sf-lovers (06/12/82)
>From JPM@Mit-Ai Sat Jun 12 09:38:56 1982
SF-LOVERS Digest Friday, 11 Jun 1982 Volume 5 : Issue 68
Today's Topics:
SF Movies - ET: the Extra-Terrestrial & Poltergeist
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Date: 11 Jun 82 11:56-PDT
From: mclure at SRI-UNIX
Subject: additional (short) reviews of ET
"One of the best movies in recent years."
Ebert/Siskel, PBS's Sneak Previews
"One of the best movies I've ever seen."
ABC critic on Good Morning America
"Another Wizard of Oz. Will live on for generations."
local TV critic in San Francisco
I don't think I've ever seen such reviews for any other movie.
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Date: 10 Jun 82 14:37-PDT
From: mclure at SRI-UNIX
Subject: Review: E.T.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestial
By RICHARD FREEDMAN
Newhouse News Service
(UNDATED) Steven Spielberg's ''E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial'' may be
the finest children's movie since the heyday of Disney. It is
certainly the most sentimental, so grownups who don't share
Spielberg's particular brand of southern Californian affirmation are
duly warned.
At the end of his ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'' you may
recall, Spielberg landed a giant spaceship, gaudy as a Christmas tree,
on earth, and out came some pointy-headed but clearly benign visitors
from outer space. The moral was clear: Not all aliens need be enemies.
This point is hammered home in ''E.T.,'' which, without being a
sequel, picks up where ''Close Encounters'' left off. Now the
spaceship, in departing - what did it accomplish while it was here? -
has inadvertently left behind one of its passengers.
He's E.T. (the ingenious creation of Carlo Ramboldi), who looks
like a cross between a tortoise, the Yoda of ''The Empire Strikes
Back,'' and the late Somerset Maugham.
He has a voice to match, ranging somewhere between a bleat and the
sound of someone gargling with Clorox. So fortunately, he isn't as
sententious as the Yoda. He's a real doll, in short - a fact you can
bet won't be lost on toy manufacturers come this Christmas.
E.T. has the luck to land in the backyard of 10-year-old Elliott
(Henry Thomas), who discovers him while going out for a pizza. With a
child's open-mindedness and capacity for wonder, Elliott almost
immediately takes to the alien visitor, treating him as a pet much
like his dog Harvey.
Elliott lives in a suburban California home resembling the haunted
one in Spielberg's ''Poltergeist.'' His father has taken off for
Mexico with a girlfriend, leaving his mother (Dee Wallace) to cope
with Elliott, his adolescent brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and
his adorably sassy little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore, granddaughter
of the legendary John Barrymore).
E.T. becomes Elliott's special pet. The boy teaches him how to
survive in America by watching television and drinking Coke, but
unlike Mary and her little lamb he can't take E.T. to school with him.
''How do I explain school to a higher intelligence?'' he asks with the
clear-eyed perception of childhood.
The two become so close that when E.T. raids the refrigerator for
beer (it doesn't take long for a higher intelligence to graduate from
Coke), Elliott burps. And the resemblance of his newfound friend to
Kermit the Frog inspires the boy to disrupt a biology experiment in
school by liberating all the doomed frogs from their killing jars.
Unfortunately, such is their mystical emotional rapport that when
E.T. becomes sick, so does Elliott. It seems the alien must return to
his home planet or he will die.
So Elliott and his friends nobly conspire to sneak him out of the
hospital, swaddle him in towels and, in the movie's delightfully wacky
conclusion, lead the police on a merry chase as they bicycle E.T. to a
conveniently waiting spaceship.
All this, of course, is a science fiction variant on the tear-
jerking formula about a boy and his dog or horse, so it comes as no
surprise that ''E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial'' was written by Melissa
Mathison, who collaborated on the screenplay for ''The Black
Stallion.''
But despite the basic cliches of plot and a facile score by John
William that borrows handily from Mahler's Ninth Symphony for its
theme, the film offers enough movie miracles to keep kids and adults
alike enchanted throughout the summer. Only teen-agers might feel
''superior'' to it.
Among its many pleasures are the visions of E.T. dressed up for
Halloween as a tiny ghost, with only his two goggling eyes peeping
warily through a bedsheet, and of bicycles soaring in the sky,
silhouetted against the moon.
Most miraculous of all, this is a gentle, lyrical evocation of
childhood without a trace of exploitative violence. It never belabors
its obvious moral - that nothing should be alien to us humans
including, possibly, even fellow humans - while entertaining us
throughout.
One can only hope that aliens from outer space - if indeed there
are any - will turn out as nice as Spielberg imagines them in this
enchanting fantasy.
X X X
FILM CLIP:
''E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL.'' Steven Spielberg's gentle,
enchanting fantasy about a small boy who befriends a stranded alien he
finds in his suburban California backyard. A bit saccharine at times,
but one of the best children's films ever made. Rated PG. Four stars.
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Date: 8 Jun 82 15:11-PDT
From: mclure at SRI-UNIX
Subject: Reviews: E.T., Poltergeist
E.T. and Poltergeist
By VINCENT CANBY
c. 1982 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - ''Children's literature in America,'' says The Oxford
Companion to American Literature, ''first consisted of aids to piety,
seemingly addressed to miniature adults.'' Among the earliest such
works, the companion cites John Cotton's ''Milk for Babes, Drawn out
of the Breasts of Both Testaments,'' published in 1633.
American babes have come a long way since. Our children's
literature now embraces everything from the Uncle Remus stories to
Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, E.B. White, Nancy Drew, sane sex
manuals, comic books and, this century's crowning contribution, motion
pictures, especially the work of Walt Disney. Now add the work of
Steven Spielberg, currently represented by two new films, each of
which is an extension of a popular children's form, though neither is
an aid to piety or seeks an audience of miniature adults.
The films are ''Poltergeist,'' which was produced by Spielberg,
directed by Tobe Hooper and is one of the few really satisfactory
haunted-house movies I've ever seen, and ''E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial,'' directed by Spielberg, a sweet-natured fantasy
with all sorts of connections to earlier children's literature
including ''Peter Pan,'' ''The Wizard of Oz,'' ''Lassie,''
''Flubber,'' Spielberg's own ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind,''
''Star Wars'' and ''The Empire Strikes Back.''
As good as both films are, their simultaneous release may not be a
wise decision, even if, as now seems possible, they succeed in
cornering a large portion of this summer's movie business between
them. ''Poltergeist'' and ''E.T.'' are enough alike to invite
comparisons but just different enough that anyone who is charmed by
one will probably be disappointed by the other.
What they do give us, however, is the opportunity to consider the
concerns and methods of a very particular talent as demonstrated in
two separate films seen side by side. In this day and age, when most
filmmakers take three or four years on each project, this kind of
opportunity doesn't come along very often. Since 1977, when ''Close
Encounters'' was released, Spielberg has made four films, ''1941,'' '
Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' ''Poltergeist'' and ''E.T.''
The most immediate conclusion: Spielberg has become his own
filmmaker, even when working through an associate, as he did with
Hooper on ''Poltergeist.'' If he were a playwright or a novelist, one
would say that he had found his own voice, but because a filmmaker
deals in images and sounds as well as words, I'm not sure what the
movie equivalent would be.
It was apparent in ''The Sugarland Express'' and ''Jaws'' that
Spielberg is an unusually facile director and a first-rate technician,
but not until ''Close Encounters'' was it apparent that there is also
a true sensibility guiding those techniques. He is an American
director who brings to the hard-boiled, hustling world of Hollywood a
delicacy of vision more often associated with small, low-budget movies
than with studio productions that have Fort Knox-sized budgets.
This is not to say that his films look small. Far from it. They
are behemoths by almost any standards. They are constructions only
slightly less complicated than the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Yet the mind behind them remains unblunted by the heavy logistics of
the Hollywood creative process.
Of the two new films, ''E.T.'' is the more conventional. At heart
it is an updated version of that old Hollywood standby, the
boy-and-his-dog picture, but with a small, frightened creature from
outer space instead of a dog. This fellow, E.T., a piece of
walking-talking sculpture created by Carlo Rambaldi, looks like a
chubby, distant cousin of the creatures in ''Close Encounters.'' He's
about three-feet tall with bulgy forehead and eyes, spindly arms,
dachshund legs, duck-like feet, a stratospheric intelligence and, when
walking, the wobbliness of a wind-up toy manufactured in Taiwan.
When his space ship, which is on a specimen-gathering mission, is
forced to make a fast getaway, E.T. finds himself marooned in Southern
California, in some woods adjacent to a middle-class housing
development. It's there that he's found and befriended by a
10-year-old boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas).
Elliot takes the creature home, where, with the enthusiastic
cooperation of his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), and
bossy little sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), he hides the lost
traveler. The kids console him, pet him, feed him, dress him up like a
doll and, generally, treat him as if he were an especially exotic
plaything. Only after E.T. causes tennis balls to dance in the air
does it dawn on the children that their companion would find even
Einstein's company a drag.
Will E.T. be discovered by the United States government's security
forces that are scouring the neighborhood? Can E.T. long survive in
the earth's alien atmosphere? What are the lessons he has to teach
Elliott, who comes to identify with E.T. so closely that when E.T.,
left alone in the house, goes on a beer binge, it's Elliott, several
miles away in school, who burps and becomes serenely smashed?
The answers to these and a lot of other questions are exactly the
sort that everyone in the audience wants to hear.
''E.T.'' is one of the shrewdest non-Disney, Disney-type pictures
ever made. It's a funny, clever variation on a Hollywood formula film,
made by adults working to come up with an adventure that will satisfy
the yearnings of children, at least as those yearnings are perceived
by adults. The perceptions are not far off the mark.
''E.T.'' seems to have been photographed mostly at the eye-level
of the children - though this may only be an impression - so that it
implicates the audience in everything the children and E.T. do.
However, because there are no real villains in the piece, the result
is not a ''them'' (adults) against ''us'' (children) situation. It's a
simple reflection of a world in which children can be in control.
Quite different, and possibly more risky, is ''Poltergeist,''
which is a child's nightmare cast in the form of a movie. It's a tale
of ghosts and goblins and creepy, slimy, unspeakable things, the sort
of narrative one child might make up for the heart-pounding
delectation of his friends.
The Freeling family - Mom and Dad, daughter Dana in her mid-teens,
son Robbie, who's somewhat younger, and Carol Anne, who is 10 - live a
representatively ordinary existence in a house that may well be on the
other side of the same real estate development where E.T. is being
hidden by Elliot and his family.
The placid home life of the Freelings is wrecked with the
initially unexplained appearance of some ghosts who seem to have come
forth from the color television set in the living room. The spirits
are at first playful, doing tricks with chairs and sirloin steaks to
amuse the family. They then become cranky and pushy and, finally,
ferociously angry.
In the middle of the night a long-dead tree, which stands in the
yard just outside Robbie's room, reaches through the window and
attempts to swallow up the boy, though this turns out to be a
diversionary tactic. While Mom and Dana scream hysterically and Dad is
trying desperately to free Robbie, the spirits somehow make off with
Carol Anne.
Negotiating Carol Anne's return from inner space involves the
services of several specialists in parapsychology, including a tiny,
possibly crazy woman exorcist, plus some of the gaudiest, grisliest
special effects to be seen since ''Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' There
are also some that are less grisly than funny, such as a giant demon's
head that looks like something you might see at F.A.O. Schwarz at
Christmas - the world's biggest jack-in-the-box.
''Poltergeist,'' rated PG, is not a film to be seen by very small
children with sleeping problems. Slightly older kids will probably
find it less shocking than their parents do. ''Poltergeist'' is more
deliciously spooky than seriously frightening because Spielberg is so
obviously in touch with the child's imagination. This is the haunted
house film that he - and we - always wanted to see as kids but never
did.
At their best, both ''E.T.'' and ''Poltergeist'' demonstrate a
feeling for children's fantasies that is most unusual in American
films. They meet kids on their own turf. They don't look down on them
or pat them on the head or flatter them by making them behave like the
miniature adults in the old Our Gang comedies.
Working within the conventions of the Hollywood film, Spielberg is
creating a kind of children's literature that need not insult the
adults in the audience. Among other things, he knows how to cast
children and then how to direct them - or to see that they are
directed by Hooper - so they don't turn into monstrous little robots.
Heather O'Rorke, who plays Carol Anne Freeling in ''Poltergeist,'' is
almost as memorable as Cary Guffey, the little boy in ''Close
Encounters.''
Further, these films are genuinely witty. Like Francois Truffaut,
whose presence as an actor in ''Close Encounters'' gave that film a
center of gravity, Spielberg seems to have mixed feelings about a
particular milieu. Truffaut's Antoine Doinel longs to be a part of a
middle class that will never tolerate him. He remains always on the
outside of it, looking in.
Spielberg's feelings about his middle-class characters are more
benign but almost as incisive as those expressed in a Truffaut movie.
He acknowledges the existence of broken homes, junk food, children
brainwashed by TV, and appliances that save time that, in turn, will
be wasted, but he is not appalled. He is amused and, perhaps, even
slightly homesick.
These are his people, and because they are, he's not about to
condescend to them with some sort of contemporary ''Milk for Babes,
Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments.'' Spielberg's suburbia is
located halfway between outer space and inner space, with easy access
to both.
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End of SF-LOVERS Digest
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