movie review: singular

Yes, Babies: something has made a dent in the Stainless Steel double door refrigerator that I call my heart. (Well, my chest cavity IS cold!)

I initially resisted "Super 8"due to two things: number one: associations with a terrible Nicholas Cage thriller about snuff films named similarly (8 millimeter, I think) and the last offering by JJ Abrams, which was a film I rented and never watched a few times, Cloverfield.

Well, this film, which I was drawn to and watched today, was a rare thing: (and I use this term lightly and at the same time with dead seriousness) magic.

There's something about this film that reaches into you and grabs you. It wasn't not as intense as Where the Wild Things Are (A film that reduced both me and my sister to emotional jelly-a film I still think about like an ex boyfriend. One of the few films I can unabashedly say was "genius").

This film was not exactly "genius"- it didn't change my world and bring me out of my world and drop me back to earth, but there was something about it that was sweet, delicate, lovable, likable, and interesting.

Of course the friends are well matched, and well played, and of course the thrills are legitimately startling and the reactions of the kids (who seem to be about10 or so) is for ONCE actually real. The dialogue is a bit Aaron Sorkin- ified, but that's okay. (Everyone is hyper literate, hyper aware of their own emotions, and hyper verbal, but that's movie making today). There's a few very funny lines. There are some amazingly well framed movie-within- a- movie moments that were so well constructed they somehow showed their seams and were seamless at the same time.

There is something missing from the US today, and that is the sense of leisurely hope that was slowly dying in the late 1970's and early 1980's to be replaced with irony, isolation, aenhedonia, and a sneer.

The main thing is...


There was a JOY about this movie that "leaked" out- it was scary, emotional, confused, violent, real, and somehow, unbelievable, joyful.

This is a love letter to something, so deep, so authentic, and so unafraid that in spite of some flaws in the film I must recognize it as a major milestone in film-making. It was unlike anything I've seen recently (the ONLY thing I can compare it to, and only fleetingly, is Wild Things, in it's construction of emotional honesty, if that makes any sense.)

There is something major here, something about how emotion is constructed and that makes it at once more believable and more removed from reality at the same time, a kind of eternity loop that is real in an existential sense, if that makes any sense: all emotions are constructed, everything is a kind of film played back in our memories, everything is "infected" by films and television (even the aliens are HR Geiger creations of horror and biological mechanics) that nothing is new, except the idea that is always new:

Here I am. This is what happened. Here is what I loved. Here is what I knew. It was so real I almost couldn't believe it.