The Super 8 kids played laser tag in Weirton (WV) for Ryan Lee's birthday.
From MovieLine:
The saucer-eyed dreamchildren of Super 8 are still not over this train accident. Instead of finding a responsible teacher, wiping their tears on that teacher’s magenta blazer, and reporting the news, they’re now standing together and holding hands like cover art on a Hootie single. It’s a little inspiring. And a lot cloying. But I think this movie is supposed to be both those things.
CBS's "Entertainment Tonight" summer movie preview will feature Super 8.
Catch is at 7:30 ET / 7:00 PT.
From the NY Times:
Abrams says that having Spielberg involved had an additional benefit: it enabled him to pay more lavish homage to Spielberg’s work, an obvious inspiration for “Super 8,” than he would otherwise have felt comfortable doing. Aspects of “Super 8” allude to “E.T.,” to “Close Encounters,” to “Jaws,” even to “Jurassic Park.”
Spielberg’s name, along with Abrams’s, is above the title in ads for the movie, which doesn’t have famous actors. But an absence of stars is only one of the gambles it takes. When you keep your movie under a thick veil, as Abrams likes to do, audiences can wind up confused and wary. “What people are looking for in the summer are films with really easy-to-digest high-concept premises,” says Phil Contrino, the editor of Boxoffice.com, which predicts and analyzes grosses. “Even in the case of ‘Inception,’ as complicated and convoluted as that movie was, it had a very, very basic high-concept premise: people invade dreams and change them.” He says it’s less easy to divine and distill what’s behind the curtain of “Super 8.”
There’s an adolescent romance, in which a grieving boy named Joe (played by Joel Courtney, a newcomer) reaches out nervously to a troubled girl named Alice (Elle Fanning). There’s a rite-of-passage story, in which they and their friends test their bravery. “Super 8” wants to be a lot more than a monster movie, but the painstaking drum roll that builds to its climax could mean that audiences judge it primarily — even solely — on whether the payoffs in the third act are commensurate with the heavy breathing in the first two.
Empire magazine posted an interview on Super 8 with JJ and Steven.
Emanuel Levy over at Cinema 24/7 has an interview with Joel:
The opposite of Elle, Joel Courtney had never had any professional acting experience at all when he was offered “Super 8’s” lead role of Joe Lamb, a kid trying to come to grips with the sudden loss of his mother.
“I knew J.J. was taking a real chance on me and I didn’t want to let him down. I wanted to do a good job for him, myself and for everybody working on the film,” Joel explains.
Abrams adds, “I didn’t want the main character in ‘Super 8’ to be the director of the movies. I wanted him to be the kid who follows the director, who’s there because he’s lost his mother and is having a tough time with his father and is looking for his way.”
From the beginning, Joel understood why Joe devotes himself to making his friend’s Super 8 movie at a time in his life when nothing else is certain. “Joe’s mom has passed away and his dad, being the town deputy, is never really around,” Joel comments. “So, Joe finds his only comfort with his friends. His dad wants him to be a regular kid and play baseball, but Joe just wants to make movies. He’s in charge of all the makeup, sound and special effects and he loves that stuff.”
Most of all, Joel was kept intrigued by the mounting tension of the story. “I love the mystery of it and it is a total adrenaline rush,” he says.