Author Topic: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films  (Read 51220 times)

Pratters

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #20 on: February 19, 2010, 03:53:20 AM »
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Interesting.  I'd love to have you convince me to watch it.

The raw human emotions displayed in the film are superb. It is a very basic story but the way it is presented with it's tragic elements makes it a great drama piece. I have not seen any thing like it and I have seen some great silent films which have drama. The acting by the central character is top notch. The way TCM treats the material is just perfect (As you expect from TCM standard wise) and they make it as complete a movie as possible based on what they have got.

ferris

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #21 on: February 22, 2010, 11:19:32 PM »


Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(Steven Spielberg, 1977)

What follows is a discussion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind – the Collector’s Edition, which Spielberg considers the definitive cut.  He can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube of having shown us inside the ship in 1980.  But we’ll do our best to forget that that answer was ever left anything but completely ambiguous.

Have you had this problem?  I’m in casual conversation with someone and it comes out that I’m a bit of a film lover.  The first question is always “oh! What’s your favorite movie?”  I respond a bit sheepishly because I know the response – “oh so you’re a sci fi fan?”  I go on to explain I have 5 sci fi films in my top 100, so I’m not sure I quite qualify for that label!

Quite frankly -  I have to be reminded that this is a science fiction movie.  I think of it as so many other things.

Here, something to listen to while you read:
Close Encounters of the Third Kind



"where are the pilots!?  Where's the crew!?"


(This irconic scene did not make the original 1977 cut)

First, I have lost the tools to try to perceive this in any kind of unbiased way.  I’ve reached the point where watching this film is like looking at old home movies.   “Hey remember that time I was driving that pickup and Indiana and that bright light showed in the sky and turned half my face red?”  It’s so integrated with the memories of my childhood that I could swear to this day I’ve been to Devil’s Tower on several occasions.  

So I won’t bother trying to write some academic criticism.  

Heck, I could do a whole essay just on significant times in my life when I watched this movie.  Here are the first three:

1) The summer of 1978.  
Close Encounters hits the area Drive-ins.  Me and my older brother laid on the roof of the town-and-country station wagon.  I was 9.  Not old enough to follow the story, but old enough to have its iconic images with the smell of concession dogs and pop corn and the cold breezes of NY summer evening imprinted on my brain for life.

2) The summer of 1980,
The “Special Edition” came out.  My dad took me special  - in a very fleeting moment of one-on-one time.  (Everyone else went to see Private Benjamin in the cineplex.  )  In those days you didn’t see a film more than once!  But here we where recreating the scene from my memory.  Same car, same drive in, same smells.  All those iconic images were exactly as I remembered them…PLUS!  WE got to see this NEW version where he goes INSIDE THE SHIP!  Cool!  (although later I’ll have to pretend ever seeing or liking that part) .  Now – a mere two years later I was amazed at what a different movie it was.  I was 12 – at a point where I was taking pride in watching adult movies and understanding them.  There is little exposition in the first 1/3 of this film!  Years later my Dad reported I asked about a 1000 questions in that 2 hour span.  

3) August 1984.  
I’m in Oshawa Ontario on an exchange student program.  tI happened that movie was on television one evening that summer.  My host could speak French and translated all that mysterious French language for me. That alone gave her a high level of undeserved importance – I’ll never forget her unique perspectives on the films   So awesome because this third viewing informed yet another deeper appreciation.


No eating of mash potatoes in our house goes without someone saying:
"This means something.  This is important!"

These three experiences were enough to make me a life-long lover of this film and to give me a deep appreciation of what I film could reveal without spoon-feeding you every step of the way.  In that respect it is probably now the benchmark for me on how to deal with exposition – how to reveal the answers to mysteries and how to treat the world with a sense of awe.  Very much like Jaws, the subject of our curiosity is well hidden through most of the film.  When the spaceships are finally revealed to us the characters have such a genuine sense of wonder and amazement.  It’s a criticism I have of a lot of films – the actors don’t’ act enough like they hadn’t seen it all before.


"I saw bigfoot once.  1951.  Sequoia National Park!  It made a sound that I would not want to hear twice in my life"
(this scene wasn't included in the original 1977 cut)

But what I have to stress – as is extremely important to note about this film…Sci Fi films up this point in history were either a subgenre of horror or action.  If the action took place on earth, the aliens were coming down to probe us or attack us.  If the action took place in space it was just cowboys and Indians in different costumes (or man vs. machine).  Audiences fully went into Close Encounters expecting a horror film.  Makes sense right?  The Cowboy and Indian film (Star Wars) came out that previous summer.   The CE trailer preyed a bit on that expectation.  

A first watching of Close Encounters might surprise you with some of the horror elements to it.  In this day and age it’s hard to go in not knowing it’s optimistic nature, but for audiences in that day – it’s not until the last reel where it finally gets revealed that these are friendly visitors.  It’s an intergalactic kumbiyah complete with the sing-along.  This marks a clear delineation in film that lasted until The Matrix where there was this positive view of extraterrestrials.   After E.T. this attitude was all but cemented.  In 1976 we had such a clear idea of who the enemies were – the Soviets, computers and aliens.  By 1988 all this was completely turned upside down and the films of that era show it.





One of the most impressive aspects of the film is the music.  Allow me to wax philosophic for a moment.  Humans are drawn to things by their nature.  There is a reason people want lakefront property and love them a good mountain view.  There is a reason we have a social gravity towards the approval of others.  LOVE has a reason.   It’s all about survival and the perpetuation of the species.  But we’re all drawn to music too.  All over the world it’s a constant.  There is no direct link between music and evolution, but it’s there all through our history.  Music helps us remember.  It gets stuck in our head.  It can be mathematically defined.  But it does not provide a perch to watch for our enemies, or fresh water to drink, or nutrition.  It does not help us get strength in numbers.   Spielberg here does a magical thing here in implying that music is the common language of the cosmos.  It gives music an evolutionary purpose in the dawning of an intergalactic age.  I’ve never seen this idea in film prior or since.


"I'm sorry, my English is not good too"

For me the conversation between the humans and the mothership is the finest 10 minutes in film history.  And I’m AMAZED at the time it’s given.  If this film was made today they would have had to rush right through that.



My favorite aspect of Close Encounters is its structure.    Spielberg has long been very effective at taking the small perspective of large events: Look at Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, ET, and even War of the Worlds: stories told of world-changing events from the eyes of a fairly ordinary protagonist.  He is SO disciplined in the way that the audience cannot know anything that our protagonist doesn’t.



In Close Encounters, the structure is a bit more eager.  Let’s look at how this is laid out:  The film is trying to work on two levels – we have this story told large: the government has been investigating the strange appearances of long-since missing  manmade crafts from different point in history.  Meanwhile we have a  common blue-collar family man from Muncie, Illinois who is struggling to deal with a strange sighting in the night sky and the implanted visions he’s had ever since.  Truth be told, the large/small parallel device is tried in films all the time – usually wth very poor results.  Deep Impact and Pearl Harbor are two great examples of where it goes very wrong.  Usually you want to pick a side and stick with it.  Star Wars rarely breaks contain on the story told from Luke’s perspective.    Goodfellas rarely breaks contain on Henry Hill’s perspective.  

So why does it work here?

It works because of brilliant device employed by Spielberg:  we tell the government story from the perspective of pseudo-outsiders: a Frenchman and his mapmaker-turned-translator.   Not just any Frenchmen - François Truffaut – (yes THAT François Truffaut).   The translator guides us through the story – asks the questions we want asked.  He’s swept up in a whirlwind away from his usual duties, in the same way Richard Dreyfus back home.  He is not a part of the conspiracy, he’s a searcher.  It's a story of his redemptions as much as anyone's


"What I need is something so scary it'll clear three hundred

square miles of every living Christian soul "

One of the great iconic scenes of the film is when Dreyfus and the other two meet.  We’re about 4 miles from Devil’s Tower.  All civilians have been evacuated.  They want answers from him and he wants answers  from them but they can’t connect.  As an audience it’s excruciating!  Ugh if they could just trust each other!  Both have questions they are struggling to answer and both have near blindly lead to this spot in the Eastern Wyoming highlands.  


"Yeah, I got one just like it in my living room"

"Who the hell are you people!!?"

Back to the structure: We enter the film given bite-sized puzzle pieces, each fairly equal in length.  We start in the Mexican desert where some planes have mysteriously appeared from a 1945 training missing over the Bermuda Triangle.  We jump to an air traffic control center in the Midwest where two unseen pilots are reporting “unknown traffic”.  We jump to Roy and his family on school night – a scene so reminiscent of my childhood it’s a labor to admit!  Like so many seasons of Lost we’ve been given about two dozen questions and not a single answer.  From here on out the questions start to pile up to a point of saturation where Speilberg finally loosens the reigns a bit in a scene where the cartographer guesses correctly that music coming from the cosmos translates to a latitude and longitude on a map which lead us directly to this meeting in the trailer outside the momument.


"salió el sol y me cantó"

"Aries 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind?"

"Quickly Brad, there are thousands of lives at stake here"

End the end of Close Encounters, Roy disappears into the ship with the answers to a thousand questions that are left to our imaginations.  So married to his structure, Speilberg cannot reveal a nugget of information outside of the perspective of our dual storytellers.  I shudder at the Michael Bay treatment of the same material.  May this film be never remade!



Lastly – if you go on to watch this film, or watch it again based on my enthusiasm for it, I want you to pay close attention to the kid actor.  He has two scenes that he nailed on the first take – mostly due to little tricks Spielberg played on the set.   At one point the kids shrieks with glee “TOYS!!!” – it is perfect, although I think a more mature Spielberg would have used a different take.



So much more to say.  I could go on and on.   I guess I’ll stop there for now.  I may come back and edit later.

« Last Edit: February 23, 2010, 12:37:24 AM by ferris »
"And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs" - Exodus 8:2 KJV
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FroHam X

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #22 on: February 22, 2010, 11:32:00 PM »
Such a great write-up and yet I feel you barely scratched the surface of this amazing film. I'll bet you feel the same way.
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flieger

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #23 on: February 22, 2010, 11:33:58 PM »
Keep going, ferris!

ferris

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #24 on: February 22, 2010, 11:36:47 PM »
Thanks Froham :)

I think I know why you like it:

« Last Edit: February 22, 2010, 11:39:52 PM by ferris »
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ferris

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #25 on: February 22, 2010, 11:40:14 PM »
Keep going, ferris!

Oh man!  I could go on and on :)
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FroHam X

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #26 on: February 22, 2010, 11:44:38 PM »
Thanks :)

I think I know why you like it:



It's funny, every time I see that I think of these headlines and others like it. I remember a a number of comments on big news channels in the days after September 11th mistakenly claiming that the terrorists were from Canada or that there were far more terrorists waiting in Canada. Funny how a little sight gag of a headline in a movie from the late 70s could ring so serious so many years later.
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Melvil

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #27 on: February 22, 2010, 11:46:09 PM »
Awesome review, ferris! I really do want to go watch it again now. Well done.

zarodinu

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #28 on: February 22, 2010, 11:55:54 PM »
Great writeup.

Does it make me a movie nerd that during my cross country drive to college I made a point of stopping at the Devils Tower?


I’ve lied to men who wear belts. I’ve lied to men who wear suspenders. But I’d never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both a belt and suspenders.

ferris

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Re: Presenting Filmspotters Favorite Films
« Reply #29 on: February 22, 2010, 11:56:30 PM »
Awesome review, ferris! I really do want to go watch it again now. Well done.

Awww thanks!  I've been running the soundtrack all evening while working on this.  It's got me wanting to rewatch as well!

« Last Edit: February 23, 2010, 12:07:54 AM by ferris »
"And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs" - Exodus 8:2 KJV
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