Super 8

There's been some internet buzz about the 10th anniversary of the release of the movie Super 8 being today. The movie was an okay-homage, but it's nothing to note on my calendar every year. 

This was written at the time of the film's release....ten years ago (don't expect a card...)

"Heavin' Steven"
or
"Asshole! Can You Stop Blowing Things Up for Two Seconds and Move the Camera?"

J.J. Abrams already had told you what this film would be with his first teaser-trailer and before anyone knew he was working on it.*  That first teaser had all the candy-smudged fingerprints of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (by way of Jaws) through it...with a noticeable twist—the utility vehicle that looks so much like Roy Neary's from that film drives onto some railroad tracks and crashes into a train causing a massive derailment, and the freeing of...something. Something that goes crash-bang-boom in the night. And won't take the time to let you complete five notes of Zoltán Kodály's musical hand-signs.

Super 8 is very clearly a Spielberg homage: the kid-centric cast of fresh faces; the swooping crane shots making parabolas before reaching for the high vantage point; the big faces turning toward the camera; the empty sky shots that are just waiting for something to fill them; the overlapping dialog; the hiring of local yokels for "color"; the slow reveals—things that make a lot of damage before we really see anything; the dysfunctional families; the ostracized pint-sizers and geeks; the showman's brio of opening the curtain just a little...then closing it...again and again and again.**

Abrams is doing an homage to Spielberg (even got him to produce it), but it's still his movie, more so than, say, Tobe Hooper imprinted Poltergeist. If anything, this one is a little more polished (than MI:III and Star Trek [2009]) because it's trying to ape Spielberg—there's more technique and less hitting the camera for jitters' sake, like the movie was on a perpetual coffee-jag—even if the film purposefully, deliberately simulates 1970's film-grain and anamorphic lens-flares (that actually get irritating after awhile). But, the tone is more Abrams. If I can use a culinary metaphor, Spielberg's early run was like a sweet-and-sour dish at a family-friendly Asian restaurant; Abrams gooses everything up a couple spice-stars flipping the ratio between action and characterization (there's more of the latter than the former)—the action a bit grittier, the emotions a might more painful and the pangs a bit more heart-felt.

For one thing, Abrams likes girls. And by that I mean that he knows how to write for them. For all the time that he spent contemplating the heavens, the boy-filmmaker Spielberg did not understand that men and women come from different planets.*** Spielberg's women (in his early films) were tom-boys with girl-clothes, or icons that the men-folk didn't/couldn't fathom. Here, the women are people (when they're allowed to be more than caricatures—the older sister, played by AJ Michalka, doesn't much rise above "petulant teen" mode). Elle Fanning's Alice Dainard feels like a real-life human being, her emotions raw and just under the surface. It's no wonder Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), the hero of the piece, is obsessed with her, beyond the fact that they're both motherless children with absent fathers (Ron Eldard, as a guilt-ridden alcoholic, and the great Kyle Chandler as Joe's Deputy Dad). Of course, they gravitate to each other—they're both dependable people in undependable worlds.

They meet—well, they already know each other by reputation from school—because baby-Orson Welles Charlie Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) is making a Super-8 zombie movie for a an amateur film competition. Joe's half the crew, and Charlie has cast Alice as the dutiful "wife" of a zombie investigator (wonder where they train for that). During a night-time shoot at a far-flung railway station, the kids are witness to, and almost victims of, the spectacular train-crash—of the teaser—caused by a truck travelling the tracks to deliberately de-rail it. The sequence goes on a bit too long, but it is a "Holy Crap!" inducing spectacular where, despite the CGI that was certainly involved you worry for the young actors dodging the fireballs and sizable debris hurtling through the frame. Abrams is a bit more visceral that Spielberg was, and has a cruel way of making sure you glimpse everything while not letting up the pace. He also keeps the reveal of the "thing" as delayed as possible, exposing only bits and pieces, various debris-fields and the governmental cover-up feint that insures we go through the bulk of the film's progress without knowing exactly what in Ohio is going on.****

All for the better. With all the manic mayhem Abrams dishes out, the focus is more on the people caught in the web of circumstance than in the BEM behind it all—in that, Abrams has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan (specifically Signs, where it seemed apparent the writer-director didn't give a Sixth Sense about what the aliens were like, so much as what the humans were going through). This leads to a rushed finale where through some E.T. like-symbiosis the kids and the "creature" (oh, let's call him a "Horta," shall we?) come to a meeting of minds and a mutual focusing of priorities. Both must find "home," and both get there a might too hurriedly and conveniently.

Still, Abrams, despite truncating any deeply emotional pay-off in his ending, does manage to stay focused on what's important—the holding-on and the letting-go. If Super 8 isn't as moving in its consummation as its inspirations were, at least it reminds us—as the whole exercise set out to do—of how rich they were and how their power should not be overlooked or taken for granted.

*

**  He missed one thing, though: the opening shot along a fence of some kind.

*** The funny thing is (if I can be gossipy for a moment) is that Spielberg didn't fully grasp women until he'd worked with his present wife Kate Capshaw, who gives one of the most irritating performances of any woman in his films in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

**** At one point, I thought it was going to turn into a "giant spider" movie.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

A-One, A-Two, A-You Know What To Do...

or

When the Levee Breaks (When My Daddy Stay Out Late/He Don't Care a Thing for Me)

August Wilson died in October 2005, and is best known for his "Pittsburgh Cycle" of ten plays and there has been a concerted effort to bring the ten to the screen. Hallmark made "The Piano Lesson" in 1995, But the rest...? Part of that is that Wilson insisted that his black plays be directed by black directors ("the job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans") making the job more difficult. Well, bullshit. Let's just say it. Nobody wants to invest the money in a black play with black actors by a black director (unless, of course, it has the word "Hood" in the title) because they don't think they'll get their money back to which I say "Wakanda Forever!" So the effort is being made to toss out the seeds on the wind and see what takes root—Denzel Washington directed Fences in 2016 with outstanding performances by him and Viola Davis—she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but I was surprised she wasn't nominated for Best Actress, as she stole the show. She does that.

And there would be that same danger with the second film to be done (of the second play in the cycle), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, if director George C. Wolfe hadn't cast his film so perfectly, and then run away with it to make an honest-to-god film as opposed to a filmed play. Ma Rainey surges and glides and pivots and laterals, lifted aloft by the music and by Wilson's language cadences. And the acting is never short of fascinating. One hesitates to put the word "perfect" to anything but to my eye and ear, this one is perfect.

It is 1927, and Ma Rainey (Davis, almost unrecognizable—except the eyes always shine through) has interrupted her tour down South to do recordings for her manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) and studio executive Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne) to meet the need for "Race Records" for those blacks who've moved to the North during the "Black Migration." In her entourage is her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) and one of her dancers Dussie Mae (Taylor Paige), who will accompany her to the session. 

She'll get there in her own time, but first to arrive are the band: Cutler (Colman Domingo)-trombone, Toledo (Glynn Turman)-piano, Slow Drag (Michael Potts)-bass, and Levee (Chadwick Boseman)—trumpet. Levee is the youngest member of the troupe, and is all unbridled energy—he just bought a pair of fancy new shoes from his poker winnings the night before and his excitement for the session is for getting to do his own arrangement of the "Black Bottom" piece and sell his arrangements to Sturdyvant with an eye towards recording them and starting his own group.

The banter between band-mates escalates and falls, as the older band-mates scoff at Levee's braggadocio over his thinking that he might have some sort of control over what Ma will or won't perform for the session. It sounds good when Ma isn't there and its just the band he's angling with, but sounding good and producing are two different things. Power plays are at the heart of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom—who has it and who pretends to have it—and one can bluff all they want to, but there's a difference between a poker-hand and life, and the rules don't necessarily apply to both.

The dynamics change when Ma arrives at the studio; you play it her way or you don't play. In a studio, time is money. But that's money down the drain if you don't get product to exploit. So, things shift and drift, with the ultimate aim of a good recording from everybody—"Who this 'we?'" What you talkin' about 'we?' Come talking this 'we" stuff. Who's 'we?'"—with no solo's allowed. And Ma will push her power—punching up and down—as far as she can go because it's her voice, her material, her band, and her name on the release forms. Nobody makes any money until that happens. You want power? Watch how a diva plays it.

This would be a great solo showcase, just for the presence of Viola Davis ("No look goes uninvested," says director Wolfe) as Ma, and the participation of the late Chadwick Boseman in his last role—that's what all the publicity is about (and they are great, don't get me wrong, I've never seen either of them do anything but light up the screen)—but, everybody in it is great. Davis and Boseman are perfectly capable of blowing people away on-screen, but they are matched by Domingo, Turman, and Potts as the band-members; they are given their monologues and solo's and each are given their moments to shine, while dialoguing without any hint that what they're saying hasn't been lived and is coming straight from their minds to their lips. This is a near-perfect ensemble piece and it is thrilling watching what they do with it.

And director George C. Wolfe does a brilliant job of giving them the proscenium to perform. Even while you're hanging on every word, there are moments when his shot choices are nothing short of breath-taking, anticipating the arcs of the play and giving you something amazing to look at and contemplate, whether the action is happening in the frame, or just waiting for it to happen. Wolfe is a grand ring-master setting things up and paying them off, with three—and other minor ones—dynamics of power that come crashing together and either makes great music or explodes.

It is thrilling to watch this kind of work and one hopes against hope that Netflix makes this more available—beyond its platform—so that more people can see it and appreciate the way a stage-bound work can be opened up from within just by making inspired choices. 

This is the second of the planned "Pittsburgh Cycle" adaptations; one wishes that Wolfe will direct the remaining eight, as well. That will do justice to Wilson's legacy.

Some of George Wolfe's compositions: