Amazon.com Essentials:
Anybody who has written him off because of his string of
stinkers--or anybody who's too young to remember The Goodbye
Girl--may be shocked at the accomplishment and nuance of
Richard Dreyfuss's performance in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. Here, he plays a man possessed; contacted by aliens, he
(along with other members of the "chosen") is drawn toward the site of
the incipient landing: Devil's Tower, in rural Wyoming. As in many
Spielberg films, there are no personalized enemies; the struggle is
between those who have been called and a scientific establishment that
seeks to protect them by keeping them away from the arriving
spacecraft. The ship, and the special effects in general, are every
bit as jaw-dropping on the small screen as they were in the theater
(well, almost). Released in 1977 as a cerebral alternative to the
swashbuckling science fiction epics then in vogue, Close
Encounters now seems almost wholesome in its representation of
alien contact and interested less in philosophizing about
extraterrestrials than it is in examining the nature of the inner
"call." Ultimately a motion picture about the obsession of the driven
artist or determined visionary, Close Encounters comes complete
with the stock Spielberg wives and girlfriends who seek to tether the
dreamy, possessed protagonists to the more mundane concerns of the
everyday. So a spectacular, seminal motion picture indeed, but one
with gender politics that are all too terrestrial. --Miles
Bethany
Amazon.com Essentials:
Anybody who has written him off because of his string of
stinkers--or anybody who's too young to remember The Goodbye
Girl--may be shocked at the accomplishment and nuance of
Richard Dreyfuss's performance in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. Here, he plays a man possessed; contacted by aliens, he
(along with other members of the "chosen") is drawn toward the site of
the incipient landing: Devil's Tower, in rural Wyoming. As in many
Spielberg films, there are no personalized enemies; the struggle is
between those who have been called and a scientific establishment that
seeks to protect them by keeping them away from the arriving
spacecraft. The ship, and the special effects in general, are every
bit as jaw-dropping on the small screen as they were in the theater
(well, almost). Released in 1977 as a cerebral alternative to the
swashbuckling science fiction epics then in vogue, Close
Encounters now seems almost wholesome in its representation of
alien contact and interested less in philosophizing about
extraterrestrials than it is in examining the nature of the inner
"call." Ultimately a motion picture about the obsession of the driven
artist or determined visionary, Close Encounters comes complete
with the stock Spielberg wives and girlfriends who seek to tether the
dreamy, possessed protagonists to the more mundane concerns of the
everyday. So a spectacular, seminal motion picture indeed, but one
with gender politics that are all too terrestrial. --Miles
Bethany
