Super 8, dir. J.J. Abrams (2011)
J.J. Abrams Super 8 is a movie banking on the nostalgia of the Spielberg era of innocent American filmmaking. It seeks to appeal, I gather, not necessarily to kids and teens looking to cool off and get some thrills, but instead to their parents, who remember with fondness ET and The Goonies. What makes Super 8 more successful than other recent kidcentric adventure movies, though, is not its relationship to Spielberg’s action-comedies and science fiction dramas—unless that relationship is understood primarily in terms of historical setting. The movie’s 1979 setting is not an accident, nor is it pure homage. Instead, it’s the only way J.J. Abrams could possibly make a movie that doesn’t involve little kids interacting with computers, cellular phones, and the other assorted technical artifacts that keep kids from actually doing interesting things on screen. (more…)
We’ve just had our first substantial snow of the season here in Boston, and it looks like it’ll be a long haul (as usual) until it’s gone. With that in mind, here’s a list of four things I’ll be enjoying until I make my winterly migration south of the equator.
1. Friday Night Lights Season One — One of my professors recommended this when we were reading Don DeLillo’s football novel End Zone. There’s nothing more satisfying than the tribulations of small town Texas football, no actor more earnest than Kyle Chandler, and no bad-ass momma more fun to listen to than Liz Mikel.
2. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick — I’d never read Dick before I picked up this fast-reading and fascinating alternate history about a world in which the axis powers had won World War II. If you haven’t, do.
3. Hot Chocolate from L.A. Burdick — Burdick, as I understand it, has three outposts: one in Cambridge, MA, one in Walpole, NH, and one in New York City. If you live in those places, odds are you’re familiar with their mousse-thick hot chocolate. It’s unbeatable. If you’re not familiar with it–well, you can order some online.
4. Die Hard — Last but certainly not least is my favorite Christmas movie. Oliver Stone said that Bruce Willis was the Humphrey Bogart of our generation. I don’t know about that, but in Die Hard he proves to be just as compulsively watchable as Bogie in To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep. Alan Rickman, too, is delightfully devilish as the leader of a German terrorist group (oddly similar to the Icelandic hockey players from The Mighty Ducks). As for John McTiernan being Howard Hawks–I’d like to say time will tell, but it doesn’t look good…
