BEFORE: Yesterday I checked my watchlist against a revised list of "The 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", something I haven't done in about three years, just to see how much progress I've made. The writers of this book series update the list every year, and I found an accessible IMDB list of the 2014 edition's films. Lots of changes in the last 3 years, which was bad news for recent hits like "The King's Speech", "Bridesmaids", "True Grit" and "The Descendents", and also "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Inglourious Bastards" are now conspicuously absent. Alfred Hitchcock's legacy suffered with the removal of three films, "Sabotage", "Spellbound" and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956) - and Scorcese didn't fare well either, with both "Casino" and "The Departed" falling off. But as if to prove my recent point about non-linear messes, "Jacob's Ladder" and "Naked Lunch" are no longer on the list, so I feel justified in trashing them.
This is all backwards progress for me, but the good news is that classics like "Wall Street", "Field of Dreams" and "Robocop" are now on the list, and "Boogie Nights" has been restored, after apparently falling out of favor a few years ago. That, along with the addition of recent films like "Lincoln", "Gravity", "Life of Pi", "American Hustle" and "Django Unchained", gives me a boost back up to 369 films viewed, but I'm still down overall from where I was before. Since there are a lot of foreign films that I'm not likely to view on the list, like "Farewell My Concubine" and "Cinema Paradiso", it's going to be hard for me to get to a nice round number like 400. I've only got copies of 12 other films on the list, some classic films like "Harold & Maude", "The Thing" and "The Exorcist", and more recent films like "The Artist", "Nebraska" and "12 Years a Slave". "The Wolf of Wall Street" is also now on the list of must-sees, but something tells me it's not going to be there for long.
Now, it's back to the films of 1984, with Jeff Bridges carrying over from "Against All Odds". I've got a number of alien/body takeover films coming up, so I wondered if I should put them together or include them in the Halloween films, but I can't resist dropping this otherwise unlinkable film right between two other Jeff Bridges movies.
THE PLOT: An alien takes the form of a young widow's husband and asks her to drive him from Wisconsin to Arizona. The government tries to stop them.
AFTER: Just as the date of the release of "Arlington Road" was the key to understanding it with regards to terrorism, the release date of this film is also key - one year after "E.T." took the country by storm. If you took the concept behind "E.T.", added in the quest/road trip element of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and filtered it through the relationship seen in "Mork & Mindy" (woman frets wihile humanoid alien misunderstands human society), you'd have "Starman".
I don't mean to belittle it, they were clearly trying to do a lot here with few resources, but the special effects are laughable by today's standards - the alien consciousness (or whatever it is) clones a woman's dead husband from a convenient hair sample in a scrapbook, and then grows from a baby on the living room floor to an adult in nothing flat, while home movies of the husband are conveniently playing on a screen, so he can quickly learn to mimic his speech.
He also gains a quick knowledge of human firearms, which is great, because how else could he call "Shotgun!" on the road trip that he quickly plans. He's got to get from Wisconsin to Arizona in three days, half-kidnapping the widow in her also-convenient dead husband's Mustang. So, yeah, there's a big buy-in here because this guy figures things out so fast - but hey, maybe he studied on the long trip. We did send that record into space a few years before with greetings in 47 languages, and the specs for how to build a record player.
What's weird if that aliens do ever find that record on our Voyager spacecraft and come to Earth, they'll probably wonder why we don't listen to records any more - we'll be invaded by hipster aliens asking us to take them to the nearest record store so they can get the new album from Ambrosia or the Little River Band. There's a movie coming out later this summer, "Pixels", that's based on a similar concept, that we sent information about society out into space, and the aliens invade with ships based on 1970's video-game designs. That's fine, I suppose, but I think the record only had like, human language and whale-song on it, and not Pac-Man footage.
Anyway, the Starman has to get to Arizona for some reason, and the U.S. Military and a guy from S.E.T.I. is also tracking him, because they see him as a threat. But why would he destroy a civilization that can produce chocolate malteds and Dutch apple pie? That would be very short-sighted.
This film was directed by John Carpenter, who also directed the 1982 version of "The Thing", which I'm saving for Halloween. He reportedly modeled the structure of this film after classic road movies like "The 39 Steps" and "It Happened One Night". And as the Starman flips channels in a motel, he watches a little bit of "From Here to Eternity", which had its beach scene ripped off for the poster for "Against All Odds", last night's film. It's all connected, man...
Also starring Karen Allen (last seen in "The Perfect Storm"), Charles Martin Smith (last seen in "Speechless"), Richard Jaeckel (last seen in "The Dirty Dozen"), with cameos from Dirk Blocker, M.C. Gainey, Mickey Jones.
RATING: 4 out of 10 truck stops
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