by Brendan Foley
Two Cents
Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
*must resist… using “Two Cents Phone Home”… as header*
…”Penis-breath!”
Steven Spielberg’s iconic sci-fi fantasy has become so deeply entrenched in the mass consciousness that even people who have never sat through the film could tell you its greatest visuals and quotes. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial hit pop culture like a bomb going off and forever changed the landscape of science-fiction adventure films.
Elliott (Henry Thomas) biking across the moon, the glowing finger, the red heart, flowers blooming back to life, jittering keys, the red hoodie and the white blanket, on and on and on.
Yet E.T.’s legacy has become curiously compromised in recent years. The disastrous 2002 “special” edition added in shit CGI, included scenes that had been cut for a reason, and digitally erased guns from government agents’ hands and replaced them with walkie-talkies. Spielberg’s defacement of his own masterwork wasn’t quite as severe as what his buddy George Lucas was up to with his “special” editions (in large part because Spielberg never tried to remove the original cut from circulation. Home releases of the movie feature both cuts, as opposed to Lucas holding onto the untouched prints of Star Wars like they were the maltese fucking falcon or something. We’re not bitter) but it still had the effect of changing the narrative of E.T. from ‘timeless classic’ to ‘can you believe what they did to this timeless classic?’.
More critically, E.T. is perhaps the best encapsulation of Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker, and as Spielberg himself has grown underappreciated in recent years, so to has the film that so defines him. Hipper-than-thou cineastes look down their nose at The Beard, for his populism and mass appeal and unironic emotion. Spielberg went from being the hungry young director pushing masterpieces through the system and became the system itself, which prompts a kneejerk contrarian dismissal from some.
So with Jeff Nichols’ extremely Spielberg-esque Midnight Special (it is essentially the last act of E.T. stretched to two hours — ‘stretched’ being the operative word) screening across the country, the Two Cents team decided to sit down with the original film and see whether or not Spielberg’s daydream of suburban magic still lifts us above the pools and fences, or if it crashes to the earth.
Did you get a chance to watch along with us this week? Want to recommend a great (or not so great) film for the whole gang to cover? Comment below or post on our Facebook or hit us up on Twitter!
– Brendan
Next Week’s Pick:
Snow White and the Huntsman was a strange and mildly successful attempt in the current free-for-all to tell modernized fairy tales. The Huntsman: Winter’s War, opening April 22, surprisingly jettisons its main character and proceeds along a bold (?), strange new path.
Though it flew under the radar, Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust has attracted a lot of devotion since its debut in 2007 with its mixture of fantasy, romance, and action. It preceded the glut of slick, modernized fairy tale crapola which arguably started with Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland in 2010, so we’re intrigued to see how it fares, especially as an original attempt when we’ve become accustomed to mind-numbing remakes.
– Austin
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co!
Our Guests
Brendan Agnew: E.T. is magic.
I don’t simply mean that in the sense that all movies are magic (but they are) or that there are a bunch of whizz-bang special effects that make this film pop (it’s actually fairly reserved in its genre trappings, especially by modern standards), I mean that E.T. is a creation of a magician at the height of his game working with just the right tools and talent. It’s not the first time Spielberg showed his talent for bolstering the mundane with the imaginary, though there’s a reason this film became his literal trademark. But where Close Encounters of the Third Kind was about disruption and mystery, E.T.‘s spaceman doesn’t violently intrude on the suburban life of Elliott, Mary, Mike, and Gertie — he helps rebuild it.
From a modern perspective, few things hold up as well as this film’s visual language. Not just that it’s shot from a child’s eye-level, but the sheer amount of visual information that Spielberg conveys. What would be pages of characters speaking text is actual visual subtext here, glances and hidden tears and muttered swears and clever acting tics (Barrymore’s “I’m going to play in Elliott’s room” is hilariously perfect) telling you far more than the page ever could. And through it all is the voice of a director whose passion for the material isn’t just apparent, it’s so urgent and palpable and heart-breakingly familiar that it absolutely sings.
E.T. is magic. (@BLCAgnew)
Jaime Burchardt: I’d be lying if I said that the unfavorable rap E.T. has gotten over the past few years doesn’t bother me. It’s one of those deals where it’ll confuse me. I mean, really? We’re all talking about the same E.T. that is good in its soul, and so amazing in its external execution? Right off the bat, let’s exclude the 2002 version (get those walkie-talkie shotgun images out of your head & thank me later), and remember what 1982 brought. True, some of the effects may not hold up quite as well today as they did then, but this Spielberg masterpiece isn’t about the visuals. It’s about the heart. From the solid performances, Melissa Mathison’s warm screenplay (rest in peace), and right down to the brilliant John Williams score, E.T. cemented itself a long time ago, and this move to the bandwagon that we’re all too cool to like E.T. is ridiculous. Maybe this movie is the term “corny” incarnate, but sometimes that’s needed in these dark days. Movies like this are around us for a reason. And if you’re going to lift your spirits, might as well do it with the best. (@jaimeburchardt)
The Team
Justin: Everyone has vastly differing memories and feelings associated with the classic films of their youth. As children of the 80s, my wife and I grew up with E.T. as one of the iconic films of our childhood. We both saw the film at a young age.
But we experience films on our own personal terms. My wife grew up alongside the woods with a father who liked to make up stories for his own amusement that often frightened his children (he’s not quite the monster I paint him as here, his stories are actually very fun and amusing). I, on the other hand, grew up in the concrete jungle with an engineer father who didn’t have much in the way of fantastical imagination.
This means that we look back on E.T. with far different feelings. For me, it is a brilliant film I have enjoyed revisiting on many occasions and at many ages. Starkly opposing my nostalgic adoration, my wife still views the cute little alien as one of the most frightening motherfuckers to ever grace the silver screen.
Was E.T. a creepy alien living in the woods behind my wife’s childhood home? Probably not, but perspective really is everything. (@thepaintedman)
Brendan: It’s been years since I’ve seen E.T. all the way through, and the time away only made the perfection of this film all the clearer. From Mathison’s deceptively rigorous screenplay (every single piece of important emotional and thematic information is enclosed in the first family scene), to the incredible sense of reality brought by the young cast (these kids feel like kids, no matter how fantastical the film grows). And all of it is held together by Spielberg, who has become underrated in his elder age as people take his genius as gratas and forget the sheer depth of imagination and visual language that he brings to bear. Hell, just the idea of making a film in which the main character and emotional lynchpin of the narrative is a largely inanimate space monster should have scared anyone away. But Spielberg and the army of brilliant people he assembled beneath him marshaled every bit of their talent and made that potato-poop faced goblin into a character that you laugh with, cry for, and ultimately love.
People have copied E.T., people have chased E.T., but no one, not even Spielberg, has ever crafted a suburban dream to match this. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
Jon: Guns > Walkie talkies. (@Texas_Jon)
Austin:Like most kids growing up in the 80’s, I watched this a few times. But unlike most, I didn’t much care for it. ET was kind of annoying, and the scene in which he is sick and pale creeped me out. Once the scary astronaut-looking guys (which I now understand were the quaran-team) stormed the house, I was done. Too dark, weird, and scary. Later when I met my wife, we discovered we both felt the same way about the movie. A couple years ago, we happened to catch the very beginning of it on TV, got interested, and were like, “Do we wanna do this?”. We took another crack at it — and loved it. Suddenly we understood its depth and heart. I guess it goes to show that sometimes you feel differently on a rewatch. (@VforVashaw)
Did you all get a chance to watch along with us? Share your thoughts with us here in the comments or on Twitter or Facebook!
Get it at Amazon:
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial [Blu-ray] | [DVD] | [Instant]