BEFORE: One week until Comic-Con, I got my boxes of DVDs shipped out yesterday via UPS to my hotel, they should arrive one day before I do, and if they're a day late, then they'll still be on time. Hey, it's not my first rodeo. Now I've just got to pack my suitcase on Monday with the various office supplies and paperwork I'll need at the booth, and try to knock off a few more sci-fi films before my plane leaves next Wednesday.
I offer a glimpse behind the curtain tonight, at how I select and collect my films for the list. Quite often one film will suggest another, and since I mostly burn my own DVD's at the 4-hour speed, usually fitting two films on a disc, it's only natural for me to program in pairs. (Why not? Hollywood often releases two similar films close together - like two films this year about the White House being attacked...) So I'd kept an eye out for this 2011 film, to pair on a DVD with "Cloverfield". The only problem is, it never showed up on the premium cable channels. Perhaps it was on PPV, but I just sort of assumed it would have aired on HBO or Showtime by now. So I tried iTunes, but it's only available for purchase there, not rental, and I didn't want to pay $9.99 to see this.
Enter Amazon.com - there it was, available for streaming to Amazon Prime customers, for the low price of zero dollars. That seemed pretty fair, but in order to view it, I needed to upgrade my Flash player. In order to upgrade my Flash player, I needed to upgrade my browser - and I'm betting that to upgrade my browser, I'd need to upgrade my whole Mac OS. See, this is how they get you - and once I start upgrading, then where does it stop? Then I'll find out a whole bunch of software that I'm used to doesn't work any more under the new OS, and I have to upgrade THOSE too, at extra cost. Uh-uh, my computer may not be current but it works (mostly), and I want to keep it that way.
So, free streaming via Amazon Prime on my wife's computer, then. (If this doesn't work, now that I've lost a whole DAY to Flash/browser issues, I'm going to chuck "Super 8" off the list and go see "Pacific Rim" instead.) But this also provides a bit of a thematic link to tomorrow's film - and as my reward, one actor carries over from "Cloverfield", his name is Tim Griffin, and he played "Command Center Officer" in last night's film, and "Commando" in tonight's film. Hmm, he may be a bit typecast as a military sort - but, hey, just because I didn't notice him in "Cloverfield", it doesn't mean that he didn't do a heck of a job. The world needs background players, too.
THE PLOT: During the summer of 1979, a group of friends witness a train crash and investigate subsequent unexplained events in their small town.
AFTER: Ah, my instincts were good once again. This film has a lot in common with "Cloverfield", namely the presence of a mysterious monster, a group of young people in peril (OK, youngish in "Cloverfield") and then we've got all the handheld camcorder footage one night, and the next we've got kids making Super 8 movies - that's quite a coincidence, I'd say. Both films also follow the track of not letting the audience see the big beastie for the majority of the film - thus saving money on effects shots. Sorry, I meant to say "thus building up suspense".
This film also demonstrates how hard acting is, especially for kids. I think it's because they haven't had much life experience, so they don't have as much to draw from - or they don't realize how much work (or maybe how little?) goes into appearing so genuine. When you ask kids to play another person, but to act natural, there may be a bit of a disconnect there. The actress who plays the girl gets it mostly right, but I think you can tell she's been in more movies than the others. The lead boy came off as mostly a blank to me - he's great at staring at something in awe or in shock, but the emotions that should follow just aren't there. And some of the actors who play his friends are just the opposite, they try too hard and end up overemoting, which is sort of the Disney Channel sitcom approach. Less is more sometimes, kids.
If you watch the end credits, you'll see a bonus, which is the "actual" (OK, not really, but you know what I mean) Super 8 film that the kid characters were seen making. It's B.S. of course, because some adult probably spent a lot of time and money making what would LOOK like a film kids would make, with jump cuts and continuity errors and sub-par acting delivery. I wonder, if you set out to make an intentionally crappy film and then do so, did you succeed in failing? Because it's easy to make a bad film, but most people do it by failing to succeed instead.
Still, this may remind you of your teen years, or as I call them, "those awkward years between being an awkward child and an awkward adult". I'm trying to recall what it was like when I was a kid, and though I hadn't specifically determined I was interested in filmmaking, I exhibited a lot of behavior that should have made it obvious I was headed in that direction. I watched a LOT of TV, and kept track of a lot of music, not just the Top 40 but also a lot of novelty records, many of which appeared in old films. I got involved with theater groups, which seemed like a good way to interact with girls - though I never got a date out of that, at least I got to dance with them on stage, and got some acting experience at the same time. And of course I watched "Star Wars" over and over, and sometimes frame-by-frame, and this got me interested in the filmmaking process in a roundabout way. I even took it upon myself to transcribe the "Star Wars" radio dramas via typewriter, which seems ridiculous now, but I learned about script formatting in the process.
I didn't pick up a 16mm movie camera until college, because I was focused on coursework in high school (plus singing and playing clarinet) - but once I was in film school I became a sort of one-man band, acting, directing and doing in-camera editing, sometimes all at once. Just like Orson Welles, only without any great story ideas. Thankfully those films are lost in the mists of time, or maybe they're in my basement, and I chose a career path where I'd work on other people's films for more money and less creative input.
Back to my questions about distribution, now - since I'm in the film biz (tangentially) I deal a little bit with contracts and distribution models and such. Though my boss has an agent that's supposed to deal with cable channels (mostly by ignoring them, it seems...) I'm still constantly mystified by the process. I realize we're living under a new paradigm, with the Netflix and the YouTube and people watching movies on their phones (Wait, is that a thing? Why would anyone do that?) but it seems to me that if you've got a product like "Super 8" to market, you'd want the maximum number of eyeballs to be able to access it, and signing an exclusive deal with Amazon streaming would seem to work against that. Wouldn't it be better to make a film available on DVD, premium cable, Netflix and Amazon, all at the same time? It would be like having a restaurant AND a food-truck to maximize your sales opportunities.
In the same vein, why make a web-site that requires people to upgrade all their software to view it? It seems rather exclusionary. Isn't the point of the web to disseminate information to everyone, in a way that's accessible across the board?
Anyway, back to "Super 8". I couldn't help but think that it seemed a bit like "Stand By Me" mixed with "E.T." and "Close Encounters", with some of the creepiness of "Poltergeist" - only to find out after that the whole thing was conceived as a Spielberg tribute, right down to the concept of kids making movies, which is what Stevie did while growing up. Well, then, in that sense the film succeeded. Hmm, it turns out that J.J. Abrams, the director of "Super 8" and his friend Matt Reeves, the director of "Cloverfield", were once hired by Spielberg to restore his old Super 8 home movies. See, it all ties together!
Also starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Gabriel Basso, Kyle Chandler (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Ron Eldard (last seen in "Scent of a Woman"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Windtalkers"), Glynn Turman, with cameos from Dan Castellanata (last heard in "The Cat in the Hat"), Greg Grunberg.
RATING: 6 out of 10 missing microwaves
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