War Horse

Two Steven Spielberg movies in one week!

War Horse follows a thoroughbred horse named Joey from being purchased at an auction by a poor farmer in a small town in Wales through the mainland during World War I, being passed from one owner to the next. The horse is charmed, and through its good fortune its live is spared many times over. His original owner is a teenaged boy named Albert who loves and cares for him until the war begins and Joey is conscripted into the military.

Among the themes and ideas that Spielberg is exploring in this movie, the one that fascinated me the most is the impact of technology on warfare. We witness this firsthand when nearly the entire English cavalry is gunned down by German machine guns. It reminded me of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, where Kurosawa showed us many evocative shots of horses lying dead or dying in the field of battle.

The horse travels across enemy lines more than once, finding owners and caretakers on both sides, be they English, French, or German. Spielberg doesn't take sides in the war, he only takes Joey's side, and his owners are always humane and kind towards him. Our capacity for kindness towards animals is something that ties all of us together.

I thought War Horse was a very lovely film, sentimental and earnest; Steven Spielberg doing what he does best: pulling on your heartstrings. The cinematography is among Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski's very best, and some of the best I've seen all year. Lots of sprawling John Ford-esque landscapes. The World War I battle sequences are intense and as realistic and evocative as they can be, given the film's bloodless PG-13 rating. John Williams' score may have been the best I've heard by him in years.

The cast is very good, too. Standouts include Jeremy Irvine as Albert, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston as two English cavalrymen, and Niels Arestrup and Celine Buckens as an old man and his sickly granddaughter who one day find the horse in their windmill. Also, there is this awesome goose that lives on Albert's farm and serves as comic relief, always attacking visitors and running into their house unexpected. I'm hoping Spielberg makes a spinoff War Goose movie.

It was kind of nice to see both sides of Steven Spielberg come out in the same week. The Adventures of Tintin felt like Spielberg just having a good time, and is a lot of fun as a diversion, but War Horse is Spielberg showing that he's still a master of heartfelt, emotional storytelling.

The Adventures of Tintin

I've already said much of what I had to say about how much I like the character of Tintin a couple of days ago in my review of Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, an old French adaptation of the character. In short: I'm a big fan. But even if I wasn't already a fan, I would have been pretty psyched for this new movie.

You see, The Adventures of Tintin's geek credibility is through the roof. It's directed by Steven Spielberg, and produced by Peter Jackson. The screenplay is credited to current Doctor Who/Sherlock showrunner Steven Moffat, Shaun of the Dead/Scott Pilgrim writer/director Edgar Wright, and Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish. It features Daniel Craig, AKA James Bond as the villain, Andy Serkis, AKA Gollum as the sidekick, and Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the comic relief.

Holy crap!

The Adventures of Tintin is the story of boy reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a market. Within the ship is a clue to hidden pirates' gold that leads him and his dog Snowy on a globetrotting adventure filled with peril and intrigue. Along the way, he gets help from dunderhead inspectors Thompson and Thomson and everybody's second favorite drunk seaman with an anger management problem (the first being Donald Duck, who must have been hitting the sauce, right?), Captain Haddock.

The movie was filmed using the performance capture method, where the actors' performances are fed into computers and then animated to look like the characters they're playing. These movies never seem to perform very well, mostly because of the often zombie-like rendered appearances of the characters. The technology has come a long way since Polar Express, though, and I have to say, it didn't really bother me this time around. There's no attempt in Tintin to make the characters look photo-real; rather, they're made to look like the human equivalent of creator Herge's art style.

Spielberg seems to be having a field day, letting his camera and imagination run wild. Positioning the camera in places that would otherwise be physically impossible in a live action film. The action centerpiece of the film is a huge, complex chase sequence done in a single shot. I'm not sure he captures Herge's spirit, exactly, but I think he manages to emphasize the stylistic and tonal qualities that the two of them have in common.

The cast all seem to be having fun as well, and are all perfect fits for their characters, particularly Jamie Bell in the title role. Pegg and Frost are quite impressive at making themselves indistinguishable from each other as the Thom(p)sons, especially considering how different they look in person. The dog, Snowy, is a purely CGI creation, but interacts perfectly with the actors, and perfectly captures the dog's personality from the comics. John Williams delivers a fun, upbeat score, that actually surprised me. In my mind, I expected it to be more along the lines of Indiana Jones, given the similar nature of the stories.

I'm honestly not sure if everyone will enjoy The Adventures of Tintin like I did. I have to admit, I was pretty inclined to like it from the get-go. I'm still not sure if America at large has any real reason to care about the character. Luckily for me, the rest of the world loves him, so a sequel is already on the way. Yay, Tintin!

Super 8

You know what? Just skip this review and see the movie. You have my permission. I'm not even going to reveal that much, but the less you know, the more fun you will have.

Super 8 is director J.J. Abrams' ode to the films that inspired him as a kid, and to the art of filmmaking itself. For me, it's perhaps best viewed on a VHS tape, recorded off the TV, with the HBO theme song playing before it. If I had seen this movie when I was ten years old, I would have begged my parents for a camcorder and got cracking. Unfortunately, at that age, I hadn't quite figured out that filmmaking was something you could just do.

Before Super 8 even started, I got a nostalgic thrill from seeing Elliott ride past the moon on his bicycle again in the old school Amblin Entertainment logo. That thrill pretty much lasted the entire movie. It feels exactly like all the Spielberg films I cherished as a kid. Much the way Tarantino does with his beloved exploitation movies, Abrams cherry picks moments and scenes from Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Goonies, Stand By Me, even Raiders of the Lost Ark, and repurposes them into something along those lines but new and different. He captures Spielberg's early visual flare and sense of suspense perfectly, as well as his knack for getting realistic, downright believable performances out of children. Of course, he has Spielberg himself along for the ride in a producing capacity, and that certainly doesn't hurt.

I won't go too deep into spoiler territory, since the marketing campaign has gone through so much trouble to spoil as little as possible, and not knowing where the movie is taking you just adds to that sense of wonder and enjoyment. Can you remember the days when trailers and endless marketing didn't give away the whole movie? I barely can. I grew up at the tail end of that time.

Super 8 is about a group of kids in 1979 setting out to make a zombie movie with a Super 8 camera. While shooting a scene, they find themselves right in the middle of a massive, disastrous, train crash. Things only deepen, as their whole town is affected by the crash, and the train's mysterious cargo.

That's really as far as the original teaser goes, even though I think they show a bit more in the later ones. But I'll stop there with the plot. If you heeded my advice, you're not even reading this anyway, you're watching the movie.

Like Spielberg's early movies, Super 8 deals a lot with broken homes. Joe, the main kid, recently lost his mother in an accident, and his dad, the Sheriff's Deputy, is having a hard time communicating with him, and Alice, the girl Joe likes, has a drunk dad and was abandoned by her mom. I thought it was interesting that the mothers were absent in Abrams' world, where it was always absent fathers in Spielberg's. I wonder if he just did that to switch things up, or if he really did have an absent mom? I don't know anything about him.

There are lots of little jumps and scares in Super 8, but it's not a straight-up horror movie. It's much more about the way these kids relate with their families and each other during this whole crisis. Charles, the director of their zombie movie, sees the military presence as an opportunity to add verisimilitude to his movie. I liked Charles a lot. In the 80's movies, the fat kid is there usually to be comic relief or more likely the loveable target. Charles, on the other hand, was smart, driven, bossy, and funny in a way that was in no way derived from his chunkiness. Good on you, J.J.

Super 8 took me back to being 10 or 11 years old again. All the movies you see as a kid are the ones that stay with you forever. Spielberg was a nut for the sci-fi and WWII movies he grew up on, and has built his entire career on pretty much just that. J.J. Abrams happened to come from the very best time in cinema history to be a kid, and shows us with Super 8 that he's still doing exactly what his young characters are doing in the movie: playing with his dad's camera.