Super-Duper: Super 8

I was living in Washington, DC in the summer of 1982. It was hot and muggy, as DC tends to be this time of year, as I waited in a movie admission line that stretched all the way from the one-screen, 800-seat KB Cinemas on Wisconsin Ave., N.W., right next to Rodman's, my favorite DC store (you could -- and still can -- get almost everything there), all the way around the corner on to Harrison St., and deep into the leafy Friendship Heights neighborhood. I was going to see E.T. 

Flash forward 28 years and 364 days later, and we now have the opening of Super 8, a homage to E.T., among other early Spielberg films, from writer/director J.J. Abrams, who not only pays tribute to the filmmaker, but has Spielberg along as his macher co-producer.

No one who comes to my 16-screen megaplex tonight will have to wait on line to get in (we have reserved seating and online ticketing), and today's theaters are filled with more distractions than just talking, but I will be surprised if we have trouble with people texting in Super 8. The secret that nobody tells you about texting during the movies: people tend to not do it when what's up on the big screen is more compelling than what's on their small screens. If you're watching Super 8, you're really going to be watching it.

(There are, of course, exceptions -- from "exceptional" individuals, aka self-involved assholes, who don't believe that courtesy of others is something that's required of them as adults. I applaud the Alamo Drafthouse for making an example out of one of them -- an example that's been viewed 1.4 million times since it was posted this week.)

Super 8 is the first hat-trick for Abrams, as he's written, produced and directed the film. It's also the first non-franchise film he's directed -- his other two directorial credits were the third installment of the Mission: Impossible series and the successful 2009 reboot of the evergreen Star Trek franchise. Super 8 is an original story, set in a small Ohio town in 1979, that evokes the era of the time by using some of the filmmaking techniques prevalent back then, which apparently include excessive lens flares and not showing the monster until the third act. (I grew weary of the former, but applaud the latter.)

Super 8, for those too young to know, was an improved 8mm film stock introduced by Kodak in 1965, and was what amateur filmmakers could afford to use to make films, back in the day when you couldn't use a phone for that stuff because it was still back at home, affixed to a wall. (We used Super 8 stock to make short films in my Visual Arts class in junior high school, a class taught by the prolifically bearded Mr. Greene, who always managed to be playing Physical Graffiti on the classroom's record player. For years I thought of "Kashmir" as "Mr. Greene's Theme," but I digress.)

Young Joe Lamb (a wonderful neophyte named Joel Courtney) lives with the sorrow of his mother's recent factory-accident death and with his depressed father, Jackson, who's Lillian's deputy sheriff (Kyle Chandler). Joe's friends have all agreed to kick off their summer vacation by helping their friend Charles, a pudgy kid from a big family, make a Super 8 zombie movie. To lend it more verisimilitude, they're going to start at midnight, when both Joe's and Charles' ideal 14-year-old woman, Alice (Elle Fanning), will pick up the film crew in a car she's "borrowed" from her dad, a ne'er-do-well townie named Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard).

Jackson, Joe, Alice and Louis, awestruck by something *secret*

Joining Charles, Joe and Alice, the leading lady, are Cary, the pyro kid we all knew growing up, Martin aka Smartin, the lead actor playing a detective on the zombie beat, and assistant Preston. After a rehearsal of a scene at Lillian's tiny railroad depot, the kids see an actual train approaching in the dark night, and Charles' battle cry of "production values!" hurries them into setting up to shoot the scene so that the train can be barreling through the station in the background (Charles directs his actors to talk extra loud).

In the distance, Joe notices a pickup truck racing towards the tracks, then deliberately stopping on them, directly in the path of the oncoming train. A frightening, but cinematically excellent, derailment follows, the children fleeing for their lives, and while the camera is knocked over, the film keeps running. Regrouping afterwards to assess the damage, they are shocked to discover that the truck was driven by their science teacher, Dr. Woodward (played by Glynn Turman, Mayor Royce on The Wire), who terrifies them both by virtue of still being freakily alive, and by brandishing a gun and telling them that they and their parents will come to harm if they tell anyone what they saw. Shaken by a second confrontation with death on the same night, the crew agrees and narrowly escapes the arrival of military personnel flooding into the crash scene.

Deputy Sheriff Lamb rightfully suspects that there are an awful lot of military troops on hand for an ordinary train derrailment, and has his requests for manifest info denied. Joe tells the rest of the kids that this was an Air Force train, something he recognizes from his experiences as a model-builder. Seemingly random stuff starts disappearing from the town: people, power cables, microwave ovens, speak-and-spell toys, car engines, all the town's dogs (ok, one of those is from a different movie). I don't want to talk about the rest of the plot, except to say that there are some good, old-fashioned, goosebumpy jolts along the way and a passing acquaintance with the inchoate longings of youth on the brink of adolescence.

A lot of emphasis is being placed on how Super 8 is derivative of Speilberg's work, as a director, writer or producer, especially relating to the kids portrayed in The Goonies and E.T. I have to say, I'm not particularly disturbed by the obvious references. People used to criticize Brian DePalma for making three psychological thrillers between 1980-84 that were (and still are) extremely derivative of Hitchcock (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out -- which also evokes Antonioni's BlowUp and Coppola's The Conversation -- and Body Double), but he made an infamous remake of Scarface in those years as well. It's clear that Abrams is an otaku of this type of genre and, probably like many men his age, has an affinity for Spielberg's early work. If you're going to be derivative, why not at least borrow a vibe, or a trick or two, from a good director who was working during the time in which you film is set?

I don't think Abrams has enough films under his belt to have developed a style that is clearly his own, repetitive lens flares notwithstanding. Maybe he never will. Is this film as original, ambitious or visually thrilling as last summer's breakout film, Inception? No it is not. (But then I would quibble that Christopher Nolan is no Stanley Kubrick, either.) But with his last two films J.J. Abrams has delivered entertaining summer movies that are a popcorn-gobbling pleasure to watch. In this season of over-marketed/3D/spandex-clad junk, that's an accomplishment.


*Awesomely inappropriate double feature: Super 8 paired with 8MM (which stars Do You Want Butter on That? fave, Nic Cage). I dare you, New Beverly Cinema. I double-dare you.

Woody's Profiterole

Nothing could warm the heart of a lit major more than to revel in the success of Woody Allen's latest, a salut d'amor to the City of Lights, Midnight in Paris.

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's 42nd feature in 45 years, since his debut with 1966's What's Up Tiger Lily? (although there was a 3-year gap until his second film, Take the Money and Run). Midnight in Paris was also the apt, out-of-competition opener for this year's Cannes Film Festival and is an interesting contrast to another auteur film that also debuted at Cannes -- and subsequently won the Palme d'Or --Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which is only Malick's fifth feature in 38 years. Say what you might about Woody Allen, anyone who can make a feature film every year for 4+ decades is not precious, and since moving away from New York stories -- especially with the excellent morality tale Match Point and the overlapping triangles of troubled love in Vicky Cristina Barcelona -- his later work has been infused with both new energy and Euro financing.

Midnight in Paris opens with a scenic montage of the city, much like 1979's Manhattan did with images of that city. The glory of Paris cannot help but stir the longings of anyone who's been there -- is it even possible for a person of artistic sensibilities to visit Paris and not fantasize about living there? (My answer is non.)

Owen Wilson as stars Gil Pender, a writer/Woody-manqué, the maestro himself well beyond the age when he could credibly play this sort of protagonist. Gil and his ill-matched fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams), are tag-along guests of her reactionary parents, moneyed francophobes who view Gil in the dimmest of lights. While their daughter admires Gil for his "success," it appears that she has no appreciation for his needs as an artist -- he's struggling with his first novel, set in the milieu of a nostalgia shop. Gil fantasizes about living the life of a real writer in 1920s Paris, living in a garret and walking the city in the rain, while Inez is mentally moving them forward, to relentlessly sunny Malibu. Despite their shared blond tresses, Gil seems muted, and it's Inez who seems to carry a glow wherever she goes -- pumped with her energy, their hotel suite blazes with gold, like a pastry crust cooked to perfection.

As if the snide in-laws weren't burden enough for Gil, they run into an Paul, a pompous know-it-all friend of Inez's whom she holds in absurd regard, played to smug perfection by Michael Sheen (whom I spotted in the lobby of my theater a few days ago). Paul holds forth with unselfconscious grandiosity on the subjects of French wine, architecture and art (he even has the gall to argue with a Musée Rodin guide -- played by France's real-life First Lady, Carla Bruni -- about whether Camille Claudel was Rodin's wife or mistress. Mon dieu!)

(Paul's a relative of the pontificator on line to see The Sorrow & the Pity behind Alvy & Annie in Annie Hall, the same blowhard Marshall McLuhan puts so neatly in his place, and the filmed fantasy of many of us forced to overhear the conversations of others in a confined space. Truth be told, though, I'm almost nostalgic for intellectually pretentious remarks in this era, where all we get is the banality of continuous cell phone chats, most of which I crave to be in a language other than English to better ignore the sheer mediocrity of them.)

Fleeing from the continued ordeal of Paul's overbearing expertise, which is about to be wed with the horror of dancing, and tipsy from an evening of sampling vin rouge, Gil makes his own way into the night, walking the cobblestone streets with only a perfunctory concern as to whether he's lost or not. At the stroke of midnight Gil is found by a vintage car full of revelers who stop and entice Gil to join their group. I'm loathe to say more about this group, except to note that Gil has the time of his life and rejoins them on subsequent nights, at last finding the kindred spirits missing from his own life.

Without giving too much away, Midnight in Paris addresses issues of longing and feelings of "otherness" often exorcized in art. As much of a waste of time it is to be nostalgic for one's own past, imagine what a soul-exhausting exercise it is to carry the torch of nostalgia for an era in which you have no place whatsoever? As my mother used to famously say (to me, at least) about the 1950s nostalgia that cropped up in the 1970s (Happy Days, anyone?), what was so great about the Korean War and McCarthyism? In other words, one woman's Belle Époque is another man's nightmare world without antibiotics.

Or, I can bemoan the ubiquitousness of instantaneous communication as being of inverse proportion to people actually having anything to say by typing these lines on a laptop computer at a coffee shop with free wifi, perhaps an equivalent, in this era, to a 1920s brasserie, non?  You will have to see the delightful Midnight in Paris and decide for yourself.

All Wave at Thor: God of Incredible Adequacy

I was at work a few weeks back and after a day spent forecasting the coming week's attendance, roughing out the house placements (which films are going where in our 16-screen megaplex), and putting the previous week's data (attendance, grosses, etc.) into various Excel spreadsheets, I decided to see a movie. We get free passes on weekdays, before 6 on Friday and after 6 on Sundays (provided the shows aren't too full), and I consider it part of my responsibility as a programmer to "keep up with the product." It's a matter of professional pride to me to be able to, on the spot, synopsize for the guests any film currently playing and guests often also ask if I've personally seen and/or liked something. Formulating opinions on film is not something I struggle with; I've been doing my whole life, long, long before I began working at a movie theater. As I once explained to a co-worker, some people went to church every weekend, but my family went to the movies.


Looking at the post-work showtimes, I had two options: the enfeebling Something Borrowed (another of those dreadful "frenemy" romcoms that Kate Hudson seems to crank out. I guess Almost Famous was a fluke. Then again, there aren't any films like Shampoo floating around for her to grab, like there was for her mom, Goldie Hawn) and the the previous weekend's high-grosser, Thor.


Naturally, after the previous weekend, when Fast Five blew the doors off the box office with its revved-up $86M opening, the collective amnesia of the industry kicked in and made them forget the previous four months of mostly mediocre box office, and led to an over-estimation of what to expect from a new superhero franchise of a lesser-known character that starred some anonymous Aussie beekcake instead of Robert Downey, Jr.


The first weekend of May has been claimed for Marvel-related releases ever since Iron Man had its $98.6M opening in 2008. Wolverine bagged $85M in 2009, Iron Man 2 opened to $128M last year, and the next two first weekends in May are already booked for Joss Whedon's 2012 adaptation of The Avengers, starring Iron Man, Craptain America, Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury aka Samuel L. Jackson in an eye patch, et. al, then Iron Man 3 in 2013. Thor's hammer only managed to pound out a $66M opening, making him quite Maypole underperformer in the Marvelverse. (And my anti-3D campaign is catching on -- the majority of our guests opted for 2D presentation.)


Of course I chose the glorious 2D 35 mm presentation, so what I saw on the screen was not negatively impacted by digital 3D. I know I'm not the audience for this film, and I have no axe to grind with those who are. I liked the first Iron Man a lot -- I thought maybe Kenneth Branagh would bring something to the party, directorially, with this one -- he certainly has experience with moody Danes in his resume. Still, I was immediately struck with the thought 'Jesus, they spent $150M on this?' The best I can say is that I found it incredibly adequate.


Thor creaks and groans along on its plot tropes. Asgard looks like a McMansionized version of Superman's old Fortress of Solitude. Showing up as Thor's Daddy is Anthony Hopkins, who wears an eye patch and bellows. I wonder how much of that $150M went to Hopkins, who would show up for anything these days (autopsy? car wash opening? bris?), if the price is right? Thor has a princely shit-fit, gets his hammer taken away by dad and Thor's hammer and ass are kicked down to Earth, where he's immediately run over by that weird chick who was in Black Swan (The releases of Natalie Portman this year have been the stoner flick Your Highness, a rom-com with Ashton Kutcher called No Strings Attached and this forgettable role. She's not quite in you-have-to-give-it-back territory like Halle Berry, but I hope Natalie makes some better choices when she returns from maternity leave.)


Natalie plays a scientist in this one; you can tell how serious she is because she doesn't wear jewelry. She does however drool like a Teen Beat reader over the big, possibly crazee blond guy she mows down in the middle of a New Mexico night. But then again, can you blame her?

With her are a comedic relief intern (Kat Dennings) and Stellan Skarsgård, a bonafide Scandinavian along for the ride to provide some clunky exposition for the "too Norse" moments in the plot (perhaps he also helped construct some IKEA furniture for the sets). 


Back upstairs in Asgard, Thor's trickster brother Loki is up to something, Anthony Hopkins has piped down (he's in a coma), Thor's homies want to rescue him, there are frost monsters, and oh crap I just can't type any more of this meaningless plot drivel. Suffice it to say, Thor does some heroic stuff, gets his hammer back, learns something and will be around for the next film. His brother Loki will be too, which frankly is more interesting, as I prefer tricksters to blond beefcake.


To me, the only spark of life in the entire film came from an edgy soldier guarding the hammer crash site who asks his superiors whether he should "take this guy out, or did you want to send in some more guys for him to beat up?" It's an unbilled Jeremy Renner cameo, priming his pump to play Hawkeye in next year's Avengers movie. This guy can bring it, even when covered in mud and in a night scene.

March (and April) Madness

Yep, it's been a while. Sometimes the craziness of actually working -- even at a movie theater -- can sap one's creative juices.

Before we push ahead into the present, aka The Silly Season of Spandex & 3D, I'd like to do a brief recap of this Spring's hits/misses and everything in between.

The month of March began promisingly enough, with the March 4 releases of the delightfully off-kilter Rango, and the not-nearly-off-kilter-enough The Adjustment Bureau, which, apart from the chemistry of Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, was pretty forgettable. Did anyone else just assume The Man Upstairs was this guy?

The weekend of March 11 brought us the crapfest that is, was and will always be Battle Los Angeles, or as I call it, Battle Louisiana, as that's the only LA featured in it (it was filmed in Baton Rouge). The best part of that was print screening (with audience) the opening midnight show and the peals of laughter during Aaron Eckhart's painfully hokey "inspirational" speech, which literally culminates with the line "But none of that matters now." People were howling.  March 11 brought two other howlers, Amanda Seyfried in the pointless Red Riding Hood (why Red, what big... eyes...you have) and Mars Needs Moms, the dismal $21M box office performance of which (against a budget of $150M) finally killed off horrible, dead-eyed motion-capture 'animation' that Robert Zemekis has been foisting on us for years.

Then The Boys of Spring blew into the theater: Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper, in The Lincoln Lawyer and Limitless, respectively, both of which opened on March 18 and kept going, week after week, like the Energizer Vibrator. Yeah, guess what -- turns out that 51% of the population find Messrs. McConaughey and Cooper very easy on the eyes. (My friend Melinda and I watched them back-to-back one afternoon, an event I dubbed a Dirty Manwich Double Feature.) The Lincoln Lawyer made $83.5M against its $70M budget, and Limitless a whopping $78.5M against its $27M budget, which showed that Bradley Cooper can now call himself a bonafide movie star, capable of opening a movie, and that Relativity could finally release a movie that didn't stink like a dead man's balls (see Season of the Witch, previously reviewed here. Better still, see it not.) Both films lasted until almost May, unheard of in the churn-and-burn release patterns these days.

It also helped that the films they were in either featured some other, actually good actors and meaty plot (The Lincoln Lawyer) or enough drug imagery/photographic pyrotechnics to keep eyes of all genders interested (Limitless). Personally, I've always considered Matthew's entire acting range to consist of shirt on or shirt off, but the supporting cast (William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei, etc.) helped prop this one up. Matt's actually wearing a shirt and a tie during most of The Lincoln Lawyer, so perhaps it's an Oscar bid.

I've liked Brad's looks since he popped up on the TV series Alias years ago. Plus he resembles someone else I'm inordinately fond of, prior to his conversion to a scaly heavy (every other Brit thesp has done Potter -- why not hold out for the best role?)

March also brought two strong indie films, a new adaptation of the classic Jane Eyre and the fantastic Win Win. Jane Eyre starred Mia Wasikoska, who starred in Alice in Wonderland, and Michael Fassbender, currently starring in a different kind of literary adaptation as young Ian McKellan (aka Magneto) in X-Men First Class.  In Win Win, Paul Giamatti gave us yet another flawed but redeemable human being in the form of Mike Flaherty, a small-time lawyer and coach in the suburbs of northern NJ (where I grew up) wrestling with making the ends meet without losing what's important. Bobby Cannavale as Mike's divorced friend was hilarious and touching. As a special treat, my theater's rep series was celebrating the Academy Awards during March by presenting films that received Best Picture nominations (but did not win) and we got to show a beautiful 35mm print of Sideways on the big screen. Talk about a win-win.

The month ended badly with the release Suck-It...er...Sucker Punch, a movie with a trailer so sexist and just plain incomprehensible that 51% of the population were uninterested in ever seeing it. Let's see, as near as I could tell from the preview, the lead girl is in some sort of dream landscape she's imagining to free herself mentally from the women's prison she's in and she chooses to dress like the pervy Japanese schoolgirl archetype from a manga series? Um, no. It was director Zack Snyder who took the spanking -- a paltry $19M opening and a $36M gross against its cost of $82M -- after this and Watchmen he's practically the go-to guy to make big money-losers out of incomprehensible material. The only film he made real money on was 300, which I find unwatchable. Best 300 joke ever, from Sarah Silverman: it was called 300 because that's how gay it is on a scale from 1-10.

We get no April showers in Los Angeles, but we do get a dull drizzle of middling film releases. Come April Fool's Day, I was very keen to see Source Code, the second film of Duncan Jones, who directed the superb Moon. Source Code was just okay, kind of a sophomore shrug, if you will. It moved along at a good clip for one of those looped, time-rebooting thingies, and some good moments with of acting, but my memory's been wiped nearly clean of it two months later. Maybe that was their plan...in some alternate universe with meta-plots.


Insidious, which I have not seen, also opened on the first and has gone on the be the biggest grossing film relative to budget this year. Made for a very un-scary $1.5M, it managed to frighten up $52.7M. The heavily-hyped Scream 4, which opened on April 15, hasn't even recouped its $40M budget yet. Low budget horror, provided it offers some real, imaginative jolts, is still a thrill for audiences to discover. More-of-the-same horror reboots, sequels, etc., not so much.

Speaking of thill-less, and pointless, reboots, April 8 brought us a new Arthur. I was always fond of the original, with Dudley Moore, Liza Minelli and John Gielgud, but it seemed to be very much a film of its time (1981). Drunk driving was still funny back then, with Dudley weaving out in his Rolls to meet his future in-laws. This new Arthur stars Russell Brand, some mumblecore indie chick and Helen Mirren. Russell Brand was both too tall and not nearly drunk enough throughout. Also, having his dim chauffeur drive him around Manhattan in the Batmobile is belabored, not funny. There were a few laugh-out-loud moments (I do like Russell Brand, even though he's quite a limited performer), but the thing was generally a sodden mess, with Helen Mirren no match for the memory of John Gielgud. The girl lead, played by Greta whose-last-name-I-feel-not-like-looking-up, was changed from the notably, vividly lower class Liza Minelli (who meets Arthur as she's shoplifting a tie for her father's birthday gift) to a waify little thing who gives tours of Grand Central without [gasp] a permit. Wow, how edgy.

Other second weekend of April releases include Hanna, a violent exercise in style with a propulsive score by the Chemical Brothers that takes you on a high-energy trip that goes nowhere. Your Highness, another unfunny stoner comedy, lasted less time in theaters than an ounce would at Snoop Dog's house.

Tax day brought Rio, a pleasing G-rated musical romp set in a cleaned-up Rio with birds of many colors. It was no Pixar film, but then again, it wasn't hyperkintic dreck like Hop, with an Easter Bunny heir who poops jelly beans [sigh] that kids had to settle for the first two weeks of April. Also on the 15th, a purportedly long-awaited, Tea Party-hyped first installation of a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. With free market grosses of $4.6M against a $20M, Atlas wasn't the only one shrugging. Also, selfishness is not a philosophy, it's a character flaw.

April 22 brought the annual Disneynature release on Earth Day. This year was African Cats, which I enjoyed immensely. It featured gorgeous photography and two family sagas, one about a cheetah mom and her cubs, and the other about an aging lioness and a pride that's about to get jacked by a new male lion and his four strapping sons (those were some good looking lions -- don't tell my cat.).

Speaking of African mammals, Water for Elephants released on the 22nd as well, starring Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz (the scary Nazi from Inglorious Basterds) and that sparkling piece of wood from Twlight, Robert Pattinson. Holy shit, can that guy not act. The elephant had more acting chops, and she was way cuter than RPutz -- she had the most adorable freckles. And Reese got to wear some pretty Depression-era clothes. A meh time was had by all.

But the biggest hit of spring came the last weekend in April with another film set in Rio de Janiero, Fast Five. It found a 6th gear to shift into, opening to $86M and grossing $199.7M in the U.S. (so far, my theater just dropped it 2 days ago) and $556M worldwide. It cost $125M before it even backed out of the garage, but it seems to be a straighforward enough genre film that it can translate well into any market. (I'm curious to know how much of that $125M was spent on steroids and body oils for The Rock. The dude was so enormous in this movie that next to him, Vin Diesel looked like some tiny turd he propulsion-shat while lifting weights.)

That big opening for Fast Five got the industry all lathered up about summer, falsely assuming that the months-long box office doldrums were over. Sadly, it stoked the foolish fantasy that this summer's seeming weekend-after-weekend of flaccid superheroes was going to be boffo, that Thor wouldn't rhyme with snore, bore and Anthony Hopkins is a big whore. But that's a tale for another day in the near future...