Thursday, June 16, 2011

SUPER 8 MY HOMEWORK



For months I had looked forward to JJ Abrams (LOST, ALIAS, the latest STAR TREK film) secrecy-shrouded feature SUPER 8, his homage to his once-hero and now-mentor Steven Spielberg and his awesome grab-bag of iconic ‘family-adventure films.’ Some Spielberg directed (E.T., RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) and some he just produced (GREMLIN, THE GOONIES), but his trademark stamp is impossible to ignore. Usually it takes kids and sends them on big adventures, pits them against big enemies, stacks against them what seem impossible odds and, experiencing these adventures and enemies and odds alongside them, we remember what it feels like to believe in magic.

SUPER 8 is also a lot like CLOVERFIELD, the monster-attacks-city movie from a few years ago that JJ Abrams produced and I loved as an allegory to 9/11 anxiety that there is nothing scarier than something loud and destructive slamming against buildings in New York. In SUPER 8 the fear is decidedly more post-9/11: there’s a monster out there that the government knew about but had covered up. It’s Patriot Act horror: what happens when the lies we aren’t told “in order to protect us” get out? What will we do if we aren’t prepared with the truth?

Unlike the claustrophobia of CLOVERFIELD (which forced us to recognize the “big city” was just a series of small spaces in which we could get trapped) SUPER 8 sets are sprawling, airy, idyllic expanses. The monster destroys plenty because he has plenty of room to destroy – but it’s a different kind of threat than that of his counterpart loose in the narrow, skyscrapered lanes of NYC. Somehow, because it has more room to run amuck, the creature feels more like an angry puppy than some unholy beast from beyond. It isn’t as real of a threat; the materials it demolishes aren’t hard steel and concrete but trees and houses, like a child destroying a Lego set after having too many grape Kool-Aid Kool Bursts. In fact, while CLOVERFIELD felt like it had a setting (however glossy or embellished), SUPER 8 feels more like it’s simply on a set – production values may be high (the call for “production values” is the mantra of the child-director making the zombie movie in the film) but this isn’t quite cinema verite.

And that’s the general vibe of SUPER 8 and one that works for it fairly successfully. It is also in line with J.J. Abrams postmodern tendencies to care more about storytelling than (and this is certainly the case here) the story. SUPER 8 is a monster movie about kids making a monster movie, and so throughout it all are touches of the wide-eyed DIY qualities that any kid fucking around with his friends and a camcorder know so very well. I look back on my own experiences being a film geek alongside childhood friends with nostalgia and, yes, some embarrassment (side note: I’m still upset I was never part of Josh’s original home video ATTACK OF THE AMISH, which somehow, despite my having nothing to do with it, stands like an obelisk in my memory: “when you’re buttons are all gone, and your VCR ain’t there, and you can’t find your blow-dryer so you can’t dry your hair…Attack of the Amish!”). SUPER 8 aspires to and tributes a prepubescent feeling of almost pre-embarrassment: when everything was possible, nothing is shameful; when the world was full of stories and ambitions and nights to almost-kiss the girl of your dreams. This is surely Spielberg’s modus operandi and maybe such puerile goodwill has no place in the cynical world of government-sanctioned lies and outsized threats from outer space….but for a moment, before the train crashes, before shit hits the fan, when the kids are filming and the night is warm and Elle Fannings’ sort of outrageously good performance hits just right, there is a bit of magic. It is ephemeral and slippery, and Abrams loses it surely, but it was there. You know it when you feel it.

I wish there were more attention paid to SUPER 8 clever Brechtian alienation and less to its undeniable faults. When the child director rewrites scenes to illicit an emotional response from the audience in order to “to make them care” it’s more than a tongue-in-cheek Ha-Ha aimed at the “real” audience; whether or not you know what your laughing at it’s actually the postmodern attribution of “standards” to a genre. Just as SCREAM taught us a lesson we didn’t-know-we-already-knew (never say: ‘I’ll be right back…”), so does SUPER 8 concern itself with concepts one Russian-Stacking-Doll further out from what’s physically going on on screen. But maybe SUPER 8's problem is that of the SCREAM sequels (2 and 3 anyway…I can’t bring myself to see 4): it’s a clever way to speak but there just may not be that much to say. Abrams has almost nothing to add to Spielberg’s family-friendly wonderment/awe/catharsis formula, so the best he can do is try to replicate it, and quite frankly, he can’t. He did his homework on Spielberg, fine, but he didn't CREATE anything that's his own. It's a mathematical problem that doesn't seem to occur to Abrams: no matter how perfectly you solve an equation, it isn't the same as designing a theorem. It isn't as elegant.

Further, in caring more about storytelling than story, Abrams overestimates his storytelling, because the story blows. Full of holes and inconsistencies, falling on trope and convention in an almost lazy way, populated by adult characters whose hokey motivations are straight from 1993, what actually happens in SUPER 8 doesn’t matter at all. We know where this train is heading and we know that, even if it is detailed along the way, it’ll get there somehow. The children are the bright spot here (‘manipulative!’ cry haters) and a reason to see the film; ironic since it’s famously-coy marketing campaign teased the monster itself as the carrot on the stick. The monster, sadly, disappoints—sort of Clifford the Big Red Dog meets the CLOVERFIELD Monster, with of course the motivations (and table manners) of E.T. Its design is far too similar to the CLOVERFIELD monster—which is inexcusable really because the thing could have looks like ANYTHING to tell the story Abrams was telling. It’s nothing but a creative failure, any way you splice it.

I don’t begrudge Abrams the intellectual preoccupation with Spielbergian convention, hell anything that successful and populist should be carefully considered, but SUPER 8 would have been better if Abrams had the creativity or gumption to give us some major BREAK from this convention, not only to surprise and entertain us but also to further educate about what it means to be a Spielberg movie in the first place. Instead of something original, we get an ending right out of E.T., made even further flaccid of course because we’ve seen it so many times since. The misunderstood alien goes home, the kid’s are vindicated as more than mischief-makers, life returns to normal. SUPER 8 fails to distinguish itself in the end, a common failing for so many action movies I see, but here it’s somehow even more toxic to the overall film: what’s the POINT of seeing SUPER 8 when E.T. in streaming on Hulu? What’s the POINT of caring when it all ends the same way?

And so, yes, not exactly the ground breaking film I was hoping for nor the latest monster to haunt my geeky monster-movie dreams. Still, I defend SUPER 8 as a well-made film. And it’s innocuous, hardly a compliment usually but here it almost (almost!) is. SUPER 8 trades in its innocuousness, its ability to neuter the monster movie and make it a family film – an idea that may be clever, that may be postmodern, that may operate successful – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.


The cross-branding writes itself. Till next time, you monsters.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

CHILD LEASHES: A Defense




Yes, I hate GLEE. But I wanted to take a few minutes to un-‘leash’ another diatribe, or at least a sort of aimless philosophical exercise, if you’ll grant me the utter nonsequitor.

At Starbucks yesterday evening (the one near my work; where I’m mayor; where I enjoy a level of popularity among the sassy baristas unparalleled in any social arena at any point throughout my life so far. Free coffee is only the beginning—Tricia told me she wanted to “feel me up” yesterday when she gave me my latte) two women were waiting for their Frappacinos when one of them saw something outside that made her cry: “OH GIRL…HELL YES. I NEED ME ONE OF THOSE.”

“What now?” her friend said, looking. Awaiting my own coffee, it was either eavesdropping or reading the track listing for the 300th time on the Deathcab CD that Starbucks is now selling. Haven’t heard it, but great track titles.


I assumed, both because these women were quite fat and because I am an asshole, that she had seen some sort of food product, perhaps a churro. But then I saw what captivated this woman so: outside there was another large woman wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt with two red-headed children attached to…could it be…CHILD LEASHES?? This was seriously something out of the classist third act of MILLON DOLLAR BABY. Utterly splendid.


The Starbucks woman was impressed—could those really be the first kid leashes she has ever seen?—but her other friend, obviously a more dogged defender of personal liberty and individual freedom of locomotion—told her she was crazy, “LEASHES ARE FOR YOUR CAT” she reasoned.


Okay, so she didn’t have the particulars right—I mean a cat leash is just insane—but generally I agree with her. And we all do, right? It just feels wrong, leashes are for pets, tying up children is cruel and neglectful (as far as TYING ANYTHING TO YOUR PERSON can be considered ‘neglectful’). It’s just plain old wrong.


But sitting on the subway home, I kept musing on this incident and my visceral reaction to it. What’s so wrong about a parent choosing to tether their child, so they don’t run off and get hit by a car, or kidnapped by Tricia the barista, or eat that weird feathery thing lodged in the crack of the sidewalk. I’m not talking about like elaborate and painful harnesses and cat-o-nail-tails cracking their flanks if they get distracted by the ice cream man and break stride, I’m just saying – is it really so different than strapping a child into a car or bike seat? Or going with them on a two-man float on a waterslide?

This is one of the many examples in my life where my initial, egalitarian, liberal, “enlightened” reaction sort of chaffed against a more slowly-determined and reasoned analysis. I’m not sure I think all kids should be manacled to their mothers—some are better off getting as far away from mom as they can, hell this particular one was wearing a MICKY MOUSE SHIRT. It’s when leashes replace responsible parenting that I think we have a larger problem, but I’m not sure why we can’t have both.

In a vacuum, kids should be able to roam free and sprinkle their joy and puerile wonderment on all things they touch. In reality, they break shit. What it comes down to is if we live in a world where parents take personal and financial responsibility for their child’s safety and liability for the damage they cause, throwing a rope around their neck and commanding—patiently yet firm—WHOOOO DOGGY may not be the worst thing in the world.

And he never babysat again.