Showing posts with label movies.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies.. Show all posts
June 16, 2011
"Super 8"
Super 8, written and directed by the talented and crowd-pleasing J.J. Abrams (2009's Star Trek) and produced by Steven Spielberg, is a nostalgic homage to Spielberg's E.T., which was the highest-grossing movie ever for a decade after its 1982 release. But I never really got E.T. -- I'm not sure it would make my Top 10 Spielberg films -- and it's not clear I was all that wrong. Spielberg re-released it with a lot of hype in 2002, hoping to make a lot of money the way the Star Wars re-releases did on their 20th anniversaries, but nobody much cared. (Here's my 2002 review of the re-release.)
In an isolated industrial town in Ohio in the summer of 1979, some 13 year old boys are filming a zombie movie on Super 8 film under the direction of an ambitious fat kid who looks like J.J. Abrams (b. 1966).
The best scene in the movie is when they draft a classmate played by Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister (and the closest thing to a movie star in Super 8), to play the detective hero's wife. They give her a speech to read and by the end the boys are all gaping, having really noticed, for the first time, talent / emotions / girls / actresses / blondes / shiksas and other things that will cause them no end of trouble for the next few decades.
Then some sci-fi stuff happens, but the kids have a hard time focusing on that because, well, they're 13. The sci-fi stuff is rather like M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 hit Signs, but that had star power in the form of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix. Plus, Shyamalan is such a dope that you can see him talking himself into believing his own dopey theory about the cause of crop circles, while for Abrams, the sci-fi is just meta -- it's not supposed to make sense, it's a 45-year-old's recollection of what a bunch of 13-year-olds in 1979 would have thought was cool.
It's a popcorn movie in the sense that you spend a lot of time wondering if you'd find it more galvanizing if you got up and got a box of popcorn. Then, when the popcorn is digesting, you start wondering if maybe a box of Whoppers wouldn't do the trick. It's a little dull and unengaging
But it's a nice little movie, so if you lower your expectations, and sneak in a lot of free snacks from home, you might enjoy it.
By the way, that reminds me that my review of X-Men: First Class might have been a little harsh. I called it a "hodge-podge," which it is, but it's a hodge-podge of energetic and interesting elements. Comic book movies make so much money these days that they can afford a lot of talent. Sometimes, they manage to get the right tone to blend everything together (e.g., Iron Man) and a lot of times they don't (Iron Man II and X-Men: First Class), but you still get a lot of first class script doctoring for your ticket price. Super 8, in contrast, is a personal project, but seems a little underpowered. I came home from First Class and wrote two pages of notes. I came home from Super 8 and realized 24 hours later that I hadn't thought of much of anything to say about it.
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