Bear with me, because this might get complicated.
"Super 8" is a film by JJ Abrams, the director of all those forgettable Star Wars and Mission Impossible movies. It's about a group of kids in a small town in 1970-something who witness some strange shenanigans involving a train wreck, a monster, and sinister military operations.
The kids are making their own movie, with a Super 8 camera, a fan-film apparently inspired by George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." In this fan-film, or film-within-a-film, the kids play adults, as kids do when they shoot their own movies. They deliver stilted, implausible dialogue while ostensibly behaving like grown-ups.
But "Super 8" is itself a fan-film, one made by JJ Abrams and clearly inspired by the early work of Steven Spielberg -- "Close Encounters" and "E. T." in particular. The kids in Abrams's movie also seem to be playing adults: they deliver stilted, implausible dialogue, and pretend to act like grown-ups, all the while carrying on the illusion of making their film-within-a-film.
It's hard to say whether this tail-eating act of nostalgia was intentional. If it was, it's a triumph of metafiction, an homage to movie-making and cinema magic. If it wasn't, it's just a clumsy reflection of JJ's childhood favorites, rife with bad dialogue, obnoxious lens flare, and manipulative editing. The child actors, Elle Fanning among them, are more like stand-ins for characters in a Spielberg movie, rather than actual children.
Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, the next generation of filmmakers, inspired by "Super 8", will make their own referential paean to the early work of JJ Abrams: a movie about adults making a movie about children who are making a movie about grown-ups who will all, hopefully, be eaten by zombies.
"Super 8" is a film by JJ Abrams, the director of all those forgettable Star Wars and Mission Impossible movies. It's about a group of kids in a small town in 1970-something who witness some strange shenanigans involving a train wreck, a monster, and sinister military operations.
The kids are making their own movie, with a Super 8 camera, a fan-film apparently inspired by George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." In this fan-film, or film-within-a-film, the kids play adults, as kids do when they shoot their own movies. They deliver stilted, implausible dialogue while ostensibly behaving like grown-ups.
But "Super 8" is itself a fan-film, one made by JJ Abrams and clearly inspired by the early work of Steven Spielberg -- "Close Encounters" and "E. T." in particular. The kids in Abrams's movie also seem to be playing adults: they deliver stilted, implausible dialogue, and pretend to act like grown-ups, all the while carrying on the illusion of making their film-within-a-film.
It's hard to say whether this tail-eating act of nostalgia was intentional. If it was, it's a triumph of metafiction, an homage to movie-making and cinema magic. If it wasn't, it's just a clumsy reflection of JJ's childhood favorites, rife with bad dialogue, obnoxious lens flare, and manipulative editing. The child actors, Elle Fanning among them, are more like stand-ins for characters in a Spielberg movie, rather than actual children.
Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, the next generation of filmmakers, inspired by "Super 8", will make their own referential paean to the early work of JJ Abrams: a movie about adults making a movie about children who are making a movie about grown-ups who will all, hopefully, be eaten by zombies.