The Screengrab : close encounters of the third kind

Starlog Magazine’s Final Frontier

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

After 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog magazine has ceased to exist as a print publication. “Official word of Starlog's demise came in a posting last week on the Starlog.com site, buried five paragraphs deep in an update informing readers that Starlog.com had relaunched in beta as part of a ‘massive digital initiative’ and touting the fact that a ‘Digital store,’ to launch next month, will feature digital editions of the entire Starlog catalog,” SciFi Wire reports. “The last print issue available for the time being is #374,while issue #375 will be available exclusively as a digital edition on the network in the very near future.”

I’m not going to claim that I’ve kept up with Starlog lately – I’m guessing the last issue I read had some hot scoop on the secrets of Return of the Jedi – but this announcement still bums me out a bit. I remember purchasing the very first issue of Starlog in 1976 (or, more likely, hounding my mother into buying it for me), the one you see pictured here. At the time I didn’t care anything about “David Bowie’s new sci-fi movie” or whether “The Changes” would help Space:1999; I was all about that Star Trek episode guide. Decades before the existence of Television Without Pity, I nearly grinded that issue into dust, checking off the episodes I’d seen and giving them my own special star ratings. With no IMDb, Ain’t it Cool News or Morning Deal Report to be found, it was only through each new issue of Starlog that I learned of such tantalizing upcoming fare as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien and the first Superman movie. The magazine was probably my first introduction to film criticism, through reviews by David Gerrold (who dared to find fault in The Empire Strikes Back, as I recall) and Harlan Ellison (whose Starlog reviews are collected in Harlan Ellison’s Watching.)

Anyway, the Twitter generation has no use for icky print and paper, so another long-running publication bites the dust. Still, there is some good news – once they put the entire digital archive online, we’ll all be able to have a good laugh at young Andrew Osborne’s letter decrying the sexual content of Saturn 3. See, there’s always a silver lining.

Insufficently Forgotten Films: "The Big Fix" (1978)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This post-counterculture private eye movie stars Richard Dreyfuss, who also served as co-producer, as thirtysomething West Coast shamus Moses Wine. Back in the glory days of the '60s student protests of which the young Moses was a part, he had a thing going on with a blonde rad-lib played by Susan Anspach. Now, she's working for a California gubernatorial candidate who is being targeted by a smear campaign; someone is seeking to tar him by claiming that he's associated with supposedly scary figures from that period, including fictionalized stand-ins for Abbie Hoffman ("Howard Eppis", played by F. Murray Abraham) and Cesar Chavez. Wine, a recent divorcee who makes wisecracks while his heart is breaking, investigates the smears while reflecting on how neither adulthood nor America has turned out quite the way he envisioned. In the course of his investigation, he discovers that the "violent radical" and fugitive from justice Eppis is hiding in plain sight with a wife and kids in a tract house, having settled down under a false name and joined the rush to collect all the "goodies" he can from the System.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It's a pitiful mess. The director, Jeremy Paul Kagen, came up through directing for TV, and after a brief spree making such feature films as The Chosen, The Sting II (the one where the roles originated by Paul Newman and Robert Redford are passed to the obvious second choices, Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis), and Big Man on Campus (also known as The Hunchback Hairball of L.A.--when you've got two potential titles as charming as these, how can you decide?), it was to directing for TV that he scuttled back. For a while there, Kagen seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the sixties out of his system: one of his TV films was the 1975 Katherine, in which a pre-Carrie Sissy Spacek played a rich girl who developed a social conscience and became a member of the radical underground, and his first theatrical feature, 1977's Heroes, starred Henry Winkler, in a failed bid to be recognized as something other than Fonzie, as a (get this) Vietnam vet (got that?) who, having been made lovably wacky by his traumatizing war experiences, travels cross country to reconnect with his old war buddies and start a worm farm. (He chatters baby talk while his heart is breaking. And while the audience is puking.) A decade later, Kagen would restage the Chicago 8 trial for a 1987 TV film called Conspiracy.

The Big Fix was one of the first Hollywood films pitched at an audience of people who'd grown up during the '60s and who thought they were changing the world at the time but now found themselves entering their thirties with kids and mortgages and stable jobs and friends who were getting ready to vote for Reagan (or even, shudder, entertaining the thought of voting for him themselves) and who might respond to entertainment that helped them find their bearings. Five years later, The Big Chill would clean up playing to that demographic, as would, another five years down the line, the TV series thirtysomething. Both of those laid their concerns right out on the table without the genre sweetening of a private-eye thriller. And both were much, much, much better made than The Big Fix. I've never met Jeremy Paul Kagen and don't really know anything about him but his filmography, but I think it must be safe to conclude that he's a hell of a nice guy, because anyone who's been entrusted to bring in a major feature film and proven himself as incompetent at making a complicated plot and key actions lucid and coherent as Kagen's work here would have been driven out of the business pretty quick if people weren't rooting for him. Of course, nobody ever walked out of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep fuming in disgust because he couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur. It's a mark of how dreary Kagen's work is that a viewer has plenty of time to ruminate on how how little success he's having figuring out what's supposed to be going on.

The Big Fix also served notice to Richard Dreyfuss that his movie career might be added to the list of things that he was about to be able to regard, along with adulthood and the American political system, as personally disappointing. Dreyfuss had just enjoyed perhaps his best year ever, starring in the blockbuster Close Encounters of the First Kind and winning an Academy Award as Best Actor (for The Goodbye Girl!) Having set this project up, he must have hoped that it would be the start of a new stage in his career, but it actually announced the beginning of a long downward slide. He would only make three other movies (The Competition, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and The Buddy System) in the nine years before he re-emerged, playing third fiddle to Nick Nolte and Bette Midler, in his next hit, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The chastening experience of his time in Siberia seemed to have done him some good as an actor. If The Big Fix had, by whatever intervention of God or the devil, somehow been a hit, and he'd felt encouraged to go even farther in the supposedly adorable mixture of (unconvincing) self-deprecating humor and tear-stained lonely-boy heroics that he was peddling here, things could have gotten really gross really fast.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: The character of Moses Wine was created by Roger L. Simon, for a series of mystery novels that began with two books--The Big Fix (1973) and Wild Turkey (1974)--that were first published by Straight Arrow Books, the short-lived literary imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. (Carrying on the roman a' clef element from The Big Fix, Wild Turkey included a knockoff of Rolling Stone star writer Hunter Thompson, called "Gunther Thomas.") Simon also did the screenplay for the movie, which led to a Hollywood career that includes a co-writing credit on one actual good movie, Paul Mazursky's 1989 adapatation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story. The most interesting thing about the first Wine novel and the movie made from it may be a shift in tone that says a lot about how much things had changed in five years: in the book, ol' Mose still harbors dreams of progressive political change, which are embodied in the candidate he's working for, but in the movie, the candidate is a doofus and all hope is dead. Moses Wine has yet to rear his frazzled head in another movie, but Simon has continued to grind out novels about him, and in 2003's Director's Cut, Wine opened the floor with the announcement, "I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft-- me a lifelong card-carrying left/liberal and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee, arrested at a half dozen demonstrations and bashed over the head by at least as many cops, nodding approvingly at the utterances of our Attorney General..." Wine goes on to explain that his "political about-face" is a "symptom of the times in which we lived. Like others I wanted to help, be Rosie the Riveter or even Clarence the Computer Chip maker, but I didn't have the skills for any of that, and besides we were told to just go about our normal work, that simply being vigilant would be enough to fight terrorism, whatever that meant." What this shrugging manifesto meant was that Simon himself had been so badly scared by 9/11 that he was now a lockstep Bush supporter, and just as his earlier novels had tried to fuse the images of Jerry Rubin and Humphrey Bogart, now he was trying to inject that World War II gung-ho spirit into his bilge. At the same time he was promoting his own political about-face on-line, at his blog and his site Pajamas Media, and in profiles with conservative writers who seemed charmed to find an actual living cartoon of a decadent Hollywood liberal type who was so eager to make cartoon attacks on the left.

Simon still peddles the Moses Wine books on his website, as if, for all his blather about how wrong he was in his younger days about who the bad guys, he has no sense of shame about having set that awful hippie-smart-ass sterotype in stone and tried to pass it off as a heroic image. Maybe he doesn't. In his own writing and in interviews, Simon comes across as vain and shallow, and utterly unconcerned about sounding as if his road to Damascus moment was motivated by something more than sheer, stark terror of the Islamofascist menace; maybe he loves his younger, dopier self too much to disown it, even as he sneers at anyone who would have agreed with him at the time. It's amusing, though, that in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has appropriated the same tactic that the villains used in The Big Fix, desperately trying to link Barack Obama to members of the Weather Underground. The fact that they're trying to do that to a candidate who was in elementary school at the time makes you wonder just how scary and confusing the world is going to seem to some people when we finally reach the point that nobody cares more about "the sixties" than the present, if we ever will. If Simon had been luckier--if, say, a brick had fallen on his head on September 10, 2001, and he'd lapsed into a coma and didn't come out of it until a week after Katrina--then he might today be able to sell a few copies of The Big Fix by touting it as a dire prediction of the corruption and self-debasement of the McCain campaign, but instead, he's been one of those sad lost souls wandering from TV studio to TV studio insisting that, because of his faith in John McCain;s honor, he believes that his candidate must be too senile to know what his own campaign is doing--now, get out there and vote for him, dammit! More recently, he heaped shame upon himself by declaring "interesting" another idiot's theory that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's first memoir. All this must have given Richard Dreyfuss something to chuckle about to himself as he hung around the set of Oliver Stone's W., bestowing his own Blofeldian impersonation of Dick Cheney on posterity.

Separated at Birth: "Wall-E" and "Silent Running"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although Wall-E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumball, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Both Wall-E and Silent Running posit a time when mankind has completely squandered the natural resources of its home planet, though Silent Running never gives you a look at what Earth itself has come to. Set entirely in space, it stars Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a crew member aboard the Valley Forge, a vessel that has been tending the last surviving gardens in an orbiting greenhouse dome. After Dick Cheney ascends to the presidency, orders come in to blow up the domes and return to Earth. Lowell is the only person who seems troubled by this, and in the end he takes command of the ship and sets off into deep space so that he can tend his garden without being hassled by the man. He has to kill his three fellow human crew members (Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, and Jess Vint) in order to pull it off, a detail that the movie doesn't linger on but that gives it a tough edge that makes it genuinely provocative and perhaps saves it from squishiness. Like Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, it can be taken as an implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism. (It should be noted that Trumball devised an out for himself with the movie's soundtrack, which raises the possibility that Dern's character has been driven insane from having to listen to Joan Baez trilling in his ears.)

Of course, there's always been a glass ceiling on the number of people in the audience who were prepared to root for Bruce Dern even when he's on his best behavior. The real heroes of Silent Running are Lowell's helpers, the drones--pint-sized, waddling robots that he whimsically renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones seem to grow their own eccentric personalities after Lowell has liberated them from their lives of anonymous drudgery and programmed them to concentrate on tending the garden, and when one of them "dies", it seems to matter much more than the deaths of Lowell's mostly cretinous human companions. To realize his concept for the drones, Trumball actually went low-tech: the robots are suits (weighing some twenty pounds each) that were inhabited by double-amputees. The character of Wall-E, in turn, is unmistakably a drone as re-imagined by Chuck Jones and liberated from live-action gravity. (Although Pixar is still technically an arm of Disney--maybe the only arm that works with any reliability--Wall-E and the accompanying short film Presto, about a stage magician with a hungry rabbit, makes it more clear than ever that if the company's contract is with Uncle Walt, its artists' hearts and souls belong to classic Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace.)

Silent Running isn't the solid knockout entertainment that Wall-E is. Originally produced for Universal's doomed early-seventies "youth division", it is a searching and sometimes fumbling film, but one whose weaknesses are redeemed both by its sweetness and the incongruously razor-blade-chewing presence of its leading man. It is in some ways a movie made for the sake of a central image, and that image--the leafy green forest in the glass dome floating silently in space, carefully preserved and safe where no man can see it, or despoil it--can still give you shivers. (Unfortunately, so can Joan Baez.) It's an oddball personal movie, but Wall-E isn't the first mainstream picture to take inspiration from it: the drones had a strong effect on the look and behavior of Star Wars's R2-D2. In turn, Pixar hired Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known as the "voice" of R2-D2, to provide the same for Wall-E. Whatever else they don't have in common, these movies could all be said to share a core language--a language of clicks and beeps.

Screengrab Movie Vacations #3: Devil's Tower, Wyoming

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Six hours west of Sioux Falls and six and a half hours north of Denver, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming isn’t particularly close to anything except surrounding towns like Spearfish, Spotted Horse and Fruitdale...and that’s why the aliens love it. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss becomes obsessed with the astonishing “monolithic igneous intrusion,” sculpting an image of the geological curiosity in mashed potato long before he knows that it’s an actual place he can visit...

...but there’s no reason YOU should miss out on this lovely UFO-watching spot, which offers camping and picnic facilities between April 25 through October 27 (weather permitting).

According to the National Park Service website (and I’m paraphrasing here), the best time to see naked boobies in the park is (presumably) the first week or so of August each year, during the massive annual week-long motorcycle rally 80 miles away in Sturgis, South Dakota. Wednesday during the rally is apparently the busiest day of the year at Devil’s Tower. “Some visitors like the rally,” the NPS site explains diplomatically, “however others would rather avoid it.”

The big rock itself, designated as a U.S. National Monument by good ol’ Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, figures in the culture and folklore of nearly two dozen Native American tribes, whose folklore says the grooves in the side of Devil’s Tower were formed by the claws of a Great Bear (hence the Lakota name, Mato Tipila or “Bear Tower”).

Whether you come with bikers or alone, and whether you’re stoned or sober, the singular formation is truly awe-inspiring for nature-lovers and movie geeks alike...and for those of you in the latter category, I highly recommend the Devil’s Tower KOA campground, featuring a “Nightly showing of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (weather permitting) at dusk.”

Let me repeat that: you can sit in your campground, watching Close Encounters, and then at the point in the movie where the Mothership appears over the Tower, you can turn your head and see the actual freakin’ Tower right there in front of you...and, in my case, a shooting star shot across the night sky right at that moment, triggering massive multiple nerd-gasms in bikers, hikers, stoners and cineastes alike.

KOA can’t promise a beautifully timed astronomical event every night, of course...but even without the extra special effects, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, is definitely a movie vacation worth taking.

In Other Blogs: Nazi Porn Edition

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

We consider ourselves worldly folks here at the Screengrab, with a wide array of interests and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture minutiae. But every once in a while, we’re reminded that there’s an inexhaustible supply of weirdness in the world. Perhaps my colleagues were already aware of “Stalags,” but I’d never heard of them before reading Beyond the Multiplex this morning. “As many older Israelis apparently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as 'Stalags,' whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.” Hey, good times! These Stalags are the subject of a new documentary by Ari Libsker, who “meets a couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that his face be obscured on camera (like a corporate whistleblower or a child molester on 60 Minutes), and also appears to believe that the scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least could have.”

Speaking of porn, Glenn Kenny is inspired by the release of Zombie Strippers to reminisce about his visit to the Adult Video News Awards, which he attended in his capacity as editor of a famed David Foster Wallace piece for Premiere magazine. “Cat with a C or K wanted to know whether it would be a good idea to go to acting school, as she thought that might be a useful place to make connections. She was stage and table dancing at the Cheetah, and wanted to step up, and was wondering about doing some loops, but not sure it would stigmatize her. I sympathized. But I advised her that going to acting school in order to make "connections" was kind of a fallacy. What you want to go to acting school for, I said, was to explore yourself and find your inner instrument...”

In a more wholesome corner of the blogosphere, Reverse Shot pays tribute to Teri Garr. “With her slightly askew beauty and her compelling but unorthodox mix of neuroses and earthy sexiness, Teri Garr was always destined for underappreciation. Usually relegated to small parts and cast more often as screechy second bananas than leading love interests, Garr nevertheless always manages to cast off tremendous light from whatever corner she's been put into, whether she's vacuously rolling in the hay (Young Frankenstein) or staving off the salacious come-ons of Martin Mull (Mr. Mom); and in more serious-minded supporting roles, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Michael Apted's unfairly forgotten Firstborn, she's played conflicted, angry wives and mothers without the slightest hint of trying to ingratiate herself to the audience.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson is still writing about Judd Apatow’s taste in leading men. “Apatow makes movies about guys -- and heterosexual relationships with women, but mainly about what used to be known as ‘male bonding.’ (The fashionable term now is ‘bro-mance,’ which is cuter and invoked largely by what used to be called ‘metrosexuals.’) The Apatow guy tends to be underemployed, white, slobby, geeky, smelly, childish (not just ‘childlike) and more or less happy, unaware that he's desperate for a woman to complete him. Then, once he becomes aware, he's not entirely sure that's possible, or desirable. This, I submit, is a minor breakthrough in romantic comedy. OK, perhaps I am single and bitter, but I'm also right.”

And finally, this week in List-o-Mania brings the Cinematical Seven: Films with Hilarious Nudity. We started this post with Nazi porn, and we end it with “the horrifically transfixing moment when a naked man turns his back to the audience, bends over, and serenades us with his butt” in Pink Flamingos. We just give and give and give.

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

YouTube? Rules.

I know: not exactly news. But I am nevertheless continually astonished by the lost treasures I stumble across there in the digital equivalent of that infinite warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark (and, apparently, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

Recently, I blogged about the amazing (to me, anyway) discovery of the lost Biggs scenes from Star Wars. And today, while searching for clips for an upcoming post, I suddenly stumbled across an audio-enhanced reworking of the penultimate scene from Lost In Translation, where Bill Murray whispers something mysterious and romantic in Scarlett Johansson’s ear, something that we the audience never got to hear...

...until now.

Now, as the wise YouTube poster vid22dotcom cautions, “If you REALLY don't want to KNOW. PLEASE SKIP THIS VIDEO.” If you think it’s more satisfying NOT knowing what BiMu says to ScarJo (in the same way it was 1000 times more satisfying NOT knowing that the interior of the Mothership in Close Encounters just looked like a bunch of cheesy “Special Edition” effects), then DON'T click on the video clip below.

But you know you wanna click it, right?

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: Margot at the Wedding, Southland Tales, Beowulf, Redacted, The Life of Reilly, Bob Balaban, Close Encounters DVD

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Margot at the Wedding: "Somehow plays more like curdled Rohmer than straight Bergman, thanks to Baumbach's precise wit and penchant for droll exaggeration."

Southland Tales: "A great high-concept movie can be summed up in a single sentence, and Southland Tales is too confused to be summed up in two hours and twenty minutes."

Beowulf: "The real star of Beowulf is the technology on display."

Redacted: "It's a formally ambitious approach to a dramatically powerful subject, which makes it all the more disappointing that nothing involving the characters seems even remotely believable."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition: "Close Encounters foreshadows the movies Spielberg would make in the coming years. It's showy. . . it's far from intellectually challenging, and it's as sentimental as a high-school yearbook."

Q&A: Bob Balaban: "I directed My Boyfriend's Back, in which a teenage boy becomes a zombie and eats some of his classmates, and Parents, in which Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt cannibalize people for meat. I don't know as I'd really call it a theme, though."