Off the List: Super 8

Last night I had the opportunity to hang out with a friend and former coworker that I haven't seen for a while, so we decided to go catch a movie. (He and I have a long-running tradition of catching "guy movies" together so we don't have to put up with an unhappy SO that doesn't like them.) The movie we wound up picking was Super 8.

The movie is excellent, a real four-star film if ever there was one. Highly reminiscent of early Spielberg, it assumes that the audience is both smart and paying attention and instead of caving your skull in with exposition, trusts that you'll figure out quite a bit from clues in the environment. It's hard to discuss the movie too much without spoiling it, but I will say this: despite some very well-executed creepy stuff going on, the real fun of the film is from the interaction of the kids with each other and their parents and the parents interactions with each other. It's a testament to the quality of the writing, acting, and direction that a story as multithreaded and complex as the one in this movie can be executed so well in such a short time. Oh, and the most spectacular train crash scene I've ever seen in anything. (The Fugitive has finally been dethroned for "best train crash ever.")