job at either a wax museum or a mausoleum.

And just when you thought the acting couldn’t get any worse…Seth Rogan shows up. Good lord. Seth Rogan is to acting what a dirty diaper is to ambience.

On top of all the bad acting, every character is extremely unlikable (the same is true in Armageddon Time and Bardo…why are director’s families so repulsive?). Early in the film, Mitzi, for some incoherent reason, drives the family towards a tornado and all I could do was hope that they would all be thrown miles away and end up a red stain on the dashboard. Once that didn’t happen, I was left praying for a pack of coyotes to come along and maul them all in their sleep, or a gas leak or a septic tank explosion, to take them out and put me out of my misery.

There’s also a very strange and frankly very ugly strain of anti-Christian sentiment that rears its head about two thirds of the way through the film. I’m not someone who ever cares about this sort of thing but Spielberg goes out of his way to demean and belittle a Christian character in the movie, and explicitly mock her religion. The treatment of this girl and her Christianity is nasty and mean-spirited and totally out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. It’s the equivalent of what the gay Neo-Nazi anti-Semites do to the Sam Fabelman character when they call him ‘Bagelman’ and demand he apologize for killing Christ. In other words, it isn’t clever or insightful or amusing, it’s just vicious and small-minded. That Spielberg, who is allegedly a man of faith (he’s made quite a show of his connection to Judaism over the years), would demean, disparage and denigrate the lone character of a differing faith in his film and gleefully embrace this repellent but culturally acceptable prejudice, speaks volumes about his lack of character.

The Fabelmans has been a major box office flop, as it has only made $25 million against a $40 million budget. But Spielberg didn’t make this movie to make money, he made it to win an Oscar….and he might just succeed.

It's a testament to Spielberg’s iron grip on Hollywood that this movie, this dreadful, no-good, really bad movie, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Spielberg’s power over Hollywood and the lack of intellectual integrity among critics, also accounts for why the movie is adored by most critics (92% critical score Rotten Tomatoes). But don’t be fooled by the vacuous opinions of these sycophants and philistines.

The reality is that the once great Emperor Spielberg, who gave us cinematic marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, has no clothes.

The naked truth for all to see but few will admit, is that The Fabelmans is an embarrassing and humiliating failure of a film. To claim otherwise is either dishonest, delusional, or both.

©2023

Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023

The Revenant : A Review

****THIS  REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!! THIS SECTION IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!***

MY RATING : SKIP IT IN THE THEATRE*, SEE IT ON NETFLIX OR CABLE.

*UNLESS YOU ARE A LOVER OF GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHY, THEN DEFINITELY SEE IT ON THE BIG SCREEN IN THE THEATRE

THE REVIEW

The Revenant, directed by Alejandro G. Innaritu and written by Innaritu and Mark L. Smith (based on the book of the same name by Michael Punke), is the story of hunter and guide, Hugh Glass, who, in 1823 on the northern plains of North America, seeks to avenge a loved one's murder while struggling to survive the uncolonized wilderness and the native tribes that inhabit it. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass, and boasts supporting performances from Tom Hardy and Domnhall Gleeson.

 Much has been made about Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in the film and his likelihood of winning the Best Actor Oscar at this years Academy Awards. I agree that Dicaprio will win the Oscar, but I disagree that his performance is worthy of such high praise. In fact, this performance seemed like a step back in DiCaprio's artistic evolution. There is a lot of grunting, groaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth, but it all feels forced and frankly, showy. DiCaprio seems to want to indicate how hard he is working, and to his credit he is working very hard, and how much he is "acting". I found the performance heavy-handed, contrived and ultimately off-putting, which was disappointing considering the trajectory of DiCaprio's work in recent years with his truly stellar turns in Django Unchained and The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio's performance in The Revenant is along the lines of his work as Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, which I felt was over-the-top and sub-par to his very high standards.

I am a big fan of actor Tom Hardy as well, but I felt his performance in The Revenant was underwhelming. It is not Hardy's fault, as his character, John Fitzgerald, is terribly under written. Fitzgerald is initially a very compelling character, but is given no dramatic arc, making him a rather hollow character, so we lose interest in him the more we see of him.

Having Fitzgerald be under-written is a big issue for the narrative of the film as well, as we need a much stronger foil for Hugh Glass to be up against in order to make the story more dramatically dynamic. The Fitzgerald character being cursory means that the narrative is never able to flower into anything more than the one-dimensional survival story of Hugh Glass, as opposed to a two-dimensional chase/revenge story, or a three-dimensional story about Glass chasing his psychological shadow in the form of his nemesis Fitzgerald. This is a disappointment as The Revenant has greatness hidden within it on multiple levels, but director Innaritu is unable to mix these potent ingredients together in a satisfactory manner in order to cook up a gourmet cinematic feast, rather we are left with a serving of unseasoned and uncooked bison meat. 

Innaritu, who won a Best Director Oscar last year for Birdman, is a very talented guy, but he has a tendency to make basic structural decisions that frustrate the potential power of his films. He undercuts the mythological flow of his films with foundational flaws that are minor in practice but major in impact. For instance, in Birdman, the ending sequence was held for a scene and a series of beats too long. This flawed climax had the result of watering down and undermining the brilliance that led up to it. In The Revenant, Innaritu again makes a minor structural stumble which stunts the energetic, mythic and psychological flow of the film. Without giving too much away, I will only say that the narratives involving Glass and his own survival and his pursuit of Fitzgerald, don't travel together in a straight line as they should, but rather diverge at a crucial point in the story, much to the detriment of the dramatic flow of the film.

On the bright side, Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki creates a visual masterpiece by seamlessly weaving his deftly moving camera amidst the stunningly crisp natural beauty of the film's locations. In the last two years, Lubezki has won consecutive Best Cinematography Oscars for his work in Gravity and Birdman (also directed by Innaritu), and it would not be a shock if he won for a third straight time this year for The Revenant. In the last decade, Lubezki's collaborations with Terence Malick on The New World, The Tree of Life and To the Wonder, and his work with Alfonso Cauron on Children of Men and Gravity, along with his work with Innaritu (Birdman, The Revenant) prove he is a visual genius of the highest order and a master at the top of his game. The Revenant is worth seeing in the theatre if for no other reason than to see Lubezki's magnificent work up on the big screen.

To be clear, The Revenant is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is also not a great one. It is a very dramatically flawed, but visually beautiful, piece of art. It is frustrating to me that the film as a whole could not live up to the potential of its various pieces in the form of a great cast, director and cinematographer. The reality is that The Revenant not only COULD have been better, but it SHOULD have been great. 

****WARNING: THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS CONTAIN SPOILERS!!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!****

THE MYTHOLOGICAL AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:  "As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think." - Joseph Campbell

The Revenant is one of those rare films that is actually much more interesting on the deeper mythological and psychological levels than it is on the entertaining/storytelling level. I found the film intriguing almost despite itself. I do wonder though, if people who do not have my interest and background in Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology would enjoy the film very much on any of these deeper levels. Regardless, here is a very short breakdown of some of the mythological and psychological imagery used in the story.

The mythology and psychology running through the film is laced with Native American spirituality and symbology. There is a Bear prominent in the story which is the impetus to send Glass on his literal and mythological quest. In native spirituality, Bear medicine symbolizes awakening the power of the unconscious, and in The Revenant, Bear brutally forces Glass to go on his journey deep into the darkest recesses of his psyche and soul to find and heal his true self. Bear instinctively and viciously attacks Glass in order to protect her cubs, leaving him unable to protect his "cub", his son Hawk, from danger. On the epic journey started by Bear, Glass will, as the title of the film suggests (Revenant means "one who has returned, as if from the dead"), die many times and be born again. Like Christ, Glass must die to his old self in order to be born again to his higher self.

Also like Christ, Glass must wander alone through the wilderness in order to be spiritually purified. It is during this "time in the desert", that Glass comes across a fellow wanderer, Hikuc, a Pawnee Indian, who also happens to share the same spiritual/psychological wound as Glass, namely, the deep grief at the loss of his family. Hikuc and Glass share the sacrament of communion in the form of eating raw bison meat. In Native spirituality, Bison, similar to Christ in Christian mythology, is a gift from the Great Spirit meant to nourish and sustain his people. Bison also symbolizes 'right prayer joined with right action'. Once Glass has been purified, and eaten the holy sacrament, he can now move on to the next portion of his journey, the symbolic re-birthing.

Glass rides on the back of Hikuc's horse to the woods where Hikuc prepares a "purifying womb" for him in the form of a sweat lodge. Glass hibernates(Bear medicine) in this sweat lodge, his physical, psychological and spiritual wounds beginning to heal thanks to Hikuc's help. When Glass awakens inside the sweat lodge, the world outside, just like Glass inside the womb, has been changed, having been christened, with a pristine layer of white snow. 

When Glass emerges from the sweat lodge, a place of 'right prayer', he resumes his journey on his own after finding Hikuc "crucified" like Christ and hanging from a tree. Glass continues on and commits an act of 'right action' by saving an Native princess from the same men who sacrificed Hikuc on the tree of life. Having fulfilled the sacred call of the Bison (right prayer joined with right action), he is now fully prepared for the "Great Leap".

A pulsating horse chase follows his saving of the princess that climaxes with Glass making the great spiritual leap from his current state of 'clutching onto the life he has now' to the state of 'letting go in order to embrace the life that is waiting for him'. Glass "dies" on this Great Leap as he rides Hikucs horse over the edge of a cliff. This is followed by Glass, once again, hibernating (Bear medicine) through a blizzard in a makeshift womb, this time in the dead body of his sacred horse mother, and being born anew after surviving a cold, dark night. 

The Great Spirit has, through Bear, Horse and Man(both Native and European), forced Glass to evolve by forging a new spirit, a new soul and a new self. Glass, having survived this crucible, is now sufficiently healed, and prepared to finish his earthly quest and then to shuffle off this mortal coil into the arms of the Great Spirit.

This alchemical cycle of destruction, purification, initiation and reconfiguration is the heart of the psychological myth of The Revenant and is what makes the film so imperative on a much deeper level than it's less than its rather mundane superficial one. Viewing the film through this mythological/psychological prism, makes for a much more satisfying experience. I recommend you do so, for Glass' spiritual journey is the same journey we all must make….the struggle to find meaning in our suffering as we hurtle headlong towards our own inevitable obliteration.

©2016