Episodes
Friday Jan 20, 2012
Jim Reviews Super 8
Friday Jan 20, 2012
Friday Jan 20, 2012
Super 8
Some movies are victims of their own hype. Don’t get me wrong, some over hyped films are still amazing and reach their levels of over exposure due to their quality. Films like “The Dark Knight,” “Terminator 2,” and “The Matrix,” all had unrealistic amounts of buzz surrounding them. But they endure because they are fundamentally good movies.
Hype in general tends to make me shy away from films. I didn’t see “Trainspotting” until it was out on video for months because for me it had become less a movie and more a series of posters that guys in the dorm had because it made them seem deep and interesting. But when I finally saw it I understood where the hype came from.
I think the problem with film hype is when it comes from the wrong place. There are some movies that attempt to build buzz by pushing things that are completely irrelevant to what the film is. Studios attempt this all the time and are, more often than not, unsuccessful with it. This is why you hear things like…
“From the studio that brought you…”
“From the producer of…”
“From the mind of…”
“From the visionary mind of…”
Hell, even “Death to Smoochie” was pushed as being “From the twisted mind of Danny Devito…” which is officially in the running for best sentence ever used on TV.
But really, what does all this have to do with the film itself? Does the studio really matter? How about the producer? Is there another place that a story comes from, or do we really need to specify mind?
It always reminds me of a Wayne’s World sketch from SNL when they were talking about the ads for “Carlito’s Way,” that flashed Pacino’s screen credits.
“Serpico,”
“The Godfather”
“Dog Day Afternoon,”
“Yeah, I noticed they didn’t say ‘Cruising.’”
Trying to push a movie like this is odd. Especially when you are using something that is not really tied to the person in question’s specialty.
So when “Super 8” came out and it was hailed as being “Produced by Steven Spielberg” I had my doubts.
Make no mistake, Spielberg is… well, he’s Spielberg. He is one of the undisputed masters of American cinema. He’s like Athena; he just sprang from the head of Hollywood fully formed and amazing. But has anyone ever hailed his producers talent? Not that he isn’t a great producer, but it’s like Bruce Willis’s band. No matter how good he is at it, you will never see him as a rock star (Note that I didn’t use “Billy Bob Thornton” and “The Box Masters” on this one, because I know he’s touch about his film and music career being mentioned together.).
So we have Spielberg as a producer, which is fairly meaningless in terms of anything other than being able to put Spielberg’s name on the film, and J.J. Abrams on as director.
Abrams is an interesting selling point because he is far more successful as a producer. Yes, he is a writer and a director, but his big successes have come from his producer work.
Don’t get me wrong, they are both accomplished in their respective roles, but it felt very much like there was an attempt to make this movie based on the names, and just the way people were used in this film… I don’t know.
Add to it that Abrams kind of has a problem with the third act. If you look at his work up to this point he had “Felicity,” about witch I know nothing other than it has a woman named Felicity in it (Or it is a meditation on the subject of Happiness. I don’t really know.), “Alias,” which started off really strong, got stronger, and then kind of fell completely apart, “Lost,” which was… well, I watched a few episodes of it, but I picked up very quickly on the “we have no idea what to do with this story and are making it up as we go along” aspect of it (I know it’s cliché, but it is also true.), and “Mission: Impossible 3,” which I thought was fantastic (Though a bit “Alias”-ey, but without Jennifer Garner in lingerie.), but it did start to lose its grip in the final third.
So, we have one of the masters of visual storytelling producing a fantastic producer who has issues with third acts on a film with an advertising campaign that stressed ambiguity. Let’s just say I wasn’t overcome with desire to see it.
But, I recently relented and decided to check it out, and I was pleasantly surprised.
On the surface it’s kind of a harder edged “E.T.” You have a child centered narrative, a mysterious alien, and an overwhelming authoritarian governmental intrusion. There isn’t the same sense of innocence here though. These kids live in a very real world where very bad things can and do happen. They still have the childlike wonder and all, but it is tempered with more reality than Eliot’s world was.
We have a group of kids working on a super 8 horror film for a competition who sneak out one night to use a passing train to add production value to their film. They see something they shouldn’t have and things progress from there.
There are a lot of good things going on here. The acting is fantastic. I normally cringe at adolescent actors because they tend to do kind of a half assed approximation of how kids their age act. That is not the case here. All the kids actually come off as real people reacting to their world in a believable way. It’s pretty amazing. Kyle Chandler knocks it out of the park. Yes, there are some echoes of Coach Taylor (If you don’t get that reference, stop reading and go watch all of Friday Night Lights. It’s ok. I’ll wait…. See, wasn’t he amazing?), but that’s not so much him as it is the part. It’s a guy who is similar to Coach Taylor, but isn’t Coach Taylor. It’s a slight distinction to make, but it’s there. The overall plot is interesting and well delivered as well.
There are some nagging points though. Ron Eldard shows up as the father of Elle Fanning’s (Who shows that Dakota isn’t the only member of that family with talent.) character and provides a kind of anticlimactic plotline. Chandler’s character hates him, and it is established early on that he is in some way connected to the death of Chandler’s wife (The mother of our protagonist.). But the back story they develop is weak and not compelling, thus making some of the later plot developments less powerful than they should be.
This film is odd because I though it was a good film but I felt like there were a few points that could have been fine tuned to make it a great film. If you are a fan of sci-fi it is definitely worth your time, but you don’t have to love sci-fi to like it. There is a very human story being told here that is very accessible. In the end, I think this film would have been better served by downplaying the producer/director wunderkind connection. Sometimes, letting the story stand on its own is a better way to go.
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