Super 8 (2011)

With the exception of Super 8, J.J. Abrams has spent the bulk of his career as a director basically continuing big screen universes.

Just in time for the extraterrestrial friendly Fourth of July weekend, Earth To Echo lands in a theater near you on July 2nd. In celebration of Echo's arrival on earth, we'd like to present a list of six films we hope Earth To Echo lovingly uses as influences towards its story and it's approach to film-making.

There are few things Hollywood movie studios do more than obsess over release dates. They are put together years in advance like a giant jigsaw puzzle. In theory, you would think every single movie would scratch and claw to get the easiest competition possible, but sometimes, the best thing a flick can do is find the biggest, most splashy entry on the calendar and position itself as counter-programming.

There were plenty of movies from this year that I absolutely loved and others that I absolutely hated, but there’s a very special category that exists between both of those ends: the ones that left me utterly disappointed. While I always enter a movie theater hoping to love the hell out of whatever I’m watching, the truth is that there are some films that I spend a lot of time thinking about and anticipating, only to be left frustrated at the end.

Much in the way that parents likely hope to send their kids to school, or to some extra-curricular activity without having to fear that the adult they’ve left their child with might be a sexual predator, it’s probably a fair assumption to say the same applies to parents of children in the entertainment industry.

The Scream Awards haven’t actually aired yet, so if you’re saving yourself for the awards ceremony, which is set to premiere on Spike TV on Tuesday, October 18th, read no further! For those of you who just want to see which horror, sci-fi and fantasy films took home awards, read on...

In a summer of super-heroes and sequels, Super 8 stood out. Whether you were on board with J.J. Abrams ode to Spielberg and the "Amblin-style" movies many of us grew up with or not, there's no question that Super 8 was ambitious and original. If it failed, it certainly didn't do so for lack of trying. Thankfully, I'm in the camp that thought it worked remarkably well, so I'm giving thanks that Super 8 has been announced for Blu-ray and DVD this November 22nd.

In Hollywood, piracy is an unfortunate fact of life nowadays. Hackers and thieves have honed their craft over the years and can generally get a DVD copy of a movie onto the internet not long after the first advance copy gets printed and shipped to whomever it was printed for

Super hero movies are arriving en masse this year with four in theaters so far and one more on the way. The latest, The Green Lantern, hit screens this weekend but in brightest day and blackest night, major profits escaped his sight.

So now that we know Greenwood had a secret role-- and a really major one at that-- where was Abrams stalwart Greg Grunberg? He found a way to include the actor in Star Trek only as a voice, and you'd think among the many townspeople in Super 8 there would have been space for him

It's a camera! It's a motel franchise! No! It's the number one movie of the weekend? The top summer fodder tends to be big budget blockbusters. This weekend was devoid of any new major sequel releases and therefore gave rise to a quieter, more original film nabbing first place, despite a low audience turn out.

After months of secrecy this weekend the world finds out what Star Trek director JJ Abrams’ next movie is all about. Super 8 is unspooling in theaters and the story of a small town under assault by mysterious forces is a piece of Amblin Entertainment nostalgia right out of the E.T. style 80s.

We’ve got two new releases coming up this week, and I haven’t the slightest idea how they’ll fare at the box office. Contrary to what you may have heard, one of them IS a bummer, but the other is showing early promise

Over the last few months the Super 8 viral campaign has been running what is called the "Super 8 Editing Room." On the site, viewers could watch parts of a very old Air Force film strip that had been divided into multiple parts. Every few days a new snippet of film would be "found," revealing more of the movie. Today the final clip was found and Yahoo has posted the video in its entirety.

I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to be J.J. Abrams. One of the most talented and hard-working men in show business, the guy has countless television shows boasting his name, a successfully rebooted franchise on his record, and what will likely be called one of the best movies of the summer coming out tomorrow.

It's clear that Paramount is pulling out all the stops to promote a movie that doesn't have the same kind of built-in audience as, say, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. A collection of strong reviews, including our own, can only get you so far, especially in the summer season

Not only have the movies trailers captured that classic Amblin feel, so have the movies posters. In particular there was one which we showed you a few weeks ago, is a deliberate homage to the posters used to advertise Close Encounters. Now at the eleventh hour, with the movie about to hit theaters, Super 8 has a new poster, and it’s the most Spielbergian of them yet.

We’re in full summer gear folks. It’s hot, the beers are on ice and there’s more than enough summer movie fare to go around. This week its all about the kids. Some are stuck in a horror film and the others got to be in a JJ Abrams flick.

It's not the entire crash sequence-- there are a lot of explosions and running away yet to be seen in the theater-- but it's the set up of one of the best action sequences you'll see in a movie this year, and probably worth your time

Hopefully you’re not getting sick of aliens just yet, because after Monsters vs. Aliens, Aliens in the Attic, Paul, and next month’s Cowboy’s & Aliens, Hollywood isn’t giving up. Platinum Studios announced today that they’re dipping

Paramount has just handed us their complete, full gallery of images from Abrams’ mysterious new film. No, of course, they don’t show the monster. Instead you’ll see more of the kids, the military, and the people of their town looking up to the sky as their neighborhood is subjected to strange happenings.

Star Trek co-writer Robert Orci confirmed in the comments section over at TrekMovie.com that J.J. Abrams “is still working” with the writers on their script, and “hoped” that he will return to direct the sequel. He even went so far as to turn over a 70-plus-page outline for the sequel's script. Chances are Abrams officially will dive into the sequel once his Super 8 commitments are behind him, and the sequel will be in theaters on June 29, 2012.

This time we see the kids being warned away from the train crash site by the man we first met in the previous clip, and promising to each other that nobody will know what they've witnessed. Watch below to see how wrong they might be

An amazing new poster for Super 8 had debuted online and, in addition to being beautiful, it’s also the closest we’ve gotten to seeing whatever it is in this movie that’s terrorizing the small town. The poster, evoking memories of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind shows two kids standing in the street holding hands

Yesterday Paramount began releasing a series of clips from the upcoming J.J. Abrams film Super 8. All taking place around the same point in the film: the train crash that puts the plot in motion. The first 30 second look showed the kids at center of the plot setting up for a scene in their monster movie and the second was all about the action, showing exactly what happens when a gigantic freight train is thrown off of its tracks. If you thought that second clip was intense, wait till you get a load of this.

Earlier today we posted the first clip from J.J. Abrams' Super 8 and it got us all pretty nostalgic for the classic Spielberg movies. From "Bye Bye Love" by The Cars to the way the kids smile and play around while filming their movie, the whole thing reeks of Amblin. Now it's time to introduce a little Saving Private Ryan.

The first clip from Super 8 has arrived, sort of. I say sort of because it’s not so much a complete clip as a bunch of portions of a scene edited together to squeeze it all in 30 seconds. I’m not sure this actually does them any favors, but it does at least give you some feel for the tone of director JJ Abrams upcoming film.

The new bit of dialogue in the beginning about the car is new, as are a handful of shots of the destruction that presumably comes up in the third act, but for the most part everything here-- including the brief flashes seen twice-- are footage that's already out there

At this stage in the game I'm fairly confident that the mystery surrounding Super 8 isn't going to be solved in the marketing. The movie is set to be released in early June and while the broad assumption is that there's an alien involved, nothing has been confirmed, simply "unusual disappearances and inexplicable events," as described in the official synopsis.

The trailer itself looks cool-- you get to explore the interior of the train before it crashes, revealing what I presume are all kinds of Easter eggs-- but like with most things in video games, probably more fun to play than to look at. All the same if you're obsessively collecting