Quickies, Vol. XXIX: Fantasies

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977) – At this point, Spielberg hadn’t quite mastered his balance between grand scope and human interest; it’s overly big with not enough emphasis on the small. It’s good and well to offer a regular joe as your main protagonist, but don’t dwarf him too much. E.T., Indiana Jones, etc. do a better job with this. Still, lots of nice images of children, with the juvenile elements of humanity most likely to connect with the extra-terrestrial.

Ghostbusters 2 (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1985) – An old, guilty pleasure. Not as classic as the original, but still with its moments. It’s all Murray’s show as far as comedy goes, and all Aykroyd’s show as far as the occult stuff goes. There’s a lot of postcolonialism going on here, a la The Exorcist. All that is paranormal and weird seems to originate in the third world, reflecting all of our “Western” anxieties about the other/Other/mother. Whereas in the first film we have a symbol of Western capitalism terrorizing Manhattan – in a fundamental departure from the Godzilla rampage in Tokyo – this one flips to the “other” side: what we have most to fear is no longer ourselves, positioned here as we are halfway through the Reagan era, but the other, more netherworldy hemispheres.

Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Sex…But Were Afraid To Ask (dir. Woody Allen, 1971) – Didn’t finish this one…didn’t make it halfway through, to be truthful. The idea of a series of vignettes about sex is worthwhile enough, and one would think that if anyone had something interesting and humorous to say about the subject, it would be Woody. It suffers from lengthy periods of either complete silence (intended as humorous awkwardness) or painful attempts at jokes. So many setups, so few coherent witticisms.

Femme Fatale (dir. Brian De Palma, 200?) – A pleasant surprise from the very techie, very senses-minded De Palma. He likes his cinema, too, as Blow-Out and this one clearly demonstrate. He’s playing with cinema’s tools, almost theorizing with them, and it comes off as exploratory and experimental rather than flashy and pretentious. By using such a classical form and narrative (noir) and toying with it and injecting it with modern thriller tropes, he whips up an interesting and bold mash-up that is, in its way, a very cool novelty. (Each of these films was screened via Netflix Instant, so screenshots suffer.)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Images of Anxiety, or, Paranoia Pics

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: New Testament Imagery

Idiot disciples

Taking up his cross

Exiting the tomb

Lion foe

Whipped

Coronation

Calming the storm?

Sermon on the mount

Let the children come to me

The law was given through Moses

Preview of drinking damnation

My Father's house

Pharisee

Kiss of Judas

Dead

Resurrected

Leap of faith

Drinking judgment

Master healer

Kingdom divided

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Colonialist Imagery

Takeout (the) Chinese

Firing blanks

Ominous

Indy-Divinity

How civil

How savage

Spoonfed stereotype

Nothing in common

Sidekick

Face of the Other

Possessed by the Other

Liberator

Sadistic Other

To the rescue

We rock, they roll

No autographs, all the credits

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Old Testament Imagery

Joseph and the well

Shekinah glory

Solomon's temple

The Fall

Temptation

He will crush the serpent's head

Levitical

David & Goliath

Jonah

Exodus of Evil

When the king assumes the priesthood

Wrath of YHWH

Sodom: Don't look back

He will spare a remnant

Intertestamental silence

E.T.

Our first experience at the midnight Friday showing at the Del Mar Theatre in downtown Santa Cruz was the priceless Dr. Strangelove. Our second was this past weekend, and it was E.T. We even claimed two of the three prizes awarded in the pre-show raffle. We came out of it with two DVDs (Hook and E.T.), two bumper stickers, two boxes of Reece’s Pieces, and a pass good for two tickets to each of the next four midnight showings. Pretty cool. Then came the movie.

Steven Spielberg was largely responsible, along with George Lucas, for the modern blockbuster film (e.g., Jaws, Star Wars). And that’s what he does best. I don’t know how you couldn’t like E.T. It’s sentimental in all the right ways. The kids are symbols of purity and innocence (even the bad kids, in the end), while the adults are better kept in the dark about earth’s first contact with extra terrestrials. Even as a 5-year-old, I remember the most frightening part of the film: when those NASA astronauts start invading the house. It was genius of Spielberg to make the film this way. It’s also devoid of that cynicism that has come to define kids of subsequent generations. Elliott’s door has a sign on it saying, “ENTER”. Granted, once E.T. moves in, Elliott adds “DO NOT” to the top, but that’s to protect his new friend. It’s become cliche nowadays for doors to kid’s rooms to say things like, “STAY OUT!” Elliott and his siblings get along and grow closer through E.T. Imagination is valued above education. Etc. It just feels good where it should. And the only scientist who turns out to be a good guy is a good guy by virtue of not letting go of his childhood, telling Elliott that he, too, had been waiting for E.T. to come since he was a boy.

The idea is that aliens aren’t the ones we should fear. Human beings are the real troublemakers. It’s this thought that Spielberg held close in the early days (also see Close Encounters), but that he discarded when he ran out of ideas and decided to film War of the Worlds. Though he included children in that story, the camera was more focused on Tom Cruise than Dakota Fanning. He was the hero in that film, and Dakota was naive and foolish. I have heard that, early in Spielberg’s career, he insisted that he would never film H.G. Welles’ book, because he was against the idea that extra terrestrials should be considered evil and malicious. Even when Spielberg broke character and did Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, he showed that, while human beings were capable of saving the day, they were also the ones that could really ruin it.
So I find it best to forget about Spielberg’s recent work (am already nervous at the implication that the new Indiana Jones will feature aliens, probably bad ones), and wallow in the nostalgia of those glorious old ones. And one last random thought: another thing that allows E.T. to retain its status of “classic” is that the only face from this movie that we’ve seen outside of it is Drew Barrymore’s. He went with unknowns, and they stayed unknowns, aside from their roles in this film. Too bad for them, but great for us.