Cinema Paradiso (1988)

Maybe we should keep the kissing parts in both our movies and our lives.  Postwar Italy is a wasteland of anger and loss, a country blasted to hell and back for the glory of Il Duce, and for what?  Dead husbands and ruined infrastructure.  A singular escape exists for young Salvatore in the form of the local cinema, and in the saint of a projectionist Alfredo who puts up with his nonsense.  Existence is authoritarian and cruel, teachers beating students for not knowing their multiplication tables and priests censoring movies for entire communities.  Cinema is dangerous in its implication, but also dangerous in its projection.  Alfredo gives everything he has, both to Salvatore and to his community.  He teaches the young boy his art and shares his gift with the town, both inside the theatre and for free out on the wall when their craving for movies proves insatiable.  Yet it’s that gift which causes the fire that blinds the old man.  Salvatore too mounts on his own expeditions of futility, courting a girl endlessly who proves fleeting and eternally unavailable.  When Salvatore throws off the yoke of suffocating life in this town of ghosts, he achieves cinematic success, apparently, but without the love associated with the emotions he sees depicted onscreen.  There are elements here, but the film is so jumpy and spotty in its connective tissue that it becomes difficult to connect with Salvatore’s journey.  Fleeting frames of elder Toto remembering his youth are apparently sufficient to explain his entire career and lack of connection with his past, and the jarring sense of loss captured in the conflagration of the first Cinema Paradiso is immediately undercut by the local lottery winner building a new one.  No amount of saccharine Ennio Morricone scoring can help to buoy cinematic thinness.

Life is a film for Salvatore, something underscored by the film’s editing sensibilities.  Match cuts are a characteristic feature throughout, pairing things seen projected on the silver screen with small-town life, from ringing bells to slaps.  Movies are a group event, everyone whooping and crying at what they see, but for Salvatore in his youth, they’re larger than life.  The lion seemingly vomiting up the film springs to life for him, frightening and beguiling.  That is the experience conjured by good movies, and imitated hollowly by this one.

THE RULES

SIP

A movie starts to show in the cinema.

A match cut happens in the edit.

Time jump.

BIG DRINK

Whackin’ kids.

The movie does that shot of someone watching a movie with the projector making a halo over their head.

The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg) x TIFF 2022.

Spielberg crafts a beautiful and painfully honest portrait of his Jewish-American family balanced with his growing love for filmmaking and cinema. The Fabelmans is full of hard personal truths about marriage, infidelity, divorce, and artistic pursuits. It's told with such reverence and understanding for its characters, especially for Williams' conception of Spielberg’s free-spirited mother. It feels both so real and imagined all at the same time.

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This was a hard watch. Not just because I watched it on my phone on a plane with really spotty wifi and tons of buffering. I've always had patience for buffering and it gave me the space I needed to keep it together on the plane. Although I was fully holding back tears. I decided to watch that on my phone because I thought it'd be funny. I also totally forgot that DKL was in this until the start of the studio visit. So I owe a lot of people an apology. This film hit so close to home for me. It was like seeing a version of my family that was Jewish and the wackiness was turned up to 11. I think if I saw this alone I would fully sob. Most of the cast was outstanding. The CA school stuff felt like a different movie to me, one where Sam and Logan realize they're gay and actually have huge crushes on each other. I'd also like to say, why am I Monica? Fantastic stuff. I just didn't expect to see the wackiest Jewish version of my family on my telephone on an airplane with terrible Wi-Fi connection and lots of buffering. I had to watch Mission Impossible: II as a palate cleanser (a reasonably horny film).

My favorite films of 2022:

-Close -Everything Everywhere All at Once -The Fabelmans -Glass Onion -Matilda -The Menu -The Outfit -RRR -Top Gun: Maverick -The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

My #Oscars series 2023 alternative movie posters 4/10: The Fabelmans (2022)

plz someone help is sammy fabelman gay??

映画「フェイブルマンズ」公式サイト

3月の観た映画紹介です。自伝ものは難しいと思いますが、そこは天下のスピルバーグ、全ての質が高い作品。地味だけど。成長・家族物語をこえて、良い映画を作ることが全てに優先するドライささえ感じます。特筆したいのは音楽・ジョン・ウイリアムスの素晴らしさと可愛いラストカットかなw

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Burt Fabelman: Amare qualcosa non basta, te ne devi anche prendere cura. È più importante del tuo hobby.

Sammy Fabelman: La smetti di chiamarlo hobby?

(The Fabelmans di Steven Spielberg, 2022)

The Fabelmans (2022)

When Sam Fabelman is behind the camera, you can tell how much Spielberg loves making movies. Whether he’s crafting a Western or a WWII action flick, Sam wells over with enthusiasm for what he’s making, an exuberant eruption of paint-filled water balloon squibs, improvised explosions, and dummies hurled off cliffs. In a sense it’s a puzzle to solve: how can Sam use his resources to create the image he has in his head, whether out on the shoot or in the editing bay? There’s of course a human aspect to filmmaking as well, and we also see Fabelman starting to find his footing in articulating his ideas to actors for what their characters are going through. Spielberg shows his hand at points, Sam walking his great-uncle through the thought process behind and impact of the Spielberg Gaze for which his films are so known. Hell, the younger Sam is pretty much genetically engineered for that exact impact, so big and blue are his eyes and so full of awe his face. The culmination of any movie being made is its exhibition for an audience, and there is so much joy in watching an audience react, laughing and clapping or gasping to the piece you’ve toiled away at making. But there is tension as well. Often during screening sequences, Spielberg is more interested in fleeting glances of nerves and tension than the movie being shown, drawing lines between characters. Movies can hurt, whether making one of Sam’s bullies to feel insecure or helping Sam realize his mother’s infidelity while editing a camping movie. In turn Sam has a lot of power, choosing what to include or remove from the final cut of a movie.

In his brief meeting with John Ford, portrayed gloriously by David Lynch, we get a bit of introspection about Spielberg as a creator. He is an undeniable creative, responsible for some of the best blockbusters ever put to film, but there’s a definite commercial tinge to his work. In this meeting, Sam describes an artwork in very literal terms, focusing on objects within an image. This contrasts with Ford, who gruffly distills art down to intrigue and style: if the horizon is low or high in the frame, it’s interesting. If not, it’s shit. Not just shit, full on Gordon Cole BULL-SHEIT.  Both can be accurate in their own camp. Yet Spielberg bows to Ford in the end, cheekily adjusting the framing of the last shot so that the sky dominates the image of studio backlots.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says ‘movie’, ‘train’, or ‘monkey’.

Gauzy lens flares.

Someone names a company.

A state gets name-dropped.

BIG DRINK

Time jump.

Sam cuts a strip of film.

Movie Review: The Fabelmans

In one of his most personal films made to date, Steven Spielberg turns the camera on his past, in the semi-autobiographical story of The Fabelmans.

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use Over the years, numerous filmmakers have given us semi-personal glimpses into their past. Cameron Crowe with Almost Famous, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and even George Lucas’ American Graffiti touched on portions of his teen years. For Director Steven Spielberg, there have been glimpses into his…

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Recently Viewed: The Fabelmans

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

What is a film? Is it a dream? A memory? Or is it a purely scientific phenomenon—a quirk of how the eye perceives motion when otherwise static photographs are projected in rapid succession? Is it art—visual poetry, a ballet of light and shadow?

Is it a truth that transcends objective facts?

In the case of The Fabelmans, the answer is easy: it is, as the title implies, a fable—the myth of modern cinema’s greatest icon, as presented by the legend himself. That’s right: after revolutionizing the industry (for better or worse) with such blockbusters as Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones series, Steven Spielberg has decided to tell the story of his own life… with a couple of minor embellishments, of course. After all, no director worth his salt has ever let a pesky thing like “reality” get in the way of good old-fashioned entertainment. Spielberg understands that the events of the past are inherently less interesting than their emotional impact—how they felt. Thus, he paints the screen with sensations—some mundane (the rhythmic clacking of long, manicured fingernails on piano keys), others surreal (unattended shopping carts stampeding downhill in the aftermath of a violent tornado), and a few just plain absurd (apparently, John Ford owned a match holder in the shape of a miniature cowboy boot, and his cigars flared up like goddamn Roman candles when he lit them).

If that description sounds overly sentimental or self-indulgent… well, then you probably won’t enjoy The Fabelmans very much, if I’m being completely honest. It’s the logical evolution of the short movies that Spielberg produced in his childhood: a form of therapy, an act of catharsis, an attempt to reign in and control chaos. Here, however, the traumas and anxieties that he confronts are significantly more personal, mature, and substantial than an irrational fear of colliding model trains (though the source of his young protagonist's teenage angst will hardly come as a surprise to anyone even passingly familiar with the subtext of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial).

Still, regardless of your opinion on Spielberg’s style, tone, and themes, you simply cannot deny that he is an accomplished craftsman. In the opening scene of The Fabelmans alone, for example, he seamlessly transitions from the master shot into coverage of three separate characters in a single unbroken take. He does this not to flaunt his technical prowess (indeed, the choreography between the camera and the performers is nearly invisible at a casual glance), but because he is economical—he simply doesn’t need to disruptively chop up the action in order to convey the relevant narrative information.

And in an era defined by bland, unambitious aesthetic uniformity, this cool, confident, effortless command of the frame is a breath of fresh air.

Steven Spielberg Got Emotional Casting Paul Dano as His Dad in The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg Got Emotional Casting Paul Dano as His Dad in The Fabelmans

Nailing the casting was especially important for Steven Spielberg‘s latest film The Fabelmans. The semi-autobiographical drama is based heavily around the legendary director’s early life growing up in post-World War II America and how he overcame a family divide to pursue his passion for movie-making. Through his stand-in Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), he explored the influence of both his…

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