I'm kidding, of course. The guy's only directed three theatrical features. His lens flares are still in training bras. But just you watch. Next week you'll be reading a multi-page, info-nugget viewer's guide in which some helpful listmaker sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff: "Mission Impossible III," "Star Trek" and "Super 8": Will two of them be "best" and the other one be "worst"? Or the other way around? Look for it! (Coming soon: "The Best and Worst of Terrence Malick.")
"One can summarize a plot in one sentence, whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame." -- Raymond Durgnat
"Young man, let me explain something to you: Every shot in a picture is the most important shot in a picture." -- Ernst Lubitsch
"I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." -- Tom Noonan
"Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." -- Martin Scorsese
“An idea does not exist apart from the words that express it. Style is not an envelope enclosing a message; the envelope is the message.” -- Dwight Macdonald
"There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear." -- Daniel Dennett
19 Comments
We need more primers for directors like this! Otherwise how will we know where to start. Can someone please do one for director Charles Laughton?
So then, is Super 8 a lens flare galore or not?
Akin to the band with only three albums releasing a greatest hits package (wait at least five/six albums or a full decade, please, and don't go all Aerosmith on us in your later years, either).
Your header is at least two words too long... take out the second and third words and you're right on the money.
Hahahaha, what a hilarious joke! And completely relevant to the purpose of Jim's post. You definitely didn't miss the point at all.
Nice one! I read the headline and you already had me angry, although I should have known better. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, everything this guy does is The Best. I've all but stopped going to see summer blockbusters, but I'll still make a point to see a JJ Abrams production.
I look forward to see a top 10 of his 3 features...
I'm not really sure what the point of this entry was. But I just saw the movie last night and loved it. An oasis in the desert of Captain Americas and Green Lanterns.
I can't defend the lens flares. I have no idea why he won't let them go. But I think it's annoying that people who dislike him latch onto that as if it's his defining point. Take the lens flare out of the equation, and the guy's shaping up to be an exceptional director. He and Larry Fong have made two of the best looking movies I've seen in the last few years.
The thing that bothers me about J.J's lens flares is that they continue long after the offending light source is out of frame. Those flares just don't want to leave!
The lens flare, fictional as they are, are the heart of Abrams' problem as a director and writer. He has no original or truly inspired ideas; all he can do is mimic his idols and try to recapture that which he knows to be great. The lens flares typify this. They're completely artificial, the digital creation of an individual struggling to make an awkwardly mundane moment cinematic. It's depressing to watch because it's so earnest but empty.
He can mimic, but he can't create. And even his lens flares ring false. Sorry, Mr Abrams, but you're all narrative hook with no payoff.
@ Joel,
To play devil's advocate, who was Abrams mimicing for Star Trek? How about Mission Impossible? How do lens flares typify mimicry again? Do you maybe want to talk about panning, set ups, tracking shots, etc., and how those directorial choices are devoid of skill or originality?
The opening scene in Super 8 begins with near silence, closing in on a "No accidents since" sign being updated. It took so much story, emotion, and plot and conveyed it beautifully and compactly. Who was he copying there?
How about before he started using lens flares? He won the emmy for best direction for the Lost pilot, and deservedly. I can't remember seeing anything on television that looked like it up to or since then; it had a pretty original feel and look to it in my opinion. What typified his hollowness in those pre-lens flare days?
Again, if I sound defensive, sorry. I wish he would just stop using the lens flares too, mostly to force people like you to seriously deconstruct what you see as inferior film making. The lens flares don't typify anything other than a superficial preoccupation.
Every director who uses a lens flare is a subhuman piece of shit. When's Trier's next movie come out?
I liked the lazy Star Trek well enough, and some of MI3, and I'll see this - I don't really have a problem with him as an emerging action guy. But it's weird that as a movie director, he's gone out of his way to make the lens flare a signature.
I thought of Hitchcock and Tarantino after your training bra line, and got a good laugh. "Look at the shiny thing!" is a signature. Looking at it that way, he's already like a gratuitously shrieking Steven Tyler. So maybe he's just still really, really excited by it all.
Maybe it's a running joke on the event movie mentality, delivered without subtlety, like what's expected of him...
I hope you include the Lost pilot in your piece!
The lens flares didn't bother me nearly as much as the constant circling dolly shots he seemed to use for every scene involving more than three characters.
For me, his best work as a director remains the pilot for LOST.
The lens flares are real in Super 8. They're not digital.
There's no such thing as a "real" lens flare; you'll never see one unless you're looking through a lens, so any lens flare in any movie doesn't belong--unless the movie is a documentary, I guess.
@ joel: Pretty sure that a lot of the flares in Star Trek, at least, weren't digital. They were created on set.
Trek had too many lens flares, sure, but it was an okay film.
Abrams is still making films for television -- close-ups, panoramas, seldom any medium shots, mostly narrow depth of field. Script for SUPER 8 enjoyable as a sort of Godard in-joke: A kid describes a by-the-numbers way to write a script "so the audience will care about the characters," and the movie promptly does likewise, as if following his advice.
Leave a comment