"We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life."
Christof (Ed Harris)
Imagine, if you will, that your life is actually a television show — a hit show, at that — and everyone knows it except you.
At least at first.
But slowly it dawned on Truman (Jim Carrey) that he was denied the free will that others enjoyed, that everything about his life was being manipulated beyond his control. He couldn't marry the girl he wanted to marry (Natascha McElhone). Instead he was paired with Laura Linney, a cast member on the show who, like everyone but Truman, was in on the story.
The show was created by a fellow named Christof (Ed Harris), who also had to create the circumstances that inevitably kept Truman, an insurance sales executive, in a place called Seaside. It had millions of viewers, some of whom kept their televisions on all night to watch Truman as he slept.
"It's clever the way he's kept on his island by implanted traumas about travel and water," film critic Roger Ebert observed. That is certainly true, especially in the fact that Truman's true love was spirited away to Fiji — and he had been conditioned to fear water because Christof had manipulated the early scripts so Truman's father would drown in a storm.
In many ways, I believe no one but Carrey could plausibly portray Truman, especially since so many of us have become voyeurs in our viewing habits.
But the more one watches "The Truman Show," which premiered 20 years ago today, the less one can avoid the obvious question — how much of it is real?
The answer, I think, is all of it — but not in a way that viewers expect.
"The Truman Show" was an unassuming flick, thought provoking on many levels, well done and creative. Two decades later it is still worth seeing.
Around the time of the Three–Mile Island nuclear accident, Saturday Night Live did a skit called "The Pepsi Syndrome."
It was a takeoff on the movie "The China Syndrome," which had been in theaters for about two weeks when the accident occurred and was said to have foretold the events at Three–Mile Island, but when I saw the original "Attack of the 50–Foot Woman," which debuted on this day in 1958, I concluded that the skit must have been partially inspired by that movie.
(I suppose you could also make a case for "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" as an inspiration for the skit — except it wouldn't be in theaters for nearly 10 years. A remake of "Attack of the 50–Foot Woman," starring Daryl Hannah, arrived in theaters in December 1993.)
Anyway, in the skit, Dan Aykroyd played President Carter, who was visiting the site, and Garrett Morris played a female maintenance worker at the facility. Both were exposed to radioactivity and grew to about 100 feet tall.
The independently made "Attack of the 50–Foot Woman" was similar in the sense that it was about a normal–sized woman who grew to 50 feet — after an encounter with an alien, not a nuclear accident. That wasn't an entirely new concept — except that all the previous films about gargantuan people that I can recall starred men. As far as I know, this was the first time a woman starred in such a story.
Nuclear power was still rather new in 1958, and it was probably still considered too futuristic to plausibly use even as the cause of such a bizarre growth spurt. Nevertheless radiation was introduced as a possible culprit in the story.
Alien encounters were pretty futuristic in those days, too, I suppose, but they were probably easier for audiences to understand.
Anyway, Allison Hayes played the title role in the 1958 version, but she didn't begin the movie as a 50–foot woman. She was an affluent alcoholic trapped in a bad marriage with a philandering husband who was only with her for her money. Nothing new about that plot angle.
She was out driving in the desert one night — which would also be implausible if the story were not set in the California desert (presumably not far from the infamous Area 51, which has figured prominently for years in tales of UFO activity) — when she encountered a glowing sphere and drove her car off the road.
Well, thanks to her alien encounter, Hayes' character grew to an enormous height, and she set out on a mission to avenge herself.
Ed Wood had a well–deserved reputation for making bad sci–fi movies, but "Attack of the 50–Foot Woman" may have been the worst of the non–Ed Wood projects. The title was cheesy enough to be from Wood's portfolio, and the special effects weren't even up to his standards.
But it was one of those movies that was so bad it was good, you know? Sometimes kitschy is all right.
Nevertheless, I preferred the remake — which is something I almost never say. The '93 version had a script that had more of a feminist slant (I suppose feminism wasn't a factor in the '50s), and it was more clever besides.
I remember watching reruns of Lost in Space on TV in the afternoons when I was a child. For a time, it was second only to I Love Lucy in syndicated viewership.
It was light and campy for a science fiction series, not nearly as cerebral as Star Trek — but it never really tried to be. It was the adventures of the Robinsons, a family of space colonists whose mission had been sabotaged and thrown off course.
Original concepts — and apparently there were at least two — called for them to be called the Space Family Robinson — a 20th–century spin on "The Swiss Family Robinson," the 19th–century novel about a family shipwrecked far from home. I thoroughly enjoyed that book when I was a boy, and I long since concluded that the TV series would have benefited from putting more emphasis on the family's ingenuity in conquering its obstacles. That may have been what I found so appealing about the novel.
By the time the series made it to TV, it was called Lost in Space.
When I saw the movie that premiered on this day in 1998, it had been quite awhile since I had seen any episodes of the series — a lot of it came back to me as I watched the movie — but the story was darker and more ominous than anything I ever remember seeing on the small screen.
While Lost in Space was fun to watch on TV, "Lost in Space" was not much fun on the big screen.
Part of the problem — for me, anyway — was the fact that there didn't seem to be anything terribly original about "Lost in Space." As one would expect from a movie made in the last 25 years or so, the special effects were flashy, but most appeared to have been lifted from previous successful films — like "Star Wars," "E.T." and "Close Encounters."
Maybe part of that was the casting, much of which was at odds with the casting of the TV series — and that was distracting, to put it mildly.
Take Gary Oldman, for example. I have long been impressed with his skill as an actor and the variety of the roles he has played. But Dr. Smith was just too much of a reach. I sort of feel that role will always be defined as Jonathan Harris' role, and Oldman just isn't the Jonathan Harris type. Of course, the beard didn't help, but that was a minor point.
In the TV series Dr. Smith was frequently the source of comic relief. I never got that sense from Oldman's Dr. Smith. He was more sinister and conniving. Any laughter his character provoked was nervous laughter.
Matt LeBlanc probably worked a little better as the pilot, Major West, but his problem is that he is probably defined (or was when "Lost in Space" premiered) as Joey on TV's Friends. That was his breakthrough role, and it made a lot of things possible for him, but sometimes that can be a double–edged sword.
The actors and actresses who played the Robinsons were all right, but not quite as charismatic, shall we say, as their predecessors.
Usually, they aren't improvements on the originals. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Oh, I concede that technical advances in filmmaking have made it possible for a remake to be better than the original. But even in the 21st century, remakes are rarely, if ever, improvements.
I offer, as Exhibit A, "The Invasion," which premiered on this day in 2007.
Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that "The Invasion" was "the fourth, and the least, of the movies made from Jack Finney's classic science fiction novel." I don't feel qualified to agree or disagree with that statement since I haven't seen all three of the previous incarnations. But Ebert's assessment surely affirms my own of remakes.
I also have a definite opinion about Nicole Kidman, the female lead of "The Invasion." I like her. I liked her the first time I can remember seeing her — in "Dead Calm." And I have liked other movies in which she appeared — "To Die For,""The Others" and "Eyes Wide Shut" come to mind. So does "Moulin Rouge," for that matter.
But Kidman has had about as many misses as hits in her career, especially in recent years, and I would put "The Invasion" on that list.
And it isn't necessary to see the other three film versions of the story to reach that conclusion, either.
All four movies do have a few things in common — primarily, the extraterrestrial invasion. The first couple of movies were transparently titled "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The third was named, simply, "Body Snatchers."
(Returning — ever so briefly — to the plausibility angle, Ebert asked, "Do you expect a movie titled 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' to be plausible?" It is a fair question, and my answer, after careful reflection, would be, "Yes. It doesn't have to be completely plausible — which is good since it is hard to imagine how it could be. But there needs to be enough plausibility to allow the viewers to suspend considerable disbelief.")
As I presume it was with each movie version of Finney's novel, "The Invasion" opened with the arrival of alien spores on Earth. In the only version I saw previously (and I have heard it was the same in the other two), these spores took the form of pods that encased their victims. They changed that a bit in "The Invasion" — the spores apparently attached themselves to a space shuttle that crashed following re–entry and scattered its debris from Dallas to Washington (that's a pretty impressive debris field). The debris was contaminated, and anyone who touched it became infected. When the victims fell into deep sleep, the infection seized control of them entirely.
Replacing the pods in "The Invasion" was a kind of film that covered the victim while he/she slept.
No one really seemed to notice what was happening at first. Oh, there were reports in the news of some strange virus in the U.S., and there were more dire reports from abroad. But, like most people, Kidman (a Washington–area psychiatrist in the movie) went about her daily routine, oblivious to what was happening until one of her patients, a victim of domestic abuse (Veronica Cartwright, who appeared in the 1978 version of the story), told her, "My husband just isn't my husband anymore."
Now, given the conversations those two were sure to have had in the past, it would be plausible for Kidman not to understand that Cartwright wasn't discussing abusive behavior — but rather the zombie–like behavior of those under the influence of the aliens. Her husband was one of them. The viewers never saw that character when he wasn't under the aliens' influence, but they knew it the first time they saw him sitting in Kidman's waiting room.
He had the look.
If you ever saw "The Stepford Wives," you would recognize the look — flat, dull, emotionless. Bloodless. Soulless. Measured in words and actions.
Kidman's character had to become proficient at the look, pretending to be one of them in order to maneuver around the city without drawing attention. That required her to maintain total outward neutrality no matter what was happening around her.
Absent any real plausibility, "The Invasion" suffered when it asked viewers to accept some pretty preposterous things.
Like, for example, the fact that a medical researcher (played by underrated actor Jeffrey Wright), a colleague of Kidman's love interest (played by Daniel Craig), was able to discern all kinds of information about this previously unknown virus from a single sample — in a couple of days. He was also able to determine how to eradicate the virus. Cancer researchers who watched this movie must have been jealous.
That would have been enough as far as I was concerned, but then there was a scene when Kidman and her young son were trying to get away in a car that was set afire by a Molotov cocktail. After it was struck the car could be seen virtually engulfed in flames, and I am pretty sure the windshield was broken when the vehicle was hit, but the car kept going, even seemed to accelerate, toward the occupants' appointed rendezvous with a helicopter.
I had to wonder how would it be plausible for someone to keep driving with flames all around like that? I mean, I was never any great shakes at science when I was in school, but you don't have to be a physics major to imagine what would happen to someone who tried to keep driving under those conditions.
Sorta like someone trying to continue driving with one flat tire. Common sense tells you it won't end well.
Then there were things that required specific knowledge of how they do things in Washington to comprehend how off the charts the plausibility factor had become.
For example, in Washington the law prohibits any building in the city from being taller than the Capitol — yet the movie clearly showed the helicopter landing on top of a (nonexistent) D.C. skyscraper.
I know how Hollywood loves to run a good thing into the ground, but trust me, this story has been driven deep into the ground. Let's move on to something new, shall we?
Graham (Mel Gibson):I suppose it would depend on its usage.
Tracy:How about 'John, you're a douche bag for kissing Barbara'?
Graham:It's a curse.
I found "Signs," which premiered on this day in 2002, to be entertaining — even though it came perilously close to violating my plausibility standard for science fiction movies. I suppose credit for that should go mostly to director M. Night Shyamalan, who seems to have a knack for making science fiction films that manage to entertain even nonscience fiction types like myself.
But his films are not created equal. "The Sixth Sense" was a remarkably good film, especially when you consider that it was only Shyamalan's third directorial effort. He's had some pretty good efforts in his career, but none of his succeeding films (at least, none that I have seen) have come close to matching that one.
He was in the ballpark with "Signs," though.
And speaking of ballparks, Joaquin Phoenix, who played Mel Gibson's younger brother, was a former minor–league ballplayer. It is important to know that — but it didn't seem important at first. Kind of like some of the details in "The Sixth Sense."
In the tradition of the great directors of thrillers, Shyamalan gives the viewers all the pieces they need to solve the puzzle — but he lets them assemble the pieces without knowing what the puzzle is ultimately supposed to look like. And then suddenly he reveals the whole picture, and the viewers begin to realize the things they got right — and the things they got wrong.
I like what film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the movie.
"In a time when Hollywood mistakes volume for action," Ebert wrote, "Shyamalan makes quiet films. In a time when incessant action is a style, he persuades us to pay close attention to the smallest nuances."
The core of this story was the sudden appearance of "crop circles," those geometric designs in fields that pop up in the news from time to time. The more conspiracy theory–minded among us tend to believe that they are created by aliens, but probably most people — and certainly most scientists — even those who fervently wish the existence of aliens could be proven tend to dismiss them as likely hoaxes.
Gibson's character had once been an ordained priest, but he had given it up after his wife's death in a car accident.
That didn't prevent the locals from asking him faith–based questions, though, and he constantly had to tell them that he had no faith.
But then these crop circles appeared in his field, and they began showing up all over the world, too, and other phenomena began to occur, like reports of strange lights over Mexico.
Phoenix and his young niece (Abigail Breslin) and asthmatic nephew (Rory Culkin), who became convinced early that aliens were real and hiding in plain sight, fashioned caps out of tin foil to prevent the aliens from reading their minds. That was one of those "nuances" to which Ebert referred.
And Gibson's character wasn't convinced — initially.
As the movie progressed, though, viewers discovered that the aliens did exist and had been responsible for those crop circles.
And Gibson and his family took all sorts of precautions to keep the aliens from entering their home, but they were unsuccessful.
When they were first seen, the aliens appeared as shadows or reflections on a TV screen. Later on, though, Shyamalan brought them into the light of day.
And it was under such circumstances that Phoenix, who hit a lot of home runs during his minor–league career but also struck out a lot, used his longball–hitting skill to take on the unwelcome guests.
Gibson's loss of faith, while mostly underplayed through the movie, was nevertheless a constant theme and restoring his faith was his character's purpose. In the end, he appeared to have regained his faith as a result of his extremely close encounter.
In fact, the whole family seemed to be doing better.
"The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space. Right?"
Ellie (Jodie Foster)
I am not a science fiction fan. That is something I have said frequently — but I do like good stories, which is something I also say frequently, and I feel that, if you're going to make a science fiction movie, make it plausible.
In my mind, implausible science fiction is something like "Sharknado" or some similar monster wreaking havoc on civilization. Such sci–fi stories are entertaining but not once will you think that it is something that could really happen.
I like science fiction that makes a clear connection to the actual human experience. Violence and destruction need not be part of the equation, particularly if they originate with a make–believe monster. In fact, I prefer it if they do not.
See, I don't believe that a good story needs splashy special effects. And a science fiction story doesn't need to promote the worst kind of fear. The best science fiction stories explore ideas.
Film critic Roger Ebert made an interesting observation after he watched "Contact" again many years after seeing it for the first time. "'Contact' is a film that takes place at the intersection of science, politics and faith,"he wrote. "Those are three subjects that don't always fit easily together."
No, they don't, and especially not today when we are so sharply divided along those very lines.
For that reason, I tend to think that "Contact" could not be made today. Too many groups would be offended by something that was said or done — or both — in the story. Any director who took on such a cinematic challenge would almost certainly end up with something that, at best, faintly resembled his/her original vision.
I have always felt that movies were a special kind of free speech, of self–expression. To be intimidated into not doing or saying something in a movie is a denial of one's free speech. As always, of course, there are limits to free speech. One cannot, after all, do the theatrical version of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded public place.
But as long as that line is not crossed, filmmakers should be permitted freedom of expression.
I agreed with Ebert; the movie was a lot bolder than I first thought.
The main character was Foster, who played a scientist searching for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Foster's character was an atheist who pursued an interest she had cultivated since childhood, inspired by her father who reasoned that, in the vastness of space, it would be a waste if the only intelligent life to be found existed on our planet. Beyond science she had no apparent faith in anything.
Representing faith was Matthew McConaughey, a Christian philosopher and member of a panel charged with selecting someone to travel in a space transport, the schematics for which had been provided to the Earth by aliens many light–years away. He was looking for much the same thing Foster was, but he readily admitted that whoever was sent to explore the heavens had to have faith in God — and that, as far as he was concerned, disqualified Foster.
The political part was represented by Tom Skerritt, the president's science adviser who wanted to halt the funding for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program for which Foster's character worked because he believed the objective was pointless.
Ebert described Skerritt's character and his ilk as "see[ing] aliens, God and messages from space all in cynical political terms. They justify their politics with the catch–all motive of 'national defense.'"
There was a time — not really so long ago — when discussions of religion or politics simply weren't done in public settings and comparatively rarely in private — at least not in the sense of whether one was good or evil for holding certain beliefs. But that time had gone long before "Contact" was made, and whereas, as Ebert wrote, "Hollywood treat[ed] movies like a polite dinner party: Don't bring up religion or politics," the subjects had been raised routinely in the movies for years before "Contact." If anything, the animosity between religion and politics has grown more intense in the intervening years.
In short, "Contact" is a movie that still has relevance to new audiences. And, in the tradition of the best science fiction movies I have seen, it raised questions as it entertained. It retains its ability to challenge once deeply held convictions.
In the movie, Skerritt was originally chosen to pilot the space vehicle, but a terrorist leveled it. A second vehicle, about which the public had known nothing, was revealed, and Foster's character was given an opportunity to operate it in space.
Then, after Foster experienced what seemed to be a remarkably revealing journey but may only have been an hallucination, she was forced to concede that, contrary to her earlier public remarks, maybe she did have some kind of faith in something after all.
An incredulous panel member said to her, "You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that to put it mildly strains credibility. Over half a trillion dollars was spent, dozens of lives were lost. Are you really going to sit there and tell us we should just take this all on faith?"
Foster replied, "Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. As a scientist, I must concede that, I must volunteer that."
Under questioning from a panel member (James Woods), Foster admitted that she had no evidence to support her story, that she might have hallucinated the whole thing and that, if she had been on the panel, she too would be skeptical.
"Why don't you simply withdraw your testimony," Woods demanded, "and concede that this 'journey to the center of the galaxy' in fact never took place?"
"Because I can't," Foster replied. "I had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever, a vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish I could share that. I wish that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe and humility and hope. That continues to be my wish."
In other words, science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps they have been explaining the same things in different ways.
A word or two must be said about the movie's director, Robert Zemeckis — although those thoughts have mostly been expressed by Ebert, who wrote that Zemeckis' work "often employs daring technical methods."
Ebert observed that Zemeckis mixed animation and live action in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" years before computer–generated imagery progressed from short to feature–length films and seamlessly inserted Forrest Gump into historic footage (something Woody Allen did in "Zelig" more than a decade earlier).
In "Contact," Zemeckis did something similar, inserting actual news anchors from CNN into the movie, reporting on this development in space travel. Zemeckis even inserted footage of then–President Bill Clinton into the story. Clinton's part was real. He wasn't performing in the movie; his words weren't about what the audience had just seen, but what he said certainly made sense within the context of the story.
Consequently it seemed real — until you remembered that you had seen nothing of this in the news.
Zemeckis didn't just break the fabled "fourth wall." He knocked it down.
"Contact" received only one Academy Award nomination (Best Sound), but, in keeping with the rest of the evening, lost to "Titanic."
Steven Spielberg is probably the most gifted filmmaker of my lifetime.
But I'll be the first to say that sequels are just not his thing.
He's a terrific story teller, but his inclination is to tell the story in a single sitting, usually not in installments — even when the response to one of his movies appears to be a cry for more — and move on to the next project.
"Jaws," for example, was great. The sequels, not so much. But Spielberg really didn't have a hand in them.
Inexplicably, he was the director of both the original "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which premiered on this day in 1997. The original was a first–rate example of Spielberg's filmmaking at its best; the second was an uncharacteristic example of giving in to the temptation to make some easy money essentially repeating yourself.
Well, it might have been better if Spielberg had repeated himself. Instead he tried to concoct an entirely new story with basically the same ingredients. Spielberg knows how to push all the right buttons to get the desired response from the audience, but these movies centered on the dinosaurs that had been created by Richard Attenborough's character in the first movie. It was almost as if Spielberg directed a documentary.
(That would have pleased my journalism professors. Their advice to us was always that, whenever we wrote about something, we should be like flies on the wall. "The reader shouldn't even know you're there," one of my professors said.)
Attenborough had a cameo role in the sequel. So did the child actors who played his grandchildren in the earlier movie.
And Jeff Goldblum was back — but none of the others returned. Instead you had Arliss Howard, Julianne Moore and a whole new cast of good guys and bad guys, all brought together to explore an island where the dinosaurs had been bred before being brought to Jurassic Park where they would be the main attraction. When the park was abandoned, the isolated supply island was forgotten.
Except by the audience. If I remember correctly, there was nothing to forget because this island was never mentioned in the original.
That was just one of the many hurdles Spielberg had to clear in order to make this movie. And I guess he succeeded in most of his objectives, but when the movie was finished and showing in the theaters, it lacked the one thing it needed the most, the one thing that just about every Spielberg movie has — a sense of awe, of wonderment.
Call it the Wow Factor. It is when Spielberg merges all the best elements of filmmaking that are at his disposal at the time.
I remember that moment in the original "Jurassic Park." It was when all the guests saw a wide assortment of dinosaurs in an open field. There was no comparable moment in the sequel.
I'm not saying Spielberg didn't try. But the dinosaurs in his sequel were always aggressive. The audience knew why, of course, and understood. But it got in the way of what one expects from Spielberg. He is the gold standard, always on the cutting edge.
His imagination takes us places we never dreamed we would go. He does the dreaming and turns it into movie reality. To borrow the words of 19th–century British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Spielberg is "the music maker and the dreamer of dreams."
Sequels just aren't his thing.
Making movie magic is his thing.
Spielberg has never struck me as a director of violent movies. I know he directed "Jaws" — but the shark never became a malevolent monster. It did what animals do — it hunted for food. In "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," the dinosaurs were malicious. They killed indiscriminately. Hunger had little to do with it.
Oh, there was a sense of wonder — initially — from some of the cast members — and most of the folks in Spielberg's audiences.
It could hardly be avoided. Spielberg's dinosaurs appeared to be the real thing. It was hard for audiences, whether watching the original or the sequel, not to be astonished by what they saw.
But where Spielberg came up short was by not reimagining the material and coming up with a unique story that did the visuals and the human characters justice.
That's when Spielberg has always been at his best — when, in addition to the movie making bells and whistles, he also gave audiences a story that surprised them, that wasn't what they expected.
Film critic Roger Ebert agreed with me, by the way.
"Perhaps the time to do the thinking on this project was before the first film, when all the possibilities lay before Spielberg,"Ebert wrote 20 years ago. "He should have tossed aside the original Michael Crichton novel, knowing it had given him only one thing of use: an explanation for why dinosaurs might walk among us. Everything else — the scientific mumbo–jumbo, the theme park scheme — was just the recycling of other movies."
Recycled is the right word, I think. When I saw "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," at a theater, I kept thinking that I had seen it before — just not with dinosaurs. I still can't say that it reminded me of a specific movie, just a genre — the monster movie.
Another thought that I had was that Spielberg's dinosaurs were always getting loose and terrorizing humans in the rain. In the original movie, it was during a rain storm — at the time I presumed it was some sort of tropical storm — that the dinosaurs escaped their pens and roamed the island.
They did essentially the same thing under the same circumstances in the sequel, and when I watched the movie, I presumed again that it was some sort of tropical island.
But then the plot called for one of the adult dinosaurs to be taken to San Diego where, sure enough, it was raining. Now, San Diego has a very agreeable climate most of the year with little rain — maybe a foot or so all year.
So that part, that this vessel carrying a living dinosaur, arrived in San Diego on one of the few rainy days of the year, probably surprised some people in the audience — but that really isn't the kind of surprise I've been talking about.
Business Insider proclaimed Star Trek"arguably the greatest science–fiction television series of all time" in an article last September that ranked the top 13 episodes of the original series.
"The City on the Edge of Forever," which premiered on this night in 1967, ranked No. 2 on that list.
Now, I am not a Star Trek fan — although I have several friends who are, and most of them would probably tell you that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was the best episode Star Trek ever aired.
It is one of the few Star Trek episodes I have seen from start to finish. Whether you rank it first or second, it was a remarkable episode — and certainly not the kind of thing one expects from a sci–fi series — although, perhaps, given the time travel angle of the episode, it is the kind of thing one would expect.
Either way, Star Trek did a beautiful job with that theme — and its co–theme of alternate reality.
Viewers probably didn't know what they were in for when the episode began. It started routinely enough, I suppose. Chief Medical Officer McCoy (DeForest Kelley) was treating a crew member (George Takei) who had been injured as the Enterprise passed through time distortions surrounding an unexplored planet when he accidentally injected himself with an overdose of a drug he had been using to revive the crew member. An overdose in a human could be lethal; in this case it caused delusions. McCoy fled to the ship's transporter room and beamed himself to the planet. Capt. Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and others followed him to the planet, where they found a glowing stone that was responsible for the time distortions.
A voice from the stone told the crew that it was the Guardian of Forever, a portal to any place and time. About that time McCoy dove into the portal — and the search party was suddenly cut off from the Enterprise. The Guardian informed the crew that McCoy's action had altered the past. The Enterprise and the Federation did not exist.
Kirk and Spock tried to follow McCoy into the past and attempt to repair the damage to the timeline, the extent of which they did not know. They found themselves in Depression–era New York City and encountered a woman (Joan Collins) who ran a mission there. Having arrived there shortly before McCoy, they worked for Collins while they waited for him — and Kirk began to fall in love with her.
Meanwhile, McCoy arrived and was taken in by Collins. Spock, who had been doing the best he could to build the computer aid to access the information in his tricorder, which he had been using to record the Guardian's data when McCoy made his escape, had discovered that Collins was supposed to have died in a traffic accident, but McCoy had prevented the accident, causing the rip in the fabric of time. Permitted to live, Collins began a pacifist movement that postponed the United States' entry into World War II. As a result, the Nazis were the first to acquire nuclear weapons and went on to win the war.
I guess you would call that unanticipated consequences.
To repair the timeline, it was necessary for Collins to die in an accident. How that comes to pass is something everyone should see for themselves.
I will, however, offer one observation.
When Keeler died — in an automobile accident, as had, ironically, been preordained — a now back to normal McCoy attempted to save her but was stopped by Kirk. He turned on Kirk and in exasperation said, "You deliberately stopped me! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?"
The grief–stricken Kirk could find no comfort in the knowledge that history had been restored.
When Rod Taylor died back at the start of this year, there was a bit of a debate over which was his best movie — "The Birds" or "The Time Machine," which premiered on this day in 1960.
For me, there really isn't a debate. As I have written here many times, I admire the work of Alfred Hitchcock very much — and there are many of his movies that I would see and have seen over and over. "The Birds," though, is not one of them. A friend of mine and I were discussing it about a week after Taylor's death, and he described the plot of "The Birds" as a "one–trick pony." That is about as good a description as I have heard.
"The Birds" was good the first time — but "The Time Machine" is always good, no matter how many times you see it.
The cast was first rate, with faces that became more familiar to TV audiences within a few years. Alan Young had been in movies for more than a decade, but it was a year after he made "The Time Machine" that he became Wilbur Post on TV's Mister Ed, which is most likely his defining role.
Likewise, Sebastian Cabot had been in many movies by the time he appeared in "The Time Machine," but he is probably best remembered for his role as Mr. French in Family Affair.
For that matter, Taylor is probably remembered more for "The Birds." That really is a pity.
He received no Oscar nominations for either movie, but I always felt that he was the star of "The Time Machine," whereas Tippi Hedren really was the focus of "The Birds.""The Time Machine" was the story of Taylor's character's travels through time — and the people he met along the way.
The time machine remained in the same physical location but could not be seen when it was traveling in a different time. From time to time, as Taylor traveled into the future, he would stop and explore, usually encountering Young as his own descendant. (Talk about a family resemblance.)
In a minor example of director George Pal's Oscar–winning use of time–lapse photographic effects, Taylor monitored developments in women's fashions by observing the mannequin in the window of the shop across the street from his home.
Now, I liked the idea, but I was disappointed that the director didn't take it to its logical conclusion and try to forecast women's fashions after Taylor's character developed his time machine. The story took place in early January 1900, and it is reasonable to assume that, since the movie supposedly projected Taylor into a future that was thousands of years from his own time, at some time part of it must have taken place in the 20th century.
The '60s, after all, brought us mini skirts, tie–dyed T–shirts and blue jeans as the drivers of women's apparel — quite a change from what people of Taylor's real time (as far as the movie was concerned) expected.
It was also quite a change for the theatrical audiences, who, in 1960, might have been shocked to see the fashions that were soon to come their way.
Yvette Mimieux played Taylor's love interest. She was a member of the Eloi, one of two post–apocalyptic species. The Eloi were benign people. At some point, being quite intelligent for a time, the Eloi resolved all the earth's problems, then were segregated into their own group by the other species, the aggressive Morlocks.
Steven Spielberg's movie version of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," which was in theaters 10 years ago today, wasn't a bad movie, but, as film critic Roger Ebert observed, it was disappointing — mainly because, on the surface at least, it seemed to have all the necessary elements to make a genuine summer blockbuster.
In hindsight, the 1953 version was better — even if it didn't have the benefit of 21st–century special effects (although it did pretty well with what it had, winning an Oscar — half a century later, the remake was nominated for Oscars for sound mixing, sound editing and visual effects but didn't win any).
I saw that 1953 version once many years ago; while its effects probably do seem primitive to modern viewers and it is often summarized as a "loose adaptation" of Wells' book, it was probably a better adaptation of that book than the film that was in the theaters in 2005.
I don't know why it turned out the way it did. Spielberg has always had something of a flair for stories with an other–worldly bent, but this one simply wasn't as satisfying as his other movies.
Ebert picked up on that, too. He called it "a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg. ... What happened to the sense of wonder Spielberg celebrated in 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and the dazzling imagination of 'Minority Report'?"
And I agree that it was clunky — mainly because it lacked that "zest and joyous energy" to which Ebert referred. That is really the secret to Spielberg's phenomenal success — and the key to understanding his failures. Oh, sure, he's pretty good with special effects, too, but that is because he makes them so realistic that, even if the premise of the movie is preposterous, the viewer really does believe it could happen. When that is done as well as Spielberg has tended to do it, that is the real magic of the movies.
With "War of the Worlds," though, I never crossed that threshold. I never believed that what I was seeing on the screen really could come to pass. It was an entertaining movie, but I never got swept into Spielberg's world — or, at least, the world he wanted us to occupy for a couple of hours. Unlike the vast majority of my experiences with Spielberg's movies, there was never a time while I was sitting in the theater watching "War of the Worlds" when I was not aware of the fact that I was watching a movie.
Now, I'm not going to say the movie was a total loss. It did have its redeeming qualities — even if it wasn't Spielberg's best.
It was a surprise to me that Tim Robbins had a role in the movie. I hadn't heard he was in it so it really caught me by surprise. He was almost unrecognizable as a survivalist at first — especially to eyes (like mine) that expected to see the young Tim Robbins of about 25 years earlier (as you can probably guess, it's been awhile since I went to movie theaters very much). Once I realized who I was seeing, I was able to concentrate on the story.
And I thought he was good. Not Oscar–worthy good, but good.
Even though the movie was probably in the theaters when Tom Cruise was still regarded as one of the most bankable names in Hollywood, I thought the real shining star of the movie was young Dakota Fanning, already a veteran of more than a dozen movies at the tender age of 11. The Las Vegas Film Critics Society gave her its Youth in Film award for her performance, and she was nominated for Best International Actress by the Irish Film & Television Academy — but lost to Gillian Anderson.
Personally, I don't think it was the best performance I've seen Fanning give. I thought she did well in the role of Cruise's daughter, but I was more impressed with her performance as Sean Penn's daughter in "I Am Sam" in 2001. She played a different kind of role in "War of the Worlds," though, one that seemed to confirm her all–around talent, and, I must admit, I expected big things from her after I saw it.
She's made about two dozen movies in the last decade, I suppose, which makes for a formidable body of work for a 21–year–old actress, and she has received a boatload of award nominations (and she has even won some of those awards), but she's never received an Oscar nomination. When she clears that hurdle, win or lose, I will feel she has lived up to her potential.
Ebert didn't have much to say about Fanning, except to lament "scenes in which [she] has to be lost or menaced, and then scenes in which she is found or saved, all with much desperate shouting." Mostly, he seemed to say, it was much ado about nothing.
Ebert didn't like the tripod invaders in a 21st–century setting. "I do not like the way they look," he wrote, "the way they are employed, the way they attack, the way they are vulnerable or the reasons they are here."
Fair enough. His beef really had little to do with the acting. His assessment — and mine as well — was that Cruise, as the hero, was tolerable in his role. After I had seen the movie, I really had no complaints about the acting, either, but I felt vaguely unsettled about what I had seen — an atypical response to a Spielberg movie.
Earlier in his review, Ebert wrote, "You look at Spielberg's machines, and you don't get much worked up, because you're seeing not alien menace but clumsy retro design. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to set the movie in 1898, at the time of Wells' novel, when the tripods represented a state–of–the–art alien invasion."
Food for thought for whoever chooses to make the next adaptation of Wells' tale.
Cornelius (David Watson):If you are caught by the gorillas, you must remember one thing.
Brent (James Franciscus):What's that?
Cornelius:Never to speak!
Brent:What the hell would I have to say to a gorilla?
I would never categorize myself as a fan of science fiction. I do like what could charitably be called mainstream science fiction — at least as it pertains to the movies. I haven't read much science fiction in my life, but I've seen some movies — all of the "Star Wars" movies, for example, and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."
And the "Planet of the Apes" movies. The sequel to the first movie, "Beneath the Planet of the Apes," premiered on this day in 1970.
I don't remember when I saw the first two "Planet of the Apes" movies, but I do know the circumstances. I saw them as part of a double feature at the movie theater in my small central Arkansas hometown. It was an old–fashioned single–screen theater, the only movie theater in town other than the drive–in on the outskirts of town, and first–run movies were never shown there. If one wanted to see a movie when it was popular, it was necessary to drive to Little Rock.
And in the summers the local merchants would sponsor free movies for the children in town on Wednesday afternoons. All a kid had to do was pick up a pass at just about any store in town and then present it on the date that was printed on the pass. Presto! You were in. Drinks and snacks still cost you money, though, but not that much, at least not when compared to what you've got to pay for drinks and snacks today.
The movies that were shown typically were a few years old, and the producers were wringing a few more bucks from them before they were retired (this was before cable and home video revived movies that were believed to have outlived their profitability). Investing in free movies was good public relations for the businesses in town. I didn't know a single mother who didn't appreciate having a few hours away from her children every Wednesday.
Most of the time, the kids paid little attention to the movies that were being shown. They were more interested in throwing popcorn at each other. And I was no different, I guess. But I remember times when I was interested in what was on the screen, and the occasion I saw the first two "Planet of the Apes" movies as a Wednesday afternoon double feature was one of those times — which also must have meant that, by that time, it was at least a year, maybe more, since the sequel had been released. I didn't think of that. I just watched the movies, mesmerized by them.
In hindsight, I think that seeing those two movies at a young age impressed upon me — especially the first movie with its unexpected ending — that movies could entertain as well as provide effective social commentaries on whatever the filmmaker wished to comment simultaneously. That may not seem like much of a revelation to you, but to my 11– or 12– or 13–year–old mind at the time, it really was a revelation.
The second movie wasn't as good as the first, but it had much better special effects, and the continuation of the story made sense to me. Charlton Heston was back, albeit in more of a supporting role this time, and James Franciscus was in it as an astronaut who had been sent in search of the lost space ship. Kim Hunter was back as Dr. Zira. Linda Harrison returned as Nova, the beautiful mute.
And the audience pieced together what had happened to earth over some 20 centuries as well as what had happened on the planet since the first movie. From the by–now famous finish of the first movie, it was clear that a nuclear war had broken out, and most of the world's population had been wiped out. Life had to begin again, but this time it evolved into a world in which apes were the rulers and humans the ones who were reduced to acting on animal instincts.
Since the original movie two years earlier, apparently the gorillas had staged some sort of military coup and were dispatching an army to the Forbidden Zone — where Heston had disappeared.
Most of the humans on the planet were mute, like Nova, but there was a subset of humans living beneath the surface (hence the name of the movie), worshiping a nuclear weapon. They accomplished many things through mind control, but, in the end, it was the bomb that stood between them and being overrun by the apes.
I wasn't very impressed with the next three movies in the "Planet of the Apes" franchise — nor have I been very impressed with its recent reincarnations — but I thought the sequel that premiered 45 years ago today was a worthy followup to the first movie and adequately answered some lingering questions.
Marty (Michael J. Fox):I'm sorry, Doc. It's all my fault you're stuck back there. I never should have let Biff get to me.
Doc (Christopher Lloyd):Well, there are plenty worse places to be than the Old West. I could've ended up in the Dark Ages. They probably would have burned me at the stake as a heretic or something.
The final installment of the "Back to the Future" trilogy premiered on this day in 1990.
Some people never thought there should be a sequel to the original, let alone a third movie. I didn't particularly mind, as I wrote last year on the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the sequel, mainly because I enjoyed the premise. But, in hindsight, I must admit that the concept had about run its course after three movies. I'm glad they didn't go all "Rocky" — or, God forbid, all "Star Wars" — on us. That could have been messy.
(Still, time travel does have certain things in common with space travel, does it not?)
Beyond that, there were a few things for which I was grateful when I saw the trilogy's final installment.
For one, I was glad the producers of the movie didn't try to return to the future. I think they explored that concept about as much as they could — without actually knowing what the future held, which, of course, was the point of "Back to the Future Part II." Other than that, I can't think of too much in the way of other themes about the future that could be plausibly explored.
It is that very knowledge that we do have about the past that makes the concept of traveling back in history, not forward, so appealing. And the temptation always seems to be to go back to a time when a major event occurred, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, and use the knowledge one brings from the future to change that past.
(It is a theme that was explored in what is probably my favorite episode from the second generation of the Twilight Zone TV series. It was about a visitor from the future who returned to Dallas in November 1963 and altered history by preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Turned out, though, that history requires something of equal value when its predetermined course is altered. Because the assassination had not happened as it was intended, serious storms erupted around the globe and the Soviet premier was assassinated.)
No, I don't think there was any more fertile ground to be plowed in the future. But the past is a different matter. The past is as vast as space, offering countless opportunities. The stuff about the '50s was pretty much exhausted, though, so it was essential to pick a different time, and the old West was as good as any. Marty could interact with his ancestors, Irish immigrants, and the always present inventor of the Time Machine, Doc Brown.
I thought it was good, for example, that Lea Thompson could continue her fine work in the third movie, playing Michael J. Fox's great–great–grandmother after playing his mother in the first two movies. And that lent itself nicely to some clashing–centuries humor. For example:
At one point, at a fund–raising party in the town square, Marty held up a plate that had the word Frisbee written on it. Frisbee, apparently, was the name of the maker of the plate or the business that served whatever had been on the plate, but Marty, of course, associated it with the plastic disc that was such a popular toy in the '70s and '80s. Marty said to his great–great–grandparents, "Hey, Frisbee! Far out!"
"What was the meanin' of that?" Fox, playing his great–great–grandfather, asked after the latter–day Marty had sauntered off.
"It was right in front of him," Thompson's character remarked.
Another thing I liked about the casting was that it featured Mary Steenburgen, an actress with whom I was familiar long before she started appearing on America's movie screens. For a time, she was a student at the central Arkansas college where my father was a religion professor, and she appeared in some campus productions. I think I even saw one once. Hard to remember now. But I knew her name. It was distinctive.
Ten years before she appeared in the final "Back to the Future" movie, Steenburgen won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in "Melvin and Howard." As far as I know, she is the only former student of that college to win an Oscar — probably the only one ever to be nominated for an Oscar.
Personally, I have always thought she was a good actress — even though she hasn't been nominated for an Oscar for any of her performances since.
Film critic Roger Ebert complained that the "looking-glass quality" from the first two movies was absent in the third, and there is something to that. There is also something to his characterization of the pace of the first two movies as "dizzying," a pace that, it seems to me, is inappropriate for a tale set mostly in the Old West — even if it did involve time travel as well.
Ebert didn't care for the sitcom quality of the Old West as presented in "Back to the Future Part III," but he did find one part of it endearing — the romance between Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Clara (Steenburgen).
He found one constant in all three movies: "a sort of bittersweet, elegiac quality involving romance and time."
"In the first movie," Ebert wrote, "McFly went back in time to be certain his parents had their first date. The second involved his own romance. The third involves Doc Brown and Clara. In all of these stories, there is the realization that love depends entirely on time. Lovers like to think their love is eternal.
"But do they ever realize it depends entirely on temporal coincidence, since, if they were not alive at the same time, romance hardly would be feasible?"
Hmmm. The relationship between romance and time travel. Something to ponder on the 25th anniversary of Part III's debut.
I'd be tempted to say that you couldn't remake "The Stepford Wives" that premiered 40 years ago today — except that they did remake it more than a decade ago. It wasn't as good — honestly, can you think of a remake that was as good as the original? — but it certainly wasn't the worst remake I have ever seen.
The original of "The Stepford Wives" really was kind of creepy — and I say that from the perspective of the teenager I was when I first saw it. The original doesn't seem creepy to me now — and the remake never has. I guess it would be strange to feel that way about the remake. It was more of a parody of the original, a comedy. The original was anything but a comedy.
When I first saw it, I didn't think of the sexist angle — that the men had all the choice in Stepford and the women had none. I didn't think of that, only of having one's individuality stripped away. I never really thought of it in gender–specific terms. Maybe I was the only one who didn't.
I'd like to think that is understandable. I'm a writer; writers are creative and very individual. To be stripped of our individuality is a fate worse than death.
Katharine Ross was one of my favorite actresses in those days. She was in many of my favorite movies from that period — "The Graduate,""Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" — and she was always playing characters who had very strong individual streaks. They all had other flaws — but not in that department.
In "The Stepford Wives," Ross played a photographer. A pretty good one, too, as I recall. When she and her family left the big city for the country town of Stepford, the audience saw Stepford as she saw it — through the lens of her camera. And she began to observe things through that lens — the women of Stepford were all gorgeous and obsessed with keeping their homes clean but had few, if any, interests beyond that.
There was a men's association in Stepford and, to counter it, Ross and a couple of free spirits (Paula Prentiss and Tina Louise) tried to organize a women's lib group, but it dissolved into a discussion of cleaning techniques.
Later, after Louise went away for the weekend with her husband and came back a changed woman, you might say, Ross and Prentiss began to do some investigating of their own — and didn't like what they found. Apparently, there was some kind of conspiracy to replace the individual women with mindless, obedient robots — if that is what they were. That part remained in doubt for awhile until Ross encountered her own duplicate, an android that looked like her and sounded like her but had no interests beyond cooking and cleaning — and had black, lifeless eyes.
My memory is that the movie was well received — but not enthusiastically — and has achieved something of a cult status over the years.
The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror Films named Ross its Best Actress for 1975.
"Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time — and time in this case can be measured in eternities."
Opening narration
On this night 55 years ago, Twilight Zone, in its first season, the TV series continued to explore its favorite theme — a character is inexplicably transported to a different time. Sometimes the episodes examined things as being alternate realities but not the episode that aired on this night in 1960. In this case, it was a World War I British pilot (Kenneth Haigh) who passed through a cloud and couldn't hear his engine for awhile — after which, he landed at a U.S. air base in 1959 France.
The pilot was stunned to learn that it was 42 years later than it had been when he took off in his plane that morning. He was even more stunned to learn that an old American colleague was scheduled to visit the base that day — a colleague the British pilot had been certain had died during air combat in World War I.
But he was informed that his colleague had survived and had gone on to distinguish himself in World War II.
That was a bit of a head scratcher for him. But then he got the idea that they both could not occupy the same time. If he got back in the air and flew through that cloud back to his own time, then his colleague would be OK. But if he stayed in 1959, it might turn out that his colleague really did die in World War I.
You know, don't you, the brand of logic that Twilight Zone used to follow?
Anyway, the pilot was being held in custody for questioning, but he felt strongly that he and his old colleague must not cross paths.
So he broke out and ran across the airfield to his plane, started it and made his getaway.
It was very Twilight Zone–esque.
It also had a sci–fi feel to it. Normally, I'm not much of a sci–fi fan. There are a few books and movies in that genre that I do like, but it isn't really my thing. In the hands of Twilight Zone's writers, though, it worked for me.
That is really the only explanation I have for why I liked this episode. It wasn't unique. It said nothing profound. Some Twilight Zone episodes were both — unique and profound. This one was neither.
Starman (Jeff Bridges):Dutch apple pie with whipped cream. It's wonderful.
Jenny (Karen Allen):For a primitive species we have our points.
Voyager 2 was a space probe that was launched in 1977 to explore the solar system. It was actually launched before Voyager 1, but Voyager 2 moves slower and was passed by Voyager 1.
It is an extended mission that has been going on now for more than 37 years.
Each Voyager carried with it a gold–plated audio–visual disc. The idea was that, if the probe was found by an intelligent life form somewhere, that life form could see images and hear voice recordings and music from earth on that disc.
That, essentially, was the starting point of John Carpenter's "Starman," a movie starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen that made its debut 30 years ago today.
Unfortunately, "Starman" was largely overlooked when it was showing on the big screen. It cost $24 million to make and took in less than $29 million at the box office, which wasn't really in the same ballpark with the top–grossing films of 1985. That really is too bad because I thought it was a literate, clever and thoroughly plausible story.
Bridges was Starman, one of those intelligent life forms I was talking about. Someone from his civilization came across the probe, found the disc and heard a clear invitation for visitors to come to earth in peace. Apparently, it was decided to send a probe to earth, on which Starman (in whatever form he took — initially, he just appeared to be a blue ball) was riding, acting as some kind of advance scout.
"He, or it, has traveled to Earth in response to the invitation from Voyager," film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "but of course the Air Force treats the spacecraft as a possible invader and shoots missiles at it." Starman's vessel crashed in Wisconsin, near the home of Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen), a young widow.
He made his way to her home, where she had been drinking and reminiscing about her late husband before passing out. While she slept, Starman the blue ball entered the home and found all the mementos she had spread out in the living room, including a lock of her husband's hair.
Starman used the hair to clone a body for himself, then he used one of several smaller balls he carried with him (each of which seemed to have the power to do remarkable things) to contact his people. He informed them that his vessel had crashed and the terrain was hostile. He arranged to rendezvous with his people at a landing site in Arizona in three days' time.
Jenny had been awakened, and she witnessed him transmitting his message.
Starman managed to coerce Jenny into taking him to Arizona. At first, she tried to figure out ways to be stopped — or to get away from the Starman. But, at the same time, she was mesmerized. He looked so much like Scott — and he sounded like Scott.
She was torn.
After Jenny saw him revive a dead deer with another of his small balls, the movie became something of a bonding experience between the two. Starman had a rudimentary knowledge of English from the disc, and he learned how to communicate more effectively in the language.
Jenny taught him that humans weren't as uniformly primitive as he first believed.
However, one of humanity's more savage elements, the U.S. Army, was pursuing them with the intention of having a vivisectionist slice up the alien. A scientist from SETI (Charles Martin Smith) was with them, and he played an important role in allowing Starman and Jenny to escape.
Before he did so, he had some questions for Starman.
"Have people from your world been here before?" he wanted to know.
"Before, yes," Starman replied. "We are interested in your species."
"You mean you're some kind of anthropologist?" the scientist asked. "Is that what you're doing here? Just checking us out?"
"You are a strange species," Starman said. "Not like any other. And you'd be surprised how many there are. Intelligent but savage. Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you?"
The scientist nodded, and then Starman delivered perhaps the best line of the movie.
"You are at your very best when things are worst."
I thought Bridges had another great line when, as he and Jenny were riding in a railroad boxcar, she asked him to describe the planet from which he came.
"It is beautiful," he replied. "Not like this, but it is beautiful. There is only one language, one law, one people. There is no war, no hunger. The strong do not victimize the helpless. We are very civilized, but we have lost something, I think. You are all so much alive, all so different."
And that really is humanity's great conundrum, isn't it? Well, it's one of them. We like to say that we value diversity, but humans are naturally suspicious of those who are different from themselves in some way. I guess it is a defense mechanism, honed by centuries of evolution.
Many people do not want to be like that and honestly despise that trait in themselves, but it remains a part of human nature — an ugly part, yes, but a part, nonetheless.
In his preparation to play Starman, I've heard that Bridges studied birds and their movements. His reasoning was that an alien would not have human characteristics and, finding himself in a human body, would act with animal instincts. I thought it was effective — and explained many things I did not know before I saw the movie.
It was effective enough that Bridges received an Oscar nomination, but he lost to F. Murray Abraham ("Amadeus"). It was the movie's only Oscar nomination.
I got my bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas, and I got my master's degree in journalism from the University of North Texas. Most of my adult life has been dedicated to writing and editing in one form or another. Most recently I have taught writing (news and developmental) as an adjunct journalism professor at Richland College, where I advise the student newspaper staff. Go, Thunderducks!
