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Super 8: The Super Combo Delivers Best of the Year

I’m fairly sure there is something more than lead in the water here.

Rating: 10 out of 10

One is a legend in the movie industry, the other is the current hot ticket with a winning streak not seen in a long, long time. Sometimes when teams like this are paired up, the expectations can be unbearable and completely fantastical, but J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg are not ones to break under the pressure of expectations. The stage was set perfectly for them and they delivered brilliantly with an homage to each other’s previous works and the simple storytelling styles of film classics gone by.

Super 8 surrounds a group of movie loving misfits who find their town the unwilling center of a government takeover after a terrible and deadly train accident. While filming their own Super 8 movie for a local festival, they bear witness to the escape of something unexplainable, setting up a quest the kids must all rise to complete or watch their friends, families and entire town get erased from the map.

Jeff Goldsmith, the Q&A master behind the popular podcast The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith sent out this tweet after screening this new summer throwback:

“I just saw Super 8. Wanna know the guarded “secret” behind it? Abrams uses plenty of screen time to develop characters you’ll care about. (@yogoldsmith)”

As usual, Jeff nailed it on the head. Above and beyond all the other things that done right in the making of this film, it is the writing and careful execution of creating characters that are human, real and inherently lovable. Super 8 brings back the youthful purity of classics like E.T., The Goonies and Stand by Me, something the movie industry has been woefully lacking in the last few years. The story gently reels you in until you almost look at their story as your own, a memory being perfectly played out they way you wish it happened to you.

Then comes the picture perfect casting, where I was compelled instantly by the innocence of Joel Courtney (as Joe Lamb), who is the first young actor since Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous to truly capture that wide-eyed stare into the possible purity of the future. Another factor connecting the audience to Courtney was our shared need to care for and protect the young damsel in distress, Elle Fanning (playing Alice Dainard). Fanning is the epitome of the first girl we all fell in love with in elementary school  and she holds the audience in the palm of her hand throughout every scene. Not to be outdone, Riley Griffiths (playing Charles, the young film director), taps into the other side of the coin, the best friend who always wanted to be the hero, but never quite made it to center stage.

Behind the camera, Abrams and Spielberg may have just cemented themselves as the ultimate dynamic duo. Spielberg is still a legend in Hollywood and has incredibly well tuned story senses, but some of his recent efforts (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, War of the Worlds) have been slightly off from his previous greatness. Abrams, on the other hand, is still a relative newcomer to the big screen (only directing Mission Impossible III and Star Trek), but has proven himself a near master of the current form, grown on the sensibilities of a changing and ever adapting crowd. Abrams took this story and crafted it into a beautiful homage to the man sitting right next to him. Super 8 is a throwback to Spielberg’s younger days, giving a whole new generation of movie watchers a glimpse into what others grew up with in the late 70′s and early 80′s. The balance of character development, action sequences and well-paced comedy beats really gives this film a perfect blend for nearly every audience member.

The End of the Page recommendation: Super 8 is a perfectly crafted summer blockbuster. It just doesn’t get better, at least not this year.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Lost Hopes

“Why does there have to be protesters at every premier?!”

Nineteen years. That’s how long we waited for this movie to come to fruition. Nineteen years. Someone born after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade left the theater is no old enough to vote, get married and fly halfway around the world to fight for the right for this movie and many others to be made. For their sakes, I seriously hope they don’t see it. They’ll all go AWOL instantly.

Yes, I’ll get right out there and say it, I did not like the movie. In fact, I was fairly offended by time it was over. I’ve read a number of reviews that are cutting the movie a ton of slack because it’s an Indy film and we all just love him so much and we’re so glad to see him back, but there is only so much slack in the world and it must have gotten used up in the mere hours before I got to see it on opening day. I guess from now on I should keep an extra helping of slack in an airtight jar in my closet, just for these occasions. (There are spoilers from this point on, so if you still want to go in untarnished, stop here. Just know deep in your heart that I tried to stop you.)

Let’s see if I can list out just a small helping of the problems with this flick:

- The magnetism of the Crystal Skull (and other alien body parts): This little tidbit of information was brought out pretty quickly in the film as one of those cool tricks only Indy seem to know about, but for the rest of the film the magnetism became a choice of each individual scene. You could feel George Lucas think, “Should we have it attract metal here? Yeah that would be cool” or “Nah, that doesn’t seem cool here. Let’s not make it magnetic at all. Or how about we stop it’s magnetic powers with this mystical hemp cloth!! God, I’m a genius.”

- CGI – Spielberg has a well earned place in cinema history for pushing CGI to it’s limits and making it work. On the flip side, Lucas has an equally well earned place in cinema history for pushing CGI to the other end of the spectrum where he think he can just replace real actors from this point on. The quality and usage in Crystal Skull was borderline childish. The duck boat effects over the waterfalls, the unnecessary CGI in the jungle chase, the mind numbing alien ship evacuation, all of these felt like a freshman in animation school could have been impressed by his work, but not coming from Spielberg, who previously with War of the Worlds actually made me a tad skiddish going outside after the movie was over since I believed those things could be there.

- Indy’s age: Harrison Ford reportedly waited for a long time to find a script that he was happy with and took a respectful look at his age and the age of his character. This is what he agreed to? I can’t think of a fight scene where he got more beat down than in this chapter during the ant hill sequence, adding the fact that he is about twenty years older now. We needed Indy to be smarter, more clever, using that intelligence that he cultivated over a quarter of a century as a professor, but instead we get a completely ludicrous senior citizen MMA match in the dirt. Even the slightest touch of realism here would have seen Indy with a broken hip.

- Shia, the Monkey King: This almost ranks as the most disappointing part of the movie because they were just starting to win me back when Shia gets sucked up into the jungle trees. He gets wrapped up in a piar of vines that decide completely on their own to retract and pull him up into a mystical monkey kingdom, where in three agonizing seconds of screen time, Shia learns to swing through the trees like Tarzan and lead the monkeys on an all out assault against Cate Blanchett. If they had made a point earlier of saying all the monkeys in that region of the world were strict haters of Communism, maybe I could have joined in the fun, but they happen to leave that out.

- Indy vs. Nuke: Yep, why not? Let’s open this movie big since people have waited so long to see it hit the screen. What could possibly be bigger than showing Indiana Jones survive a nuclear blast in the first 20 minutes of the film? What could possibly not make sense about there being random lead lined refrigerators in a fake town? What could possibly not seem plausible about that same fridge being magically vaulted by the blast miles away, with Indy not only able to walk afterwards, but just plain able to get out of the fridge at all? Didn’t kids lock themselves in those and die all the time in the 50′s?

There are more things I could go into, but I’ll just leave you with those few bullet points. I’m all for continuing franchises and moving the story along as long as they are treated with the same intelligence and respect as the previous versions. This was not only denied the respect of a well written script, but it also managed to deny the respect of its audience. My advice now is for Spielberg to slow his downward spiral by moving as far away from George Lucas as possible, and if he likes a script from now on (as he supposedly did with the Indy version done by Frank Darabont, which Lucas vetoed), man up and shoot it. It couldn’t have been nearly as awful as what we got in the end.

Even worse is the fact that this will make a retarded amount of money, like previous crapfest Spider-Man 3, and further the studios and other directors to think making movies like this, no matter how bad, is a profitable and worthwhile venture. I’m begging someone with influence and opportunity to sit these people down, show them Once, Lars and the Real Girl, Brick, hell, make them watch the original three Indy films and see if they can’t remember what doing a good job really felt like.