Super 8

Instead of watching game six of the NHL Stanley Cup, Evan and I went to something I'm far more interested in - Suppurate. No, wait, not the bleeding. Super 8. I got more of the previews, and I think most of them are on our list (although there's a body switching comedy with Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman I wouldn't go to see if you threatened me suppurating wounds).

Going into this movie, we didn't know a whole lot. There would be kids trying to film their own movie. There would be a train crash and an alien. J.J. Abrams wrote and directed while Steven Spielberg produced and provided inspiration. That’s about the extent of our knowledge. So going in, I didn't know how I would write about it without spoiling it. But after seeing it, I can sum it up pretty well. I can talk unequivocally about the central theme, I can discuss plot points, I can elaborate extensively about what this movie was about. I will tell you here and now about everything this movie is about. And that is: Lens Flare!

I should have seen it coming, what with J.J. Abrams as the director, but none of the previews did it justice. The movie starts with Lens Flare! It finishes with Lens Flare! There's Lens Flare! at the beginning, Lens Flare! in the middle, and Lens Flare! at the end. There's Lens Flare! for the main plot, and Lens Flare! for subplots. There's Lens Flare! during the day, and Lens Flare! during the night. The actors are all played by Lens Flare!, and Lens Flare! is the executive producer. Lens Flare! wrote the music, did the cinematography, and was even the Best Boy Key Grip. Yes, this movie was all about Lens Flare! It could have been called Lens Flare!: The Movie, if that wasn't already the alt-title for Star Trek two years ago.

So, there was a lot of Lens Flare! (it's used as much as cheap cheerleaders use Jazz Hands). But besides that, we also have Joe Lamb hanging out with friends and filming a movie while getting over his mothers accidental death four months before hand. They witness a train crash, and Joe falls in love with one of his co-stars (the only girl in the cast). The train crash is pretty spectacular, and seems to be far more destructive than train crashes should actually be.

Soon, weird things starts happening in town. The sheriff goes missing, so Joe's father, the deputy has to step up. Also, Joe's parents were divorced, so he wasn't in Joe's life until he had fatherhood thrust upon him by his ex-wife's death. Sub-plot one.

Sub-plot two involves a lowlife who missed a shift at the steel mill, so Joe's mother took over for him. That's when she was killed. The lowlife is also the father of Joe's love interest. And single. His wife dies or left. Single fathers who have a reason to hate each other while their kids start dating. I would have been blinded by the cliché if the Lens Flare! hadn't done it first.

Yeah, there are a lot of clichés as well, but the reason clichés are clichés is because they're used all the time. And the reason they're used all the time is because a lot of the time, they work. So yeah, we have fathers who make decisions their kids don't like, only to reconcile by the end of the movie. And there is a military commander who's a jerk and gets his comeuppance (he's played by Noah Emmerich, who seems like a nice guy but is always trapped in antagonistic roles. He's the duplicitous best friend in The Truman Show, and the conniving (OPR) FBI agent in White Collar).

And then there's the tremendous acting of the kids ... oh wait, that's not cliché. That's actually tremendous. After the movie, Evan said it's just not fair that people that young can act that well. And the adult actors (particularly Kyle Chandler - who no one will recognize from Friday Night Lights because only critics watch that show) are pretty good as well. Except for the Lens Flare! this could be a small town in Ohio where odd (and sometimes disquieting) things start happening after a train wreck. Well, as long as we travelled back in time to 1979 and spied on unsuspecting passerby.

There's the required action scene, and the cheesy scene required of any movie in the E.T. vein. And there's a bit of comedy too, but the movie is mainly about kids gradually finding out about the truth, and then trying to save the girl. I don't think it's a theatre movie (I haven't seen one of those in a while, and I'm getting kind of anxious), but I'd put it at the top of the Blu-Ray pile. Make sure to stick around during the credits, though. We finally get to see the movie these kids have been working on, and it's sort of half-decent, in an Ed Wood kind of way. Plus, it has an awesome reference to Romero. So there's that.