I saw The Fabelmans yesterday, and it was very nice. It was a complete dramatic film of the kind I have stopped expecting from Hollywood. It made me appreciate the life of Stephen Spielberg. When I was a kid he was the director the grownups were all raving about. As I got older he seemed more and more boring and he became a symbol of conformist mediocrity and apathy to me. But this movie about his life is so good that I can appreciate him as a person and I want to go back and look through his catalogue to see if there’s anything else there as genuine. I don’t know what it means but it gives me a sliver of hope for Hollywood, although I still think it’s a cesspool maybe there could be a few interesting people in it. There’s no doubt that Spielberg is a good director and I’m inspired to attempt to write rationally about film again, to confront the absurd horrors of the movie business and try to pick out those few examples of civilization that yet remain. We’ll see if this works. But for now at least I started this blog entry, which I plan to develop over time – an experiment to see if there’s anything meaningful to say about movies in these days when the industry seems so utterly devoid of life and conscience.