Super 8

I hadn't heard about Spielberg's latest until a student started insisting that I had to see this movie. Based on this recommendation alone, I found it, and settled down to watch it with a few loved ones. Well it had me from the first strains of ELO, and then when The Knack started up, and then The Cars, and then they were driving that 2-door Buick Skylark - which reminded me of my friend's Chevy Malibu - I was completely transported back to my adolescence, and the friends and innocence of that time just before you're not innocent anymore - those moments when you're just becoming aware of one another as having motives beyond fun and building stuff and then tearing it down again. My friends and I didn't make movies (like the kids in the movie), but we tore banana-seat bikes apart and made them into proto-bmx things to ride around town on, late into the nights. We made model cars and trains and raced things, and watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Jaws and loved to shoot things and light them on fire. And we were just starting to think that girls might be interesting as friends of a different kind.

So when the train wrecks gloriously, stupendously, right in front of them when they're doing what they most want to do, and there's a girl there too, it's just rapturous! It's that small apocalypse that you escape to tell about - and it gets better in the telling. Except, in Super 8, it gets better and then worse too in the telling. Unaccountably, ominously, foreshadowingly, Cloverfieldishly worse. J.J. Abrams produces this movie, as he did Star Trek, and Cloverfield. The monster here might as well have hopped frames from Cloverfield to the train car from which it escapes here. 

Which bring me to this thing that successful directors do - they re-iterate (some call it homage) the work of other auteurs, and their own work as well. Auteurs do this sort of thing - you can see an Atwood or a McCarthy novel coming from a mile away - and it's mostly okay. I appreciate it that I can buy a Dylan album, and settle into the comfortable "re-runishness" of it. Shakespeare constantly pirated his own best lines. I find comfort in knowing what Ian McEwan will supply in a novel. The good ones however, like Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds, do more than just revisit the old riffs, they make something new, something fresh, something magnificently unexpected.    

I liked ET and I as soon as the kids in this movie start riding their bikes across open fields, the camera staying low to expand the horizon that overlooks a sleepy midwestern town, I started to expect that this was what Spielberg was re-serving. Which was fine. I love the "sharp fresh kids versus the blunt jaded adults" trope. It's a reminder to stay young and to act less (hopefully a lot less) like the narrow-scoped dopes that run the air force, the police force, or the school (at least they're dopes in the movies). There is a modicum of freshness here. The young male hero's dad isn't quite the dope we might expect. Neither is the biology teacher that seems responsible for initiating the whole shebang. Otherwise though, the adults deliver their stupid, unaware, uninteresting lines, and the kids wisely dodge them.

No, Spielberg's got nothing new to offer here: not in the relationships between the kids, nor between the kids and the adults, nor between the civilians and army guys. Further, he's got nothing new to offer to the alien-intelligence meets human-xenophia situation either. Not since District 9 (well okay, Cloverfield wasn't bad either) has anyone really tried hard to re-fresh this plot. Spielberg and Abrams, for all the money, technology, and ingenuity (got writers anyone?) at their disposal could do nothing more imaginative than an upscale, more spectacular, ET phone home. 

Where are the good sci-fi writers when this kind of film gets proposed? What could LeGuin do with these resources? I know I know, Spielberg and Hollywood don't really want to make us fundamentally uncomfortable at the end of a show that features adorably innocent, truth-seeking teens. Good point. So I'll just have to accept that after all that cash, and all those technical resources were thrown at the screen, what stuck were the first twenty minutes or so with its shazamic late 70s rock, its youthful imagination, its blossoming love, and its orgasmic train wreck. After that  this train gets back on that pretty narrow successful train-track feel-good formula. It mails it in. It's a nice to get a care-package now and then, but these cookies are stale.

Ride report(s)

It's worth noting that I rode from Altona to St. Joseph and then home yesterday (about 29 ks). It was about -10'C and the wind was from the North. I rode gravel and dirt roads, and this reminds me of my absolute love for my cross bike. There are so many more options for rides.

Today

in:      -25'C wind 10ks N

out:   -14'C wind 10ks N