Just watched E.T. again and I forgot how much the film drags, especially in the space suits operating room scenes. The scenes where Elliot starts teaching E.T. hold up well along with E.T. home alone and Halloween, but the rest of the film is a slog.
But that music (full disclosure, I played a suite from the music with my high school orchestra so it sticks with me) is still amazing. Just love that soundtrack.
Lousy movie. Barely makes the top 25 in AFI’s top American movies of all time. What a loser.
I didn’t say it was lousy, I said it wasn’t great. I know of the film’s historical importance and how big it was.
The Rewatchables podcast just released their ET pod last night, and now this thread.
Will say, for children the film holds up remarkably well.
Krush Groove was a better film.
It is the classic ‘kids on bikes’ movie, but if you start thinking about it very deeply it’s actually pretty creepy; closer to Poltergeist by way of the Farrelly Brothers than Starman or Cocoon. The extraterrestrials themselves seem totally inept; barely mobile but incapable of concealing themselves, and despite the fact that the titular alien can propel children through the air with just a flick of his Rudolph-nose-tipped finger somehow couldn’t make it back to his ship before it summarily abandoned him to his fate to eat Reese’s Pieces, build an interstellar communication rig out of a Speak’n’Spell and some aluminum foil, and drunkenly mind-fuck a young child into molesting his classmate.
Stranger
But I do think that is both a great movie and a Great movie. Especially compared to the brain-dead ADHD-paced CGI crap that passes for SF blockbusters in the 21st century.
It is a good film. However, it was a terrible video game.
You got something against collecting geraniums from holes?
Is that what that was? Although I loved my Atari, that game made very little sense. More Dada than Digdug. More Picasso than Pac-Man…
The game was a little more complex than I remembered…
Love this post.