July 23: Super 8 (2011 – J.J. Abrams)

★★★

This movie is just a delight --  my second wonderful summer film bauble after Midnight in Paris.  It’s not aiming to give great insight or to move or to thrill.  Super 8 is just a fun, smart homage to Steven Spielberg’s film-making without cynicism or irony.

And that's its value and attraction.  I’ve tried on my own to sit down and make a list of the components of Spielberg’s film style, and I’ve pretty much always failed to find a uniqueness that would distinguish him from others.  I’ve always sensed it and felt I could recognize a Spielberg film, but I couldn’t tell someone what I was responding to.

 

Abrams, though, nails it.  His lens flairs, the long train wreck, his focus on children and (especially) their relationship to their fathers, the pure kid and the flawed adult, the strong foregrounding, the misunderstood alien, the mysterious government……yeah, ALL these are Spielberg.  This film is the best description of a Spielberg style that I’ve seen, and while I totally enjoyed the film, I also came away with a vision of Spielberg’s work that I hadn’t had before I saw it.

So Super 8 is a pretty good way to spend a couple of summer hours.  It foregrounds Spielberg's style while making it work on the viewer.  What a pleasure.....now back to Close Encounters.

July 22: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2 (2011 -- David Yates)

★★★★

I read that Yates has done the last four Harry Potters, and I think he’s got the knack.  Though Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 dragged a bit, this one did not disappoint.  At all.  I enjoyed the story a lot and, for once, I felt invested in Harry.  I went into the film with a vague foreboding, not having read the book and not having heard how it ended -- just all the usual chatter about “appropriate” and “mature.”  With that in mind, I wasn’t a half hour into the film before I felt the weight of doom on Harry, and I had an awful dread going all the way through.  It was the first time, in any of the films, that I was pulling for the boy and worried about what would happen to him.

Add that engagement to the impressive cinematography, and you have a worthwhile summer movie, and a kids movie to boot.  From the menace to Harry and his buds to the impressive action sequences like the attack on the shield over Hogwarts and the magicians’ battles, I felt altogether in the hands of a good story teller.  I was engaged; I felt threatened.  And I enjoyed the experience...in IMAX 3D.   I think the magician’s battles even break some new ground in fantasy film since they were so impressive despite the relatively restrained acting called for. 

The film isn’t perfect.  I got some answers to questions from Pt. 1 -- like who helped the kids escape from the department of magic – but I found some of the dramatic reversals to be  distracting.  I’m sure a lot of that had to happen because fans would want to know the ultimate fates of the characters, and this being the last in a series, I think Yates can be forgiven for packing in some info that might not be integral to what happens in this particular movie.  In any case, these digressions hardly take away from the pleasure of watching the culmination of the series and the vague bittersweet of the ending, which reminded me of how I always feel at the end of Peter Pan, with its continuing faith but also its sense of loss.


So I join the crowd in expressing my appreciation for this series-ending film.