Look! Up in the sky! It's a Spielberg movie!

 Went to see Super 8 with Bob and Patience Mason. Good skiffy movie fun. The homage to Spielberg was a little thick, but evidently it’s meant as a sincere “thank you” from director J.J. Abrams, who’s worked with Spielberg since, at age 15, he spliced together the old man’s childhood Super 8 films.

It’s a fun movie for kids of all ages, homage or hommage or whatever notwithstanding – I had to think about how throat-grabbingly dramatic George Pal’s War of the Worlds was when I saw it at ten or eleven, and could still feel some of that thrill here. I hope kids that age aren’t too jaded to jump at a sudden monster shot nowadays. And it has the best train wreck scene ever. And really cool pyrotechnics, both miniaturized and life-sized.

Abrams wisely resisted sexualizing the boy-girl friendship here. I mean, their parents have enough to worry about with Martians fucking up the countryside and the entire 9th Infantry Division encamping overnight in their back yard.

The film’s set in Ohio in the 70s, and is a convincing reconstruction. A couple of times the kids’ dialogue and attitude seemed a little 80s or even 90s.

My parents forbade me to see War of the Worlds in 1953, too scary . . . wonder if anything would have been different now if I’d obeyed them. It gave me wonderful nightmares for I don’t know how long. (Wonder whether Mother noticed that the comic strips I was drawing suddenly were full of death rays and flying saucers. She stitched them together for me, on her sewing machine, I think without comment other than motherly praise.)

Joe