Super 8, uncut

I know that editors are necessary, and there are space limitations in print publications, but when I lose a paragraph, it fees as if I losing… well, a meal or a good party. Not a finger. I mean, it’s just a paragraph. Anyway, my review of Super 8 is up at LGBT Weekly. The uncut version is below.

Spielberg is superior, but Abrams’ Super 8 is great fun

Super 8
Written and Directed by J. J. Abrams
Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, and Kyle Chandler
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

About half way through J. J. Abrams’ enormously enjoyable Super 8, I watched 15-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) riding his bike through a small town in Ohio at twilight in the summer of 1979, and suddenly I felt as if it was 30 years ago, and I was in a movie theater in Cincinnati seeing ET for the first time. Abrams is clearly quoting the iconic bicycle riding scenes from the great Spielberg film, just as he is also paying homage in Super 8 to Spielberg’s previous two films from the late 70s, the classics Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. (There’s a dash of both Goonies and Jurassic Park, too.) While Abrams is not by any means Spielberg’s equal, the younger director, who rebooted Star Trek in 2009 and produced the TV series Lost, Fringe, and Alias, is just as much a populist crowd-pleaser. By repurposing some of Spielberg’s greatest ideas and images and having Spielberg himself approve and produce the film, Abrams has given us the first great popcorn flick of the summer.

The title of Super 8 refers to the film that was used in pre-video amateur movie cameras, which is what Joe’s friends are using to make a zombie movie. During the filming of a romantic scene at a train station, they witness a spectacular derailment. They all barely, and miraculously, survive and discover that the derailment was caused by their crotchety biology teacher. He tells them that if they don’t run and keep what they’ve seen to themselves, “they” will kill them all.

“They,” it turns out, is the US Air Force, which shows up to clean up the wreckage. As dogs, people, and machinery start disappearing all over town – all taken by a large, unseen, and very violent monster – Joe’s father, Deputy Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler), tries to get to the bottom of the Air Force’s involvement with the train wreck and strange goings on. Meanwhile, Joe and his friends continue to make their movie, using the Air Force’s invasion of the small town as a backdrop. And Joe falls for Alice (Elle Fanning), who stars in the movie and whose father has something to do with the death of Joe’s mom.

Many of Abrams’ themes in Super 8 mirror late 70s, early 80s Spielberg: the powerful and pure wonder of children, the justified fear of a corrupt military, the painful loss of a parent, the redemption that comes only from empathy and kindness. And Abrams’ casting choices are not dissimilar from Spielberg’s. Joel Courtney, who plays the sensitive, smart, mop-headed Joe, was unknown before being cast in Super 8, just as Henry Thomas was when he was cast as Eliot in ET. And as the key blonde, Abrams cast Elle Fanning, an almost disturbingly brilliant child actress, just as Drew Barrymore was back in the early 80s. The relationship between Fanning’s Alice and Joe grounds the film in an innocent love that propels the story more than the Jaws-like monster attacks.

At its best, Super 8’s homage to Spielberg provides the humor, amazement, and excitement of the films that made sci-fi blockbusters an annual summer treat three decades ago. At its worst, when it was clear that Abrams is relying too much on his idol’s past work, the film reminded me that Spielberg’s genius needs to be revisited. AI, his misunderstood masterpiece about artifice and childhood, is now in my Netflix queue.

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Begin the Beguine

Beginners is my favorite movie of the year so far. Here’s the link to my review, or you can read it all here:

Beginners
Written and directed by Mike Mills
Starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, and Mélanie Laurent
Inexplicably rated R
Opens June 17

The relationship between a gay son and his straight father is about as fraught and awkward as any, and this is reflected in the history of queer cinema, which has mined this conflict like it was a ten-mile-deep cache of diamonds: The Sum of Us, La Mission, Beautiful Thing, etc.

For obvious reasons, the opposite story – a gay father and his straight son – hasn’t found its way into too many movies. This is only one of the things that makes Beginners, Mike Mills’ exquisite new film starring Ewan McGregor as the straight son and Christopher Plummer as his newly out father, different.

The other things – a non-linear story structure and a smart, funny and moving voice-over – are seamlessly combined with the kind of acting you expect from late-fall movies released as Oscar bait. I assume Beginners will be re-released at the end of the year just for that purpose, if for anything Plummer’s performance, arguably the best of his extremely long career.

McGregor plays Oliver, a 38-year-old art director, whose father Hal (Plummer) has recently died, four years after coming out following the death of his wife. The film follows Oliver’s grieving and burgeoning relationship with Anna (Mélanie Laurent from Inglourious Basterds), a French actress, while flashing back to Hal’s coming out, his relationship with an awkward and much younger man (ER’s Goran Visnjic) and his fight with cancer.

Both Oliver and Hal are dealing with beginnings and endings; thus the rather on-point title of the film. For the back story on why these starts and finishes are so hard and so meaningful, Mills includes flashbacks of conversations between a very young Oliver (Keegan Boos) and his funny and frustrated mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), as well as carefully curated historical images of the world Hal and Georgia experienced as children and young adults.

Added to the mix are Oliver’s artful and hilarious drawings of “the history of sadness” and Hal’s, then Oliver’s, Jack Russell terrier Arthur, whose subtitled lines are extraordinarily wise.

Yes, there’s a lot going on in Beginners. But Mills and his editor Olivier Bugge Coutté splice the present day of the film with flashbacks, voice-overs and archival imagery with such careful skill that the complex, emotional through-line is totally clear.

Mills, who wrote the film from his own experience with his father, is examining the quest for love and the power of fear and sadness to get in the way. The pastiche-like style of the film and its witty, sly humor – particularly in the form of Arthur – prevent it all from getting too heavy.

But the trio of McGregor, Plummer and Laurent provide such authentic emotion to the film, I found it impossible not to cry. Laurent communicates as much with her mischievous, haunting eyes as she does with her lines (which may be because she’s somewhat underwritten).

McGregor, as always, is the perfect straight man (as it were), providing a non-showy but deeply empathic performance that rarely is rewarded in the way that Plummer’s will be. The star of The Sound of Music, among others, is charmingly giddy as a man who waited his whole life to be who he felt inside and his quiet raging against the dying of the light provides some of the best sick-bed scenes since Terms of Endearment.

While another gay movie that both begins and ends with the death of the gay character is perhaps more than one too many, Beginners celebrates both him and his gayness while also celebrating the universal struggle to love and be loved.

Note: There’s no really good reason for why I titled my review in LGBT Weekly “Begin the Begin” other than the word “Begin.” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” makes more sense. And REM’s awesome song of the similar name has just about nothing in common with the movie. Or it does. Who can tell? The lyrics are pretty opaque.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 30: My Favorite Song At This Time Last Year

Wow. I blogged every day for 30 days. I don’t think I’ve done that since 2004, if I’ve ever done it. I need another challenge to keep this up. And maybe something that will excite my non pop music obsessed readers, like my mom. The 30 Photo Challenge is a possibility…

Anyway, around this time last year I was listening to Lightspeed Champion’s Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You, which my brother and sister-in-law gave me for my birthday. If I remember correctly, I was listening to it over and over by this point. It’s so. Fucking. Good. “Marlene” is one of the best tracks, which is saying something, since they’re all pretty great. It’s epic, it’s catchy, it’s edgy, it’s awesome.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 29: A Song From My Childhood

I’m not sure why, of all of the songs that I remember for being a wee lad, that I immediate picked “Lady” by Kenny Rogers. I could have picked “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)” by ABBA (because I was so gay, even when I was in 2nd grade) or “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen (again: gay) or “Elvira” by The Oak Ridge Boys (weird, right?). But “Lady” reminds me of the AM radio in our Malibu station wagon, of the stereo in the living room, of the copy of Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits that I got on vinyl for Christmas when I was something like six years old. Also, it’s just a beautiful song, as intense Lionel Richie songs sung by Kenny Rogers are wont to be, and Kenny’s voice is… so damn sexy. Like he was back then. Woof.

Yay, childhood!

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 28: A Song That Makes Me Feel Guilty

This is an odd prompt. Is it meant to be a song that you feel guilty for liking — like a guilty pleasure? But that’s Day 13. I guess there’s a guilty pleasure that you’re gleeful about admitting and a guilty pleasure that you’d never admit. Like if you secretly loved singing the first stanza of Deutschlandlied while stretching out your right hand. Or, I guess, the prompt could mean that the song reminds you or forces you to feel guilty because of the content, the exhortation, of the lyrics. That could be Phil Collins’s treacly, if somewhat brilliant “Another Day In Paradise.”

But what about a song that is both a song that is supposed to make you feel guilty and a song that makes you embarrassed, makes you feel guilt or shame, for listening to it. I’ve got one: “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” by Crystal Waters. Not only is the song a rather oddly constructed tune about homelessness — it’s a house/disco song, and a classic one at that — but dancing to it makes you feel all icky. I mean, hello, you’re dancing to this peppy, joyful, beat-erific, singalong anthem at some club and it’s a song about a homeless woman who is doing all she can to keep up appearances. Yay! Twirl! Singalong! Have another cosmo! For a while, I’d sing along to the song at the clubs and laugh — oh, how ridiculous this song is — and now I can only gawk at the disconnect of the lyrics and the music.

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