Cinema of childhood bucks summer trend

J. J. Abrams's Super 8, however, resisted the urge to splurge when it pitched its credentials among this winter's Hollywood blockbusters.

"It was important that we try not to talk about it too much," Abrams says, adding that he didn't want to spoil the movie-going experience. Nevertheless, he's now on a global promotional tour and "we also need to tell people about it otherwise they won't know it's there. It's a double-edged sword".

At least with Super 8, the mystery was maintained for an unusually long period. Its plot was kept secret and its cast is relatively unknown. You can do that when the film is produced by Steven Spielberg.

Abrams - a co-creator of the TV series Lost and director of Mission: Impossible 3 and the successful rejuvenation of Star Trek - ensured that Super 8 was not spoiled by teaser campaigns.

"It's the thing that makes me craziest," he says. "There's no point in seeing the movie anymore because you've seen the trailer."

Super 8 is a quiet film in comparison with typical blockbuster bombast. It may come to be considered a reaction against such franchises as Transformers, X Men and Harry Potter in that it doesn't scream from the rooftops. Instead, it represents a throwback to the kind of films Abrams grew up watching in the 1970s. New York magazine described Super 8 as "the [US] summer's lone original blockbuster".

Abrams says it was an "interesting opportunity" to compete in the lucrative US summer season with a movie that was intimate and not as noisy as other Hollywood fare.

"It was a fun idea to have a movie that used to be the kind of movie that I would look forward to every summer and seems to not exist anymore in that season," he says.

Super 8 follows a group of rural kids cobbling together a rudimentary Super 8 film. While filming, they witness a horrendous train crash that wreaks havoc upon their community.

Abrams is happy to hear comparisons with innocent films of past decades, including E.T., The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Super 8 is a personal film, particularly after he made the third Mission Impossible and Star Trek which, to be fair, had many fingers all over them.

Abrams is politic. "It was definitely a relief in a way to work on a movie that didn't feel beholden to any specific pre-existing series of movies or TV shows," he says.

"But I will say the movie owes everything to the cinema of my childhood, watching films by Spielberg and certainly Star Wars and American Graffiti and John Carpenter's horror films, George Romero's zombie movies, the slasher films of the late '70s-early '80s, the films of Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg. . .

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Book Review: 'Crazy 4 Cult' A Celebration Of Cult Movie Fandom

There is, in Los Angeles, a very cool art gallery called Gallery 1988 . Once a year they hold a show called Crazy 4 Cult, in which they invite underground artists (some of them quite famous, like Shepard Fairey , who did the Obama “Hope” poster and co-starred in the art world puzzle-box “ Exit Through the Gift Shop ”) to contribute, imprinting their specific style onto a moment or image from a classically cultish movie. Also, once a year Kevin Smith masturbates to gay sex.

You’ll learn all of the above in the introduction to the gorgeous coffee-table book “ Crazy 4 Cult: Cult Movie Art ,” an introduction written (of course) by Kevin Smith. The book itself is a collection of the first four years of the show’s run, with over 170 pages of art, paintings, collages, even little stuffed figurines of characters from “ The Big Lebowski ” all beautifully presented on big, slick pages.

Source: Indie Wire (blog)

Book Review: 'Crazy 4 Cult' A Celebration Of Cult Movie Fandom

There is, in Los Angeles, a very cool art gallery called Gallery 1988 . Once a year they hold a show called Crazy 4 Cult, in which they invite underground artists (some of them quite famous, like Shepard Fairey , who did the Obama “Hope” poster and co-starred in the art world puzzle-box “ Exit Through the Gift Shop ”) to contribute, imprinting their specific style onto a moment or image from a classically cultish movie. Also, once a year Kevin Smith masturbates to gay sex....

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My friend Nick and i are going to the movies beofre we both leave for vacation. We can’t decide if we should see Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Knight and Day. We’re both prett open with movies (he even went to Eclipse with me and another friend). We both have slight obsession with Horror/thriller/Action movies (obviously these don’t really fit into that genre but i figured I’d add that just in case.) one thing is he’s big on plot, we argued iver terminaotr Salvation for an hour because he thought it had “plot holoes” (weirdo tehe). But we’re both pretty poen with movies. so what do you think?