Rambunctious teens are the stars in Super 8

Popcorn has never tasted this good. Not real popcorn, mind you, but the popcorn-movie variety. The genre has been increasingly stale in recent summers. Not this time.

Super 8 is a perfect summer movie. It comes from the guy who invented the summer movie — Steven Spielberg — which means that Super 8 comes from a stately pedigree: Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. It’s a mixture of all those, and also the kid-classic The Goonies, from which Super 8 mines its spontaneous energy and wonder.

We can talk comparisons all day, but really this is a wholly original movie, a fantastically nostalgic romp with some pre-teens as they discover their own voices and the alien that terrorizes their small Ohio town. Set inside the framework of Super 8 is a movie within a movie, which is where our young stars make their entrance.

The year is 1979 and Joe (Joel Courtney) is the makeup man on an 8mm movie project called The Case, a zombie film written and directed by his best friend Charles, a lovable tyrant of a director who might be a Francis Ford Coppola facsimile. Cary, with a wild smile full of braces, is the film’s special effects wiz and pyromaniac. Martin, who throws up whenever he’s nervous, is the zombie flick’s star. The boys are in high school — based on their plucky attitudes, probably freshman.

These youngsters are authentic boys in every way: they like baseball and model kits, they ride their bikes everywhere, they bicker and argue in rowdy overlapping bursts, and they swear like little pirates. The big F word is mostly off limits; just the nickel-and-dime swears — shit, hell, damn — the ones that every kid in America knows and uses because it’s rebellious and fun. Remember when Elliott said "penis breath" in E.T.? It didn't inflict any damage on my young mind, and neither will these swear words so don't be afraid to take your children.

Swearing or not, I loved these kids. They make the movie. Each has their own quirks and interests, which gives them personality and spunk. I liked the Charles kid, who lives in one of those big houses with a gaggle of brothers and sisters who terrorize their parents at every dinner table gathering — in every shot someone is getting walloped repeatedly with a plastic bat. It reminded me of Ned Beatty’s house in 1941, the one with the kids who bounce off the walls as Beatty’s ack-ack gun is driven through the living room.

While Joe and the rest of the film crew shoot a late-night scene at a train station, they witness a horrific train crash that turns loose a captured alien, a massive beast that disappears into the brush and quietly escalates a campaign of terror on the town: Electricity flickers. The local dogs flee for neighboring communities. Engines from cars at a car dealership are stolen: “How do I explain this to my insurance company?” the lot owner screeches. Joe’s dad, the town’s ranking deputy after the sheriff turns up missing or eaten, tries to piece everything together to no avail. The deputy is played by Kyle Chandler, who was in another perfect popcorn movie about a monster and a movie within a movie — Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake.

There’s only one female character, Alice, played by Elle Fanning (Somewhere), Dakota’s little sister. She’s taller and slightly more developed than the boys because that’s the way it is; girls mature faster than boys. She has several great scenes, including one where she wows the film crew with her acting. Her careful performance provides a tender contrast to the film’s other sides: the action-heavy bombast, the witty banter with the boys, and the sci-fi thrills.

With the thrills, there are many. And they aren’t just gotcha moments, where the soundtrack volume jumps to illicit cheap shocks. Super 8 works — and works hard — for its electric jolts. I liked one scene with an electrician who hears strange noises while suspended high up above a utility truck. He goes higher and higher until the bucket he’s riding in tops out at the perfect chomping height for space aliens.

Action and thrills are prominent in Super 8, but the film never panders to the lowest common denominator. It’s fun and exciting, but also incredibly intuitive about filmgoers’ tastes. There’s a generally accepted misconception that some audiences want “mindless entertainment” — that they “don’t want to think, but just enjoy a movie.” (I get emails like this every time I pan a blockbuster movie.) This idea perpetuates movies by Michael Bay and others who feel obligated to create explosion after explosion for no other reasons than just because. Or it “looks cool.” Considering the horribleness of the last Transformers movie, this film philosophy doesn’t hold much water.

Here’s a test: go on YouTube and watch videos of building demolitions. Time yourself. If you can do this for more than two hours then you’re in a rather small minority I would not admit to in public. Most people want substance, whether they realize it or not. They want the plot, and the characters within it, to make sense. Here’s a movie that combines all the popcorny elements — gunfights, explosions, aliens, chases — into a coherent plot that will impress the hell out of you with its keen eye for detail, sharp sense of humor and its irreverent journey into the life of boys.

What begins as an adventure, quickly veers into science-fiction, mystery, action and lots of human dramas, including a half-expected romance and a painful revelation about Joe's deceased mother who may have had something to do with Alice's dad and why he's such a grump. The military also makes an appearance, as does a barking colonel who turns the Ohio town into a warzone as soldiers criss-cross the streets searching for their escaped extraterrestrial. The movie excels with each new addition to the plot. Each new layer adds to the whole, and the young actors adapt with ease. I fear that some will find the finale implausible and silly, but I saw it as a natural progression to its end. (Speaking of ends, stay for the credits to watch The Case in its entirety.)

It’s no surprise that Steven Spielberg is producing this film. He was a boy himself when he began filming his own Super 8 movies. I’ve mentioned Spielberg several times before this, but he’s not the director. J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, TV’s Alias) has that job, and he does it well. I just see more of Spielberg in this than of Abrams. Super 8 feels like a splendid mixture of E.T. and Goonies, two classic Spielberg projects that understood what it meant to be young and to seek out that one great adventure before a boy became a man, uncoiled from his imagination and entered adulthood. This is one of those rare movies that makes me want to be a kid again.

ElecTRONic sequel three decades later

Rarely are films so completely unique that they invent new genres upon their release. Even rare still: that the only other entry in the genre — call it cyber-adventure — is the original film's sequel 28 years later.

The first TRON was a watershed moment for computer imaging in films, so much so that the organization that runs the Academy Awards, scratching its head at the film’s pyrotechnic wonder, barred it from the special effects category. They simply didn’t know what to do with it.

No one really knew what to do with it, which is probably why you’ve never seen anything even slightly similar to TRON in the last three decades. In an industry where everything is derivative of something, TRON was genuine.

So is its sequel.

TRON: Legacy, the hotly anticipated computer adventure, is everything the Web geeks and techno nerds have been saying about it through the last few weeks of pre-release hype. It is as uniquely stunning as the original, but with some much-needed visual upgrades and with all the hyper-kinetic additions films have embraced since 1982: dazzlingly rendered computer effects, lightning-fast editing, a technocentric soundtrack (by Daft Punk) that soothes the film’s digital ego and some fresh, young stars who fill this realm of circuitry. Even the 3-D, which I loathe in principle, worked rather well in this neon-tinted wonder of computer imagery.

The film begins several years after the original TRON, with game designer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being permanently uploaded into the digital world of the first film, leaving his son with a crumbling software empire and without a father. Years pass and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is more into mischief than following the footsteps of his forgotten father. The mischief leads him back to his father’s hidden office and into the rabbit hole of the digital universe.

It’s here on the Grid that Sam is forced to compete in a series of gladiator-like games involving Frisbees, ricocheting walls, gravity-manipulating arenas and the famous Lightcycles, which leave trails of neon ribbon behind them. It’s also here that he finds the original Kevin Flynn, now much older, and a computer clone called CLU, who serves as the villain — maybe he was created with ctrl-C and ctrl-V commands.

The story is fairly straightforward, though it leaves plot holes big enough for terabytes of information to flow from in big streaming arcs. There’s a whole business with CLU trying to take a digital army from the Grid into the real world, and some more business about a race of intelligent algorithms that are somehow the answer to the world’s problems. None of this really make sense, but neither did most of the first TRON; we’re just expected to watch and enjoy, not figure all this out.

Bridges is a lot fun, and occasionally he channels his inner Dudeness — “It’s like bio-digital jazz, man.” Between this and his turn as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, Bridges has a lock on the holiday movie season. Hedlund performs well in a role that must have required a lot of standing in front of green screens and grimacing at tennis balls on sticks. The two men are completed by Olivia Wilde, who plays one of the lost algorithms. She’s so perfectly beautiful that the geeks of the world might replace their gold-bikini’d Princess Leia toys with ones of Wilde.

The film is a dazzler. Much of it is shot in blacks and grays, but with this nifty neon trim attached to everything from clothing and Lightcycles to the Grid’s fantastic vistas and the computer architecture. And when characters, called programs, are killed — often by deadly Frisbees — their individual little bytes break apart as if corrupted by a deadly computer virus. It’s a neat effect.

There is no shortage of things to look at in TRON: Legacy: There are numerous Lightcycle scenes, laser battles, chase sequences and one-on-one fights to see who can crumble the other’s pixels first. I had a blast in this movie. I think you will too, whether you’re visiting the TRON universe for the second time or the first. Go have fun with this movie.

What dreams, dreams, dreams may come

With a growing collection of fine work to his credit, director Christopher Nolan — rightfully becoming heir to cinema’s highest orders — has found yet another way to thrill us, this time in our dreams.

His latest, Inception, is an elaborate heist movie that takes place within the fragile scaffolding of a victim’s sleep. The items stolen are not jewels and gems, but powerful ideas. Don’t call it just a heist movie, though; it is so much more, and also so much less. It manages to do something very few Hollywood action extravaganzas do: It provides high-octane thrills with shootouts, car chases and special effects, but also dissects one man’s own very personal story using science so technical and precise that it plays out like an MIT term paper.

Nolan’s fierce one-two punch — big action and personal character studies — is what gave him an edge in Dark Knight, but here it’s fine-tuned even further inside the recesses of man’s unconscious state, to a level that even Freud would find compelling. That Nolan juggles all of his elements— a large cast of A-list actors, a riveting sci-fi plot, hundreds of special-effect shots, a huge nine-figure budget, and a script he’s managed to keep secret for a decade — so precisely is further testament to his powers as a great director.

Inception’s thief is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Using a machine that fits into a suitcase — which at one point fits into another suitcase, a paradoxical visual — Cobb can boot himself into another person’s dreams, where he accesses their private thoughts to extract secrets. What he steals hardly matters; it could be the formula for Coca-Cola, Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices, or top secret company documents. It's simply Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: everyone wants it, but it is inconsequential to the actual plot. Inception's MacGuffin is the sell-off of an inherited company. What the company does, or what its wholesaling will accomplish, is not important.

Once in a dream, an extractor like Cobb can manipulate the physics of the dream to a certain extent including one scene where Paris seems to fold in half like a piece of paper, and then the fruit stands explode in a parade of colorful shrapnel. And should he die in a dream he’ll simply wake up, or he can always throw himself off a tall building — after all, that dream of falling always ends before we hit the ground.

Early in the film, Cobb is hired to do an difficult, thought-impossible inception job. We learn that inception is implanting an idea into a sleeping brain, as opposed to stealing one. It's no cakewalk since a dreaming mind is not easily tricked, so Cobb and his team have devised layers of dreams that will hide the true nature of their task. By the end of the film, we’ll see four layers — a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream — with the possibility of even more layers that remain unseen. There’s also this business where five minutes of sleep time translates into hours of dream time, and on the deepest levels, a dreamer can experience decades of dreams inside a single night’s sleep. Meanwhile his real body is booted into the suitcase machine while dream versions of himself are booted into dream machines on descending levels that fall down into the rabbit hole. So climbing back out of the dreams means his subconscious must be woken up on each dream level, sometimes they require a "kick" that adds to Cobb's labyrinthine masterplan.

These are heady ideas, but the film handles them without compromising the dense science of Inception’s world. As confusing as it sounds, Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay) seems to enjoy the complexity of the challenges associated with the plot as it descends into maddening new layers of dreams and collective unconscious. His Memento was apparently light calisthenics to prepare for this. Like time-travel caper Primer before it, or even Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Inception will reward sharp or repeat viewers with further science. After I saw it, I immediately wanted to see it again, mostly because it was such a remarkable experience, but also because the plot warrants further examination.

Besides DiCaprio, who proves his talent with each new role, the film is full of wonderful actors perfectly cast in solid, impenetrable roles. There’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) as a dapper assistant who has different roles within different layers of dreams. In one dream layer, he has a zero-G brawl in a hotel corridor that apparently took weeks to shoot. Then there’s Ellen Page (Juno), who plays a dream architect able to design the basic structure of a dream. Cobb has her audition for the role: “Draw me a maze in two minutes that takes one minute to get out of.” Tom Hardy, who will be the new Mad Max in 2012, plays a forger who can assume the identity of others, one of them being a character played by Tom Berenger (welcome back, Tom).

These characters, as good as they are at their respective jobs, must rely much on team leader Cobb, whose dreams are easily penetrated by the subconscious taunting of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name has an ominous meaning in Spanish. In one scene, she interrupts the con by sending a freight train tearing through a place that definitely was not meant for a freight train. Although separate from the dream infiltration sequences, this plot element with the wife really allows Inception to expand on the idea of dreams: that dreams are the unrepressed images of our unconscious fighting to express themselves to our conscious self. Eventually, the film becomes more about what reality ultimately is and isn’t, which leads us into Matrix territory. But what the Matrix movies couldn’t do in three movies, Inception does in just one.

Few films can invent their own worlds, let alone their own brand of science. And few films can juggle so many elements so smoothly. The bigger, more innovative, more ambitious movies become the more they expose themselves to risk. Yet here’s Inception, as bold and ambitions as sci-fi movies can get, and Christopher Nolan makes it look so simple with his latest, easily the best film of the summer, and probably the entire year.

Don’t bother pinching me; I’m not dreaming.

(I like the photos so I'm posting all of them!)

When burlap sacks save the world

When our world ends — like really ends — let’s pray that little burlap dolls aren’t left to fix our mistakes. Although, at that point it's unlikely anyone will be around to do any praying. Hell, at that point dolls or even rusty carburetors could be tasked with the cleanup and either way mankind wouldn't peep a single complaint.

I watched 9 keenly, absorbed by its post-apocalyptic detail and its well-choreographed action, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why six-inch-tall ragdolls were given the job of saving the world. Or why a scientist, who could inject his soul into anything, would choose forms so tiny and so incapable of preserving man’s dual legacy of hope and destruction. I question this part of the plot, but let that be my only complaint on this strikingly different animated film.

In 9, it’s the not-too-distant future and scientists have created artificial intelligence, which will be invented to be villains in movies like this or the Terminator franchise. Notice the “peacekeeping” machines that first roll off the assembly line: they all have chaingun turrets to, you know, keep the peace. Of course, the AI responds to man’s control with hostile force and eventually every city on the planet is a smoking crater of poison gas and brimming with the stench of death.

Living in the smoldering remnants of man are the nine little stitched dolls, each named in the order that they were made. 9 is the last one created and he awakes in confusion: what is his purpose, he wonders, as he claws through the detritus of splintered wood, powdered brick and decaying bodies. This movie is not shy with its treatment of death, and it rightfully earns its PG-13 rating; think twice before bringing little ones.

Eventually 9 (Elijah Wood) meets up with the other eight sack people, including fear-mongering leader 1 (Christopher Plummer), gadget guru 5 (John C. Reilly), sexy fighter 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and loony tune 6 (Crispin Glover). Their purpose in this apocalyptic landscape, they reason, is to hide from the last of the nomadic machines as it scours the cracks for things to kill.

Surely life has more purpose, free-spirited rebel 2 (Martin Landau) says. He’s proven right after 9 finds a thimble-like artifact that accidentally turns the machines of war back on after their battery life expired long ago. Before they could hide in fear, but with fresh smoke billowing from the factories of death, the nine now have to fight or be crushed in a second apocalypse. The movie never establishes the nine’s importance well enough that we can accept their role in ending this world-obliterating calamity, but the nine believe it and that counts for something.

I love the style and feel of this film. The sack people, with their zippered fronts and hand-stitched joints — apparently this is called “stitch punk” — are terrific, albeit outlandish, subjects. They have these can-like eyes with snapping little apertures for eyelids that allow for full, expressive emotions. The villains they fight, assembled from the rubble of the wasteland, are equally impressive as harpoon-tailed pterodactyls, wormy snakes that can cocoon victims in scarlet thread, and a robotic cat with a real cat skull for its head. The bombed-out landscape provides many opportunities for these two sides to battle, and battle they do on the crashed wing of a bomber, on the plains of the war-ravaged countryside, and on the mechanical arms of a brain machine.

Mostly I liked this film because it was completely original. When was the last time an animated film used the post-apocalypse as a setting? Or featured death in such a challenging way? Or had non-human characters that weren’t talking animals? You can answer all three questions with “never” or “almost never.”

Like Coraline before it from earlier this year, 9 presents a frightening story and tells it in an inventive, unforgiving way. Children need not be coddled so diligently in this day and age. If they can handle it, let them be a little scared with 9 and its unique burlap heroes.

And just because I love the 9 artwork, here's more: