Super 8
Flock to the Angelika all you like, folks (I know I do), but the simple truth is this; man cannot live on sterling indies alone. They may be soulful, organic, deeply satisfying dishes, but we all need to tuck into a sugary, summer-days-driftin'-away confection every now and then--albeit a well-made one. Super 8 is just that, an Event picture with a capital E that doubles as a piquant, sweetly nostalgic ode to the art of the analog home movie. It's appropriate that Steven Spielberg's producing; the movie pays homage to many of his hot-months milestones, including Close Encounters, ET, and The Goonies, and is worth mentioning in the same breath as those minor classics. Director JJ Abrams has proved a fiercely talented celluloid pop artist from the very beginning, but here he outdoes himself. This is one of the best films of the year.
Abrams gives us a refreshing respite from this summer's seemingly endless parade of superheroes, pirates, and talking animals, putting a group of startlingly real, incredibly likable tweens at the center of his story. Yes, adults hover around the periphery--deputies and sheriffs here, abusive parents there, etc. etc. But this movie really belongs to Joe (Joel Courtney) and Charles (Riley Griffiths) and their many friends, who are in the midst of filming an amateur zombie flick on the titular device when they witness a mysterious train accident. The crash is followed by a plethora of supernatural occurrences-hundreds of dogs go missing, car generators vanish, radio frequencies go haywire-and while the local law searches frantically for ever-elusive evidence, the kids also search for an explanation of what they saw, uncovering a military conspiracy, and, oh yeah, an alien on the loose. And they film the whole thing--production value is production value, after all.
Putting a bunch of 13-year-olds at the helm of a blockbuster is tres risky, but, in this case, it's a decision that pays dividends. Courtney is the best male child actor I've seen in some time-he delivers his lines with great truth and clarity, and his expressions are laced with an angelic innocence that can't be bought. On the flip side, Elle Fanning shows beyond-her-years grit as the self-sufficient "actress" he falls in love with. As a director, Abrams smartly steps back and just lets these kids be kids. Their interactions unfold with such unforced, good-humoured grace that I have to wonder of some of the scenes were improvised. These children are portrayed warts-and-all; they lie and curse and steal and even commandeer a car. Yet they are also quick-witted, wide-eyed, and loyal to a fault. But notice how the director's love for them shines through in every frame. The explosions pop and the gunshots fly--to say Abrams is good with action scenes is like noting that Picasso was fairly skilled with a paintbrush-but this movie is about them. You root for them from scene one--and, by extension, for the movie.
When people complain that mainstream releases have "lost something" these past few decades, they're probably referring to that sense of wonder, that feeling that you've been lifted out of your solitary confinement of space and time and body and into a new world so beautiful you come back down grinning ecstatically and wiping the stardust from your sleeve. To watch Super 8 is to remember how you felt when Rick stood on the runway with Ilsa, when Obi Wan shouted "Use the force, Luke!", when ET defied gravity and Elliot defied his wildest dreams. And to watch Super 8 is to feel it all again. Here's a film about a group of children united by a love of good ol'-fashion movie magic that instills in us their precious sense of youthful, cinema-crazed wonder. It's good enough to give you your faith back in movies, or make you a believer if you aren't already. It's a film that's already come to mean a lot to me, and if non-cinephiles won't be quite as moved by it as I was, I can promise this; they'll still enjoy the hell out of it. If you give even 1/10th of a damn about my critical opinion, you'll run, not walk, to Super 8. A
PS. Stick around for the credits. You won't be sorry.
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The Tree of Life
People have this movie critic thing all wrong. The chief question a critic should concern him or herself with answering is not "should I see this movie?", but "what am I seeing?" What is the filmmaker attempting to do here? How do they do it? Is there technical mastery to be appreciated? Intellectual fecundity to be savored? What lurks just behind the visages of the actors and the veneer of the scenery that could lead audience to a better appreciation of this picture? Conversely, what's hiding in plain sight that abuses cinema, that extracts false emotions, endeavours to create cheap sensations, serves to diminish our human experience instead of enhance it?
So many motion pictures of recent years are so aesthetically uninspired and ideologically vacuous that they collapse under such intense questioning. On the flip side, Tree of Life is so dense-complex and simple, epic and intimate, horrifying and moving, insipid and inspiring, magical and maddening-that it renders even the most profound inquiries trite and ridiculous. I do not know how Terence Malick accomplished what he has accomplished here. I'm not entirely sure what he has accomplished. I cannot even answer basic questions regarding the picture's plot, characters, and storytelling structure. It resists categorization and criticism; Roger Ebert was correct in deeming it a "cinematic prayer", and you just can't give a prayer a letter grade.
I will say this; there are moments in this movie that rank among the most astonishing ever captured by a camera. As it attempts to link a fractured Texas family (Brad Pitt is the brooding patriarch, Jessica Chastain the loving wife) to nothing less than the creation of our planet, Malick, a deliberate, intensely visual hermit-god of a filmmaker, creates a few precious moments that serve to widen our very view of the world and our place in it. There are times, particular in the opening half hour, where it feels as if he's discovered something new and wonderful about our relationship to time and space, something you can't say about most new releases in the age of Something Borrowed. There are also long stretches of maddening passivity, of mazes of metaphors trapped inside other metaphors, of ponderous, exasperating exegesis and examination of What It All Means. There is an utterly indescribable ending that takes us directly into Malick's haunted brain and then leaves us there, directionless and exhausted and frustrated.
"Suffer into wisdom", Aeschylus said, and Terry Malick seems to agree. How can I recommend a film that's often so obtuse and spacey that the act of watching it becomes almost physically painful? Yet how can I urge you to stay away from a picture that, when it works, works so well as to give us a little glimpse into the hidden clockwork of the universe itself? I bet you know by now if Tree of Life is for you. If not, watch some of Malick's earlier work, particularly the masterful Thin Red Line, and see if you're ready for his latest, twice as sprawling and ambitious. Ask yourself how important things like narrative and action are to your moviegoing experience. Steel yourself for a deeply emotional experience, whether that emotion be agitation or awe. And, if you do see the thing, don't watch it, don't try to figure it out as it happens--just let it wash over you. No grade
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