The part with the mouse. Totally didn't need that part, anyway.

I almost watched that a while back when netflix was aggressively insisting that I would love it every time I logged on. "Dude, you are so gonna love this movie. We think you'd rate it like 4.5 stars. You HAVE to watch this." But the description sounded so dull, and there are very few documentaries that manage to keep up a decent pace for a couple hours and don't resort to padding and shit, so I never watched it. But since you guys said it's good, I watched it.

And now I don't know how to feel. As a documentary it's fucking amazing. The content in the movie makes me feel really bad about saying anything positive about it, tho, cause I'd honestly rather the thing had never had to get made in the first place.

I loved Super 8 as well, but yeah, it's got some weird problems in the writing that you could have fixed really easily. The only thing that really started to bug me were the jump-scares. Good lord there are a ton of those in there.

The part of the story that matters is the part about the parents and their kids, and the monster story is secondary to that and really sort of supports it. I mean, the kid likes this girl, but their parents hate each other, so they want to keep them apart. The monster steps in at that point and physically takes her away. The two fathers have their talk in the car and confront their guilt and anger right before the kid's scene where he stops running and confronts the monster.

The monster is building this machine that will apparently collect all the little cube things, but he's also wasting time killing people. In the scenes where the monster attacks people it's initially just collecting parts for it's machine, but then it's distracted by some human and takes them or kills them. I guess the scene with the kid was supposed to make it realize that it should stop wasting time and take off. The two fathers spend the movie ultimately defeating their own goals, which is to have a positive relationship with their kids, because they're too preoccupied with being pissed off at each other and feeling sorry for themselves. They take their selfish emotions out on their kids in the same way the monster takes it's own selfish emotions out on the humans in town. Overcoming selfishness is something of a theme in the film, as the fat kid has to deal with it as well.

I wanted to facepalm when the locket thing happened, but later I met some people who actually didn't get the whole "letting go of the locket" thing, so I guess the movie is riding that fine line between being your typical summer blockbuster and being subtle, though subtle isn't the right word.

I also thought the 8mm film was going to play much more into the movie's plot.

Overall, tho, it's probably the most fun and upbeat movie I've seen in a theater in a while. Too many action flicks are just so damn dark and depressing. Also, those two main kids can fuckin act. Pyro kid was funny. I liked how scenes with a bunch of people would often have multiple conversations going on at once. I'll probably see it again in the theater. Unfortunately, as I was being shoved through the exit door of the theater by the dicks behind me the kids' film started playing, so I didn't get to see more than a couple seconds of it. Wish I had just kept my ass in my seat.

On a totally unrelated note, if you guys haven't seen it, you should watch "Find Me Guilty". It's not amazing or anything, but I'd say it's probably Vin's best performance and kinda proves that the guy can act.

Not just that, but wasn't this supposed to be the first in some kind of trilogy or something? They still talk about making another one. At the end of the flick he is now in control of the most powerful army in the universe. Assuming the next movie isn't about the sudden arrival of some interdimensional space demons he has to fight with his new army, where do you go from the end of this movie?

When I was 15 or 16 I was bored one night and was surfing around late-night cable TV to see what I could find. I ended up bumping randomly into Fellini's "La Strada". Some goofy chick who was acting all weird about her hat started getting bullied by some big oaf guy. I left it there for a minute just to see what the hell was going on and ended up watching the whole thing and having my feeble little teenage mind blown. My idea at the time of what a good movie was supposed to be was stuff like Star Wars and Jurassic Park and Die Hard. I never really got into Fellini after that, tho La Strada is still one of my favorite flicks, but becaues of that movie I ended up finding Kurosawa and allowed myself to watch older movies like "M" and "Breakfast At Tiffany's", which are both also favorite films of mine now.

A year or two later I got into anime with Akira, and eventually discovered "Grave of the Fireflies" (in a theater at a film festival, no less), which blew my mind again. Grave is my favorite film without a doubt.

La Strada showed me that movies could tell these really simple stories without any special effects or action sequences, yet they could be just as exciting and absorbing in other ways.

Grave of the Fireflies taught me that you could use a movie to eviscerate a theater full of grown adults and make them all sob uncontrollably like little babies.

And Return of the Jedi, for the record, was the first flick I ever saw (or at least remember seeing) in a theater.