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Post by erik on Jun 11, 2012 9:31:01 GMT -5
Thirty years ago today, on June 11, 1982, a film came out that would touch the world in a way that only a select handful of films have ever done. This was director Steven Spielberg's sci-fi masterpiece E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, arguably one of the most personal movies any director ever made, and one that still holds up from an otherwise depressingly authoritarian (politically speaking) decade: www.digitaljournal.com/article/326255 |
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Post by the Scribe on Jun 12, 2012 20:48:37 GMT -5
Yes Erik, you are becoming OLD!
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Post by erik on Jun 12, 2012 22:04:50 GMT -5
I still remember vividly that day, because I saw it on the very day it opened. It was at a theater out in Monrovia, just a little east of where I lived, where I went to see it with my mother, uncle, and aunt. At 11 years old, going on 12, I really hadn't any idea what kind of a film I was in for. But some two hours later, all four of us were literally in tears.
There are moments of suspense and terror (proof that Spielberg learned a lot from Hitchcock), with the government agents only being seen from the waist down, and Henry Thomas' first encounter with E.T. being rather jolting. There's that hysterically priceless first scene between E.T. and Drew Barrymore that remains the only scene in any single film where I have wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. And of course, what would we do without John Williams' music score?
What I think might get missed about E.T. is how politically incorrect a film it was back in 1982. It dealt very clearly with parental separation, divorce, peer pressure, bullying, and government dissembling in ways that I think most people could identify with by that time, but which hard-line neo-conservatives pretended (as they do today) didn't exist in "their" America. Even with the knowledge that Spielberg is a political liberal, I doubt that he ever directly intended the political implications of the film to seep through. He was being so nakedly autobiographical, that's all. And yet, this is one of the very few films of that time that can legitimately be called an American masterpiece (IMHO).
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