Super 8 is currently playing in theaters. Let’s begin by saying that I saw the movie last night. I liked it. The movie is set in the year 1979. Take it from someone who was 8-years-old, going on 9, in the Summer of ’79. The clothes, the cars, and the music were spot on.

Kudos to director J.J. Abrams for capturing the look of 1979.

The movie itself is engrossing, at first. The audience learns in the beginning of the movie that an industrial accident has claimed the life of a woman. The woman’s son and husband are left to begin the grieving process. The film moves to four months after her death.

The son, Joe, deals with the loss of his mom while helping his three friends make an amateur zombie movie. The movie’s script calls for a girl. So, the four boys ask a girl named Alice to participate in film. Joe apparently has a crush on Alice.

On the first night of the filming with Alice, the pre-teens witness a spectacular train accident, which begins another storyline in the film. The military moves in to town, pet dogs clear out of town, and people begin to disappear from town without a trace. Strange things are afoot in town, but the filming of the film within the film continues. So does the grieving process of a widower, as well as a son left without a mother. (Warning: major plot twist revealed in the next paragraph. Skip it and move on to the next if you don’t want to know.)

The widower, who is also the local deputy sheriff, quickly moves on to the blame and anger stages of grief. We learn that his deceased wife was only working that particular shift four months prior to cover for a co-worker. It’s revealed that the co-worker couldn’t work his shift that day, because he was drunk. We learn that alcohol helps him to deal with his wife leaving him and his daughter, some time before.  The daughter is Joe’s love-interest, Alice. Alice and Joe are forbidden to see each other by their fathers. So begins a sort-of Romeo and Juliet story in the summer of ’79.

The clothes, the cars and the music, like I said, are spot-on for 1979. What was happening in the world around the fictional town was not. One reference to popular culture, early in the film, was incorrect: the Rubik’s cube. When this reference was made early in the movie, I fell out of my own personal time machine and hit the ground hard. I spent the rest of the time in the theater trying to recall that particular summer, since my memory seemed to be failing me.

I couldn’t put my finger on it until I got home. The Rubik’s cube reference would have fit the following year, 1980. So that reference threw me. Something else mesmerized the world in 1979, which I would have recalled if I wasn’t puzzled over the Rubik’s cube:

Skylab was falling that summer.

During the summer of 1979, people all over the world pondered the falling-back-to-earth of Skylab. NASA had no idea where on earth the 85-ton space station would land. Of course, it would largely break up when it entered the earth’s atmosphere, but pieces of it could still kill you.

I was terrified of Skylab. I didn’t want to die. Neither did anyone else. It was a big, big deal.

Skylab caused an international media frenzy. Who can forget  those 12 million radio listeners who participated in a mass meditation to halt a potential disaster? Those listeners employed  “mental energy”, on a day in May, to try to push Skylab into a higher orbit to prevent its re-entry. It didn’t work. It fell back to earth in July 1979.

It fell into the ocean and no one died. Still, it was a big, big deal at the time. At the time, which would perfectly correspond with the time frame captured in Super 8. Abrams missed a great opportunity to incorporate Skylab into the plot. It would have been a better reference to popular culture than the Rubik’s cube.

Okay, back to Super 8. The rest of the movie is great. It’s revealed that an alien from outer space is behind the strange goings on in town. The alien also happens to have some issues dealing with his own personal pain and grief. So, it basically all ties together and works out in the end.

If you seek nostalgia,  think back to what you were doing when Skylab was falling. This, of course, doesn’t apply to younger viewers who won’t know the difference.

The film is directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. It stars Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Kyle Chandler. The film has a run-time of 112 minutes and is rated PG-13.

For the last couple of months, I have been looking forward to the upcoming movie Battle: Los Angeles. This is a film inspired by the 1942 military attack on a still unidentified object in Los Angeles, set for release in March 2011. Although the 1942 incident did not involve aliens (only an object), this film features a full-scale battle with aliens.

At the same time, there has been another movie in the making. This movie is called Skyline, an independent film, which also features aliens descending on Los Angeles. It is set for release on November 12, 2010, four months earlier than Battle: Los Angeles.

Just a coincidence? Well, that’s for attorneys to decide.

The makers of the independent film Skyline are owners of special effects company Hydraulx. They created the effects for Sony’s Battle: Los Angeles at the same time they were filming  their own L.A./alien movie. Hydraulx is owned by the Brothers Strause (Colin and Greg) who supplied the effects for such films like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Fantastic Four, as well as some effects for the X-files movie and Avatar.

The legal battle continues with three weeks to go until the first alien battle movie appears on the big screen.

While this is going on, something else has been happening in cyberspace. It is being alleged that all of the UFO sightings we have experienced lately (here and and in other parts of the globe) are simply special effects created by the Brothers Strause. So, around the blogosphere, it is alleged that recent sightings are nothing but a viral marketing campaign to promote Skyline.

The evidence for this accusation stems from a blogger’s imagination after watching the trailer for Skyline. The trailer features mass abductions (like the “disappearing village in China”), as well as lights in the sky that mesmerize the viewer on the ground. It’s all too similar, they say.

So, some bloggers have inserted polls in their posts, or ask you to weigh-in via the comment section, if you think it is a viral marketing campaign or not.

Personally, I think that the internet rumor about the viral marketing campaign is as ridiculous as the “disappearing village in China” rumor (proven to be false, but still making the rounds on blogs). The China rumor was created via the wild imagination of a string of bloggers, based on a single sentence from the signature of another blogger.

I don’t think it is possible that these guys, on an extremely limited budget (and facing legal woes), could pull something off like that.

In the meantime, evidence is being weighed in a legal battle between the makers of two UFO movies to find the truth. As far as the “viral marketing campaign” for Skyline, what evidence is there to support this idea?

The only thing evident to me is that a blogger with a wild imagination came up with the viral marketing rumor, which has sadly gone viral in itself.

A new paranormal thriller will open in the U.S. on October 22nd, called Hereafter. The film, which opened in Toronto on Sunday, has received mixed reviews.

Referring to this film starring Matt Damon, and directed by Clint Eastwood, film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

“Eastwood has made a film for sensitive, intelligent people who are naturally curious about what happens when the shutters close.” - Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, in his blog from Toronto

Eastwood is no stranger to suspense thrillers. Play Misty for Me was his cinematic directorial debut in 1971. Like Fatal Attraction after it, this film made men leery of one-night stands with women for a while.

In Eastwood’s Hereafter, Matt Damon plays George, a blue-collar factory worker who can communicate with the hereafter – a gift he has trouble coping with. The “reluctant psychic” soon finds himself connected to a French television journalist named Marie (Cecile De France), who writes a book about her near death experience. Both become connected to Marcus, a young boy who has suffered the loss of his sibling Jason. The brothers are played by real-life twins, newcomers Frankie and George McLaren. The film’s synchronistic events lead to the convergences of these three characters from San Francisco, Paris and London, respectively. Crash meets The Sixth Sense comes to mind.

In fact, M. Night Shyamalan-favorite Bryce Dallas Howard (Lady in the Water, The Village) is also in the film’s supporting cast, as a supporter of the psychic abilities displayed by Damon’s character.

Unlike director Shyamalan’s interest in the paranormal, Eastwood stated recently that at the age of 80, he hasn’t given much thought to the afterlife, except that he doesn’t hope to cross over to the other side anytime soon.

It will be interesting to watch Eastwood’s interpretation of this script. Of which, scriptwriter Peter Morgan previously described to the Hollywood Reporter:

“It’s quite spiritual material, and quite romantic, too. It’s the sort of piece that’s not easy to describe and in the hands of different filmmakers could end up as wildly different films. Quite unlike some of my other material, which I think there were only certain ways that you could shoot it.”

Due to the mixed reviews, audiences may either love it or hate it, like last year’s Paranormal Activity, which I loved. I viewed Paranormal Activity with no expectations and with an open mind. What I found was that it was a fun flick with a terrible ending, but by no means was it a waste of my time.

Despite the mixed reviews from the Toronto premiere, I’ll approach Hereafter with no expectations and an open mind.