In praise of "E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial," released 25 years ago on June 11, 1982

i was 4 when i saw it. my older brother wrote me a letter and signed it E.T. and i was entirely convinced he was coming to visit me. i had E.T. slides for my viewmaster, and they gave me this recurring nightmare: kinda like a frieze-frame, compiled from my distorted memory of the movie - i'm in a room which has a big window along one wall, with blinds and bright light shining through. there's a family kinda standing in one corner, looking horrified, and there's an arm poking through the blinds with what looks like a plaster cast incasing it. all elements from the movie itself. 23 years later and i still vividly recall that nightmare, and how utterly terrified it made me.

i was 4 when i saw it. my older brother wrote me a letter and signed it E.T. and i was entirely convinced he was coming to visit me.

awwwww!

...and then he took great pleasure in telling me it was all a lie, and that E.T. wasn't real and would never be coming to visit. my brother was (and still is) a cunt bastard.

hahahaha that's like when my mom stepped out one afternoon to go to the store and my sister (about 5 or 6 at the time), not realizing she'd left, came out of her room asking where mommy was. i told her in a somber tone, "Mommy got flushed down the toilet and she's never coming back." and of course my sister started crying uncontrollably until my mom came home and chewed me out for being such a jerk. ah, to be a big brother...

you mean little shit! ;)
i bet you gave her the stinkfinger, too. that was one of my bro's favourites.

no, i mean seen it as a kid initially to enjoy it

You could have something there, but I'm thinking in terms of the ILX worship of the likes of The Goonies or Ferris Bueller.

it was screened on one of the last days of junior high school in our biology class.

Hahaha, did you liberate the frogs and kiss a girl like John Wayne?

I need pictures of Morbs crying.

If I sign a new lease for my apartment in Toddlerland Brooklyn, I'll ask for a camera.

Good thread. Last time I watched it was as though I was seeing an entirely different movie than I remembered, as though every last inch of childhood blockbuster hype had been wiped clear and left an oddly humble little movie.

One of Matthew Wilder's better reviews:

http://citypages.com/databank/23/1112/article10264.asp

E.T. is good, but Pauline Kael was un-OTM about thinking it was so clearly superior to Poltergeist.
-- Eric H., Monday, June 11, 2007 11:33 PM (7 months ago)

(Oh, and the last time I watched Poltergeist was kind of a disappointment.)

we WILL turn you...

this is the one film i still can't watch without crying my eyes out.

Turn me into a Poltergeist dissenter? Heavy nostalgia and the performance of JoBeth Williams will prevent that from ever happening.

I rescreened it last year

Just rescreened E.T. a couple of hours ago

I re-screened it last year!

i love this movie

fuck "special Oscars" -- Henry Thomas deserved the real thing; he's certainly more impressive than the other nominated performances.

Eliott over Gandhi any day.

never mind -- I forgot that this was The Year of the Tootsie.

this movie is hella crepey

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jWNhyMUpjSE/SZSmXf3z6dI/AAAAAAAACtM/x3NMpxhrzTg/s1600-h/et.jpg

http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/8146/45577901tk4.jpg

i stll fancy the mum, even more now she's (film age) younger than me.

xp, i'll be right up here etc...

Towards the end of ET, barely able to support my own grief and bewdilderment, i turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, i felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; i felt as though i had lived out a year-long love affair - complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration - in the space of 120 minutes.
_
Martin Amis, The Observer, November 21st 1982.

Referring to people as "black" in the USA

I think the "dude" part of that is more questionable.

Can't believe they left the 2002 edition's chucking-loo-roll-about Halloween scene out of the original.

Rewatching it now on TV: haven't seen it for maybe 20 years? I remember seeing it Brighton with a friend -- who went on to be a minor Hollywood director swank swank (lass swank if i told you what his movies were, but I shall not betray him here) -- in a theatre full of kids. British kids, so noisily cheerful, not weeping or anything. Don't remember my own response in depth -- didn't hate it; thought it was fun; didn't have any "cineaste" type responses in any direction. I was in my mid-20s, and it must have been out for some years -- so maybe I'd already seen it? (If so I totally don't recall.)

The family stuff is of course terrific, kids and mom; E.T. himself is maybe a teeny bit under-imagined in terms of being an actual alien (as opposed to a human-directed/human-compatible being). I'd forgotten what a racket he makes.

interesting reading morbs' opening post on this thread; the movie had always carried a lot of meaning for me in terms of family and this sense of warmth, but i wasn't sure if it was viewed that way at large.

I definitely remember that being discussed at the time, as something really unusual -- just the fact that this was a one-parent family, and the weave of warmth and hurt, and the well-observed details, like the nature of the swearing (when the mom can't help laughing when Elliot says "penis-breath!" even though she's trying to tell him off); also Elliot's knowledgeable investment in Star Wars figurines -- this was actually an element my later-to-be-Hollywood ex-friend was totally knocked out by; he seemed to think it was completely groundbreaking. (Which it may be: it's become a bit of a nuisance, since -- hommage and knowing pop-culture references and etc -- and my ex-friend's one of the people who made it a nuisance, possibly, but at the time it provided a new layer of realism which was really interesting; ordinary people in films as cultural beings, or something).

when the mom can't help laughing when Elliot says "penis-breath!" even though she's trying to tell him off

Such a great moment.

wow, i'd totally forgotten that mind-meld moment where elliot acts out the scene that ET is watching on TV at that very moment

E.T. is one of those movies that was ubiquitous when I was a kid and I've seen at least half a dozen times and can't remember a single goddamn thing about it. Another movie that shares this same trait for me is "Goonies."

Both I've even seen as an adult a couple times and it just falls out of my head right after.

i still remember Elliott calling his old brother "penis breath"

I remember Elliot holding the thermometer up to a desk lamp.

Which should've made his temperature, what, 185 degrees?

hahahahahaha yea i forgot about that part

I had the videogame. Actually a friend had it and brought it over to show me, and ended up leaving it and not really wanting it back. I don't think i played it more than once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmrQkQsM9FU

The Raiders game was pretty much the same thing. SUCK SUCK SUCK

I had it too. Beat it a few times, but only on the easy level. the FBI/CIA agents used to scare me.

if you want a copy there's a landfill with a million copies somewhere

RIP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

KEEP THEM AWAY FROM WALTER WHITE

It's in Alamogordo, NM, but they're covered in concrete iirc

i didn't get why E.T. stretching his neck allowed him to float out of wells.

like it wasn't something that the movie exactly...ehm...focused on

Also I'd misremembered it as much more brightly lit and primary colours than it actually is -- more like Star Wars in tone and hue (most be the John Williams effect) (and the trick-or-treat scene). The lighting's actually really sparse a lot of the time, and the colour's all muted browns and greys. Williams is the weak link for me, I know too much of the sources he constantly raids (Janacek!) not to get irritable when he amps it up.

If you don't feel a bit emotional when the music kicks in during the bike flying scene i dunno what's wrong with you

Yeah, I would've definitely given the Oscar to Goldsmith that year.

"Can't he just b-beam up?"
"This is reality, Greg!"

one neat little dramatic reversal from earlier -- when the house is suddenly menaced from outside, a house that has comfily housed an actual-real alien for days, the intruding "monster" is... a human in a moon-landing-style spacesuit

Suggested E.T. to a friend for their Friday family film night, but it go nixed because it makes his wife cry. So instead I sneakily recommend The Iron Giant, which is not only also great but which is also basically E.T. Family loved it, wife left halfway because "she knew where this was heading."