Here’s the one scene I can describe from Close Encounters that might make you want to see it:
Earlier in the movie, Dreyfuss encounters a bunch of smallish UFOs that are essentially joyriding over the countryside. A pile of people saw them the same night, and so they meet up the next night in the same general area to see if they can see them again.
So he joins them - a bunch of strangers, all of whom aren’t quite sure what they saw or how they should feel about it. Suddenly, lights appear in the night sky. The people get excited, eager even. Spielberg pans to a classic Spielbergian composition of an elderly couple, eyes wet with wonder, lifting their faces expectantly towards the light…
… which turn out to the the lights from a bunch of Fed helicopters, which land and promptly arrest everybody.
Jeeze, Stefan, there aren’t that many of Spielberg’s movies that really hold up. But this is one of them. I can understand skipping, say, Hook. But you really should see Close Encounters.
By the way, the sequel, Fourth Kind, is awful. So awfully awful. And Universal insists on playing it as if it was built on some sort of bona fide found footage. What an offensive crock. One of the best things Close Encounters has going for it is that it’s from a more innocent time when UFOs weren’t fantasies for mentally deficient Art Bell and Whitley Streiber* followers.
-Tom
I have no idea how to spell that dumbass’s name and I’m not even going to bother looking it up.
I saw Close Encounters somewhat recently and I thought it held up beautifully. Dreyfuss is great but the rest of the performances are more than up to the task as well. I agree that the movie really does have a palpable sense of wonder. But it does a good job with dramatic tension as well. Did anyone really think that taking off the gas masks was going to kill the main characters (or harm them in some way)? Probably not. But I still found the scene tense and exciting (and felt the triumph the main characters surely felt; a big step along the way to proving they aren’t crazy, and that their on to something. Big). And I agree on the house abduction scene - that freaked me out as a kid big time. And I agree that E.T. has not held up over the years. It is a stark contrast when held up next to Close Encounters.
As for Poltergeist, I can’t imagine something PG being scarier (I’ve seen parts of it recently, and what I saw I thought held up pretty good). It touches on all the things that could scare you as a kid (the dark, storms, dolls in general as manifested through the god forsaken clown, creepy tree in the window that can make some fucked up shadows) and in a way that still resonates in adulthood. It captures that feeling of disorientation that can take place when you wake from sleep in the middle of the night (and it makes that iconic scene all that much more creepy). It also does a sensational job of setting the mood (beers on football sunday, the remote car amush, the tv remote war). I’m sure many people knew it was going to be a scary movie going in, and I certainly knew it was a scary movie when I saw it on HBO for the first time. But Speilberg really does a good job showing you the principle characters and putting you at ease. It’s a typical suburban family with a dad who is rising in the ranks. What could possibly trouble them, outside of the things we face in every day life?
I watched Close Encounters for the first time last night. It’s always existed in a really weird place for me: It’s an extremely popular movie that is often referenced (E.g. The clown college mashed potatoes scene in The Simpsons), and I’d seen bits and pieces of it over the years, but I knew almost nothing about it. I didn’t know if there were actually aliens in the film, or if there was some other explanation for whatever was going on. How is that even possible in this day and age?
I absolutely loved everything about the first hour. The planes showing up in Mexico, the flight controllers talking to the pilots, and Dreyfuss’ actual encounter are all fantastic scenes. Those big still shots of him driving in the dark across those flatlands had such a strong effect on me and really made me tense up. We go from the chaos of his average evening in his home, which is cramped and full of crap to these wide open spaces and silence.
I was a bit disappointed with the film following Barry’s abduction; everything following it seemed a bit disconnected to me. The movie is chronicling Dreyfuss’ journey, but he’s just an observer for such a significant part of that ending.
Still, that might just be a reaction to how much I enjoyed the first half.
One thing I really hated was the credits starting to play over the ship flying away. What the hell was that? I don’t think I’ve ever been snapped back into reality so abruptly.
Dreyfuss bursting into the kids’ rooms and them in those sleeping positions was fantastic.
Also, I loved how he taught math: “Quickly, Brad. There are thousands of lives at stake.”
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Close Encounters. The love part’s easy: the first and third acts are great. For me, though, the second act just drags interminably. Dreyfuss takes too long to figure out where to go and I don’t enjoy the hour spent watching his life fall apart in excruciating detail.
Man, today is fun thread necro day. Must be Diablo 3 viral marketing or something. Anyway, till the age of maybe 20 or so, this was my most watched movie. I don’t know how that happened, we didn’t have VCRs, so maybe I went to the theater like a dozen times? Anyway, that’s my memory and I’m sticking to it.
Also, reading this Random Roles with Lance Henriksen, I totally forgot that he had one of his earliest film roles here!
I love the story about approaching Steven Spielberg and asking if his character could capture one of the aliens.
Close Encounters really was “my” movie growing up in the sense it seemed to hit almost every aspect of my own cultural identification. The parents looked somewhat like my parents, the house looked somewhat like my house, that sense of reality and fantasy, that pastiche of blinking lights off in the distance after twilight that I encountered time and again travelling, of wise and intelligent academics (often of international bent) and the well meaning but inflexible military types, of the mysterious other-worldliness and power of storms, of the mystique of the outdoors, of hitting a cultural high note of the representation of UFO’s (i think CEOTTK is probably as culturally significant for UFOs as Jaws was for sharks), of rationality and reason and science solving the problems in the end.
[quote]
LH: Well, it’s a dysfunctional family, and I play the patriarch, a guy who can’t be wrong. He’s just never wrong. That’s the set-up. And then my son’s coming home, and he’s going to marry this Oriental woman, and I just go, “What?!”[/quote]
I’ll tell it to you like the Korean girl I was involved with at the time told it to me: things are oriental, people are Asian. But that was something like 20 years ago and may also be out of favor at this point.
Obviously biased, as a fan of the Spielberg 70’s oeuvre, but I think Close Encounters is a nearly perfect movie. I love the investigation scenes like finding Flight 19 in a desert (and they look like new, and start right up!), or the tense air traffic control scene (with a ton of phraseology that it doesn’t try to explain), interspersed with those family moments. Spielberg is so good with family and dialogue back then. Notice how often he uses the technique of having multiple conversations going on at once,or goofy stuff happening in the background. Everything feels so real and grounded, which makes the introduction of the fantastic all the more startling.
Using music as a language? Genius. Having John Williams function as that voice? Genius x10.
If the movie has a fault, I would say that Roy Neary’s obsession makes him fairly unlikable as a character. But, it also makes him relatable. Jillian, she of the lost child, is who the movie would focus on were it made today.
The triple knockout of Jaws + Star Wars + Close Encounters pretty much defined my youth and my passage into life-long geekdom.
Upon seeing this news, I asked my son if he’d be interested in whatever’s coming down the pipe. He said he hasn’t actually seen the film. In that moment, I felt like a larger failure of a father than I ever have before, lol.
