Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[JWBear]

Originally Posted by CoasterMatt

Sounds like an endorsement to me

It sounds more like a seizure to me.

[Snowflake]

I saw the film on first release, once and maybe twice. I remember the mashed potato carving scene and I remember laughing. But, that's about it. I'm sure if I saw the film again today, I'd think I saw the same film.

[innerSpaceman]

That's what the Spielberg and/or the Studio are banking on: that no one really remembers the details of the film, despite it being a huge hit in 1977. The problem with lying about a 30th Anniversary restoration release is that SOME PEOPLE ARE STILL ALIVE 30 years later.

They should have waited till the 75th Anniversary when everyone who saw the original film would be dead.


The mashed potato scene still gets a laugh, but I don't know why. Yeah, it's silly. And people who saw the film in '77, like Snowflake, remember they laughed at that part ... and still laugh today. But it was a joke with an elaborate set-up. And the set-up is no longer in the film.


Ok, I've watched the new DVD .... more in a bit. (Hahahah, put me on Ignore for a day or two if you don't want to read more about Close Encounters than you ever cared to know!)

[Gemini Cricket]

I get so confused by this film. I feel like I've seen many versions of it now. I don't know what's what. I remember a version that ends with the interior of the big mother ship. I remember a version where Dreyfuss is throwing junk through the windows of his house as his family flees...
Confusion.

[Snowflake]

Originally Posted by Gemini Cricket

I get so confused by this film. I feel like I've seen many versions of it now. I don't know what's what. I remember a version that ends with the interior of the big mother ship. I remember a version where Dreyfuss is throwing junk through the windows of his house as his family flees...
Confusion.

Okay, I've not seen the inside of the mother ship (that was aded later, right?)

I do remember him throwing junk out the windows to make room for the Devil's Tower sculpture out of dirt from the garden (when he was ripping out trees and such) Teri Garr was not too sympathetic!

[innerSpaceman]

Well, the long-awaited and too-expensive DVD set of Three Kinds of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is extremely disappointing in its false advertising of containing the original 1977 theatrical release. It most certainly does not.

What it does contain is the closest restoration yet released, but only by the most incremental of measures. In the early 1990's, the reputable Criterion Company released, on laserdisc, a purported restoration of the original theatrical release that was nonetheless missing several scenes ... and that version, more or less, was the one broadcast by television stations across the country until 1998, when a "Director’s Cut" of Spielberg’s 20-year’s-later preference for the film was released on home video. Since then, TV stations have been running either version.

The only "improvement" of the new DVD release purporting to be the "original" version is the inclusion in the film of two so-called "trim" sections previously available only as disc "extras" on the Criterion Collection laserdisc. These trim sections, lasting less than 10 seconds in total, correspond with two segments of footage excised for the 1980 "Special Edition" release, but are not necessarily the actual footage excised.

The two shots are 1) Roy Neary driving his truck through a tunnel, just after his first close encounter at the stop sign intersection; and 2) Roy, Gillian and Larry (from L.A.) pushing past Hazmat personnel to break out of the army helicopter that’s set to fly them away from the Decontamination Camp at the base of Devil’s Tower.

These snippets of film do indeed match up with tiny segments that were cut from the original release version. But there’s reason to believe they are not the cut footage, or at least not all of it. It’s telling that Criterion chose not to insert the footage into its restoration attempt (at Spielberg’s specific request, if the laserdisc’s printed materials are to be believed), while - at the same time - they inserted two other tiny snippets also cut from the ‘77 version (the line "They can run rings around the Moon, but we’re years ahead of ‘em on the highway" and the extension of the Days of Our Lives opening, "This is MacDonald Carey, and these are the Days of Our Lives.")

Further, the "trims" do not make sense. The first one of the tunnel is certainly part of the missing footage. But the "restored" scene now cuts directly from Roy driving away from the stop sign to a shot of him suddenly inside a tunnel. I’m fairly sure there was some connecting shot, and though this piece was found on the cutting room floor as a "trim," Criterion notably did not include it in the film.

More jarring is the scene of Roy and Co. pushing past Hazmat Guards to escape from the helicopter, because there is no sign of pursuit in the next few shots ... which would have seemed bizarre in the original cut if they pushed guards to the ground and were not chased. In fact, the footage of Neary, Gillian and Larry running through the camp shows only puzzled onlookers among the personnel unloading Piggly Wiggly and Baskin Robins trucks, with an element of pursuit added post-production by an off-screen dubbed voice shouting, "Hey, wait a minute!" There is definitely some missing footage when Roy and Gillian escape from the helicopter, but I don’t believe this is it. Criterion notably did not include it in the film.


HOWEVER, I must look upon the new DVD’s inclusion of these two snippets as a legitimate attempt to get closer to the 1977 version. And that’s as far as they went.


Major and minor differences still remain, and it’s a pure and despicable LIE and fraud to claim this new release as the 1977 Original Version.

It’s closer than the disastrous "Special Edition" of 1980, closer than the vaguely-palatable "Director’s Cut" of 1998, and a teeny, tiny bit closer than the previous restoration attempts by Criterion and aired on various TV stations.

[innerSpaceman]

(continued)

But here’s what’s still different about Close Encounters of the Third Kind ...

1) Right after Roy Neary’s first close encounter, inside his truck at the stop sign, a new effects shot of a UFO shadow passing over Roy’s truck was inserted for the Special Edition. The new DVD uses "trim" footage of Roy’s truck driving through a tunnel as a restoration, but there is likely still a brief shot missing from this segment. Tiny difference.

2) The actor Roberts Blossom plays an unnamed old coot character who "saw Bigfoot once" and is mysteriously present and waiting with his hillbilly family when Roy and Gillian first see the UFOs whiz by on the highway, and are pursued by police cruisers. After the police zoom by, and before Neary says the line, "This is nuts!" ... Blossom’s character had a line, "They can fly rings around the Moon, but we’re years ahead of them on the highway." The restoration uses an alternate-take shot of this line, and inserts it in the wrong place. It uses a very long shot with a car headlight in the foreground and Blossoms way in the background. The original was a much closer, waist-up shot of Blossom. And of course, the line makes zero sense if it’s uttered before the police drive by in pursuit. Nice try, but this is still a minor difference from the original film.

3) The first scene of Roy and the mountain he’s built in the center of his miniature train setup is GONE. Missing Forever. Arrggh. It’s part of the really important progression of Roy’s descent into seeming lunacy and a vital element of Roy’s obsession with the "shape" that was a central theme of the original movie. In this scene, we are introduced to the train set mountain and the "shrine" Roy’s assembled in his hobby room of newspaper clippings and Star Trek model spaceships. In the scene, Roy promises Ronnie he’ll give up the crazy obsession if there’s no positive result at the Air Force News Conference (the following scene). I remember the Enterprise and Klingon ship models got a laugh from the audience, and a prominently displayed magazine cover of projected NASA ships of the post-Moon-landing future is also one I cut out of that magazine as a kid. (It’s still visible in the far background of the existing versions of the film when we now first see the clippings and Star Trek models much later). Big, substantive difference. Entire Missing Scene.

4) There is still some missing footage from the start of the following Air Force News Conference scene as Roy and Ronnie are waiting in the reception area - before Gillian arrives in the scene, hounded by reporters about her missing son, Barry. Obviously lost when the prior scene was cut. Sloppy, but a small difference.

5) The second scene of Roy and his miniature mountain is one of the most important scenes in the entire movie and it’s MISSING and assumed LOST FOREVER. In it, Roy is seen getting more intuitive about transforming the mountain into the "shape" he’s had implanted in his mind. Just after the scene where the audience learns about a butte-shaped feature called "Devil’s Tower," Roy for the first time starts carving grooves and ridges into his mountain sculpture. This was a particularly suspenseful scene for the audience because, even though most people were not familiar with Devil’s Tower before it was popularized by this very film in the late ‘70's, the audience had just figured out all Neary had to do was lop the top off his mountain. He was getting warmer and warmer as he carved ridges and was just about to have the all-important epiphany ... when he’s called away to dinner. On the menu: Mashed Potatoes.

Since 1980, all versions of the film would have you believe that Roy Neary has never sculpted the "shape" until he starts doing so with a fork in a pile of mushy spuds. The action of obsessed mashed potato carving is still funny as a silly thing to do. But there is no set up for this big joke. The audience never sees Roy carving his mountain. Worse and stupider ... we never see Roy losing his marbles. He’s just suddenly insane.

In all modern versions of the film, we last see Roy on the mountain road waiting for the UFOs to return. Military helicopters show up instead. Roy is just beginning to notice the "shape." Here, he sees it in a pile of dirt being molded the little kid, Barry. Earlier in the day he saw it in a blob of shaving cream and (in some versions) an upturned pillow. After an interlude about LaCombe in India and Barry being abducted by aliens, we next see Roy at the Air Force News Conference and then sitting down for Mashed Potato dinner. There’s no indication that his obsession with the "shape" has progressed into his own sculpture attempts, or that his UFO obsession has progressed into shrine-making. (The element of him building an observation platform on his roof was cut from all versions of the film, but you can still see it when Ronnie leaves home with the kids a little bit later in the movie.)

One minute, Roy’s a mildly curious man ... and the next he’s a completely bonkers mashed potato masher. His growing obsession with The Shape and losing his grip on day-to-day realities, while a central element of the original movie, is now eviscerated in all remaining versions of this iconic film. In fact - until the film breaks out into action mode and UFO encounterism in its final act, this is what the movie was ABOUT. And yet, all semblance of it is gone - - even in the so-called "Director’s Cut" - which leads me to sadly assume the footage has been irretrievably lost.

In the very next scene after the mashed potatoes incident, where we NOW see the model train mountain FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, the effect is jarring. It’s palpably obvious to almost everyone who saw the original film that - wait a minute - that mountain’s "been there" since long before "now." (Less obvious, but still within the realm of recollection, is that the Star Trek models and newspaper clippings "first" seen in an even later segment have also "been there before.").

BAH on this. Very important Missing Scene. The two missing scenes represent a BIG DEPARTURE from the original movie, and frankly ... Roy Neary’s character arc just does not make sense without them.

Though they may be legitimately (if negligently) lost ... it is purely fraudulent to label any version that doesn’t include them as the 1977 Original Theatrical Release.


.

[innerSpaceman]

(Third and Final Part)

6) Later, when Roy is tearing down all the news clippings and Star Trek models, there’s an insert shot of the Pinocchio musical figurine and strains of its music-box rendition of "When You Wish Upon a Star" on the soundtrack that were not in the original film. It was sheer laziness to not restore this to the original version. A small but irksome difference.

7) There is some missing footage when Roy, Gillian and Larry escape from the military helicopter. The "trim" footage added back-in on this new DVD release is almost certainly not the footage removed from the original cut back in 1980. A small difference made bothersome by the clumsy effort to restore it.

8) Just before we see that Roy Neary has been suited-up in red astronaut garb, joining the end of the queue of hopeful Mothership passengers ... a new series of shots featuring an astronaut "prayer meeting" were inserted in the 1980 Special Edition, and have never been removed. As the musical score does not appear to have been altered, there must be a significant amount of missing footage at this vital part of the film ... which now practically "gives away" the Roy Neary ending a few seconds too early.

This segment is 17 seconds long! That’s a lot of missing footage. In the original version, the astronauts were kept way more in the background ... so that Roy leaving on the Mothership might be a surprise. We never see them in their astronaut uniforms until a second or two before we saw Roy as a new member of that group ... and thus we didn’t really know they’re astronauts at all when we saw them in the background of a couple other scenes. This 17 second gap at the movie’s finale is a Big Difference.

9) Though the really lame and stupid Inside the Mothership scene has been edited out of both the Directors’ Cut and all restoration attempts, the original music editing has been lost and all re-mix attempts have been surprisingly poor. The new DVD has the best re-mix yet, but it’s not the original mix. A very minor difference.

10) Finally, the effects shots behind the end credits were switched around for the 1980 Special Edition, and have never been restored to their original 1977 order. In the original, the first credits (Speilberg’s and others) were displayed over close-up shots of Mothership detail, and the progression was from a series of close-ups to full-shots of the gargantuan spaceseship, to a far away view of the UFO, and then a blank starfield.
The revised credits start with the full-shots of the ship, then progress to the series of close-ups, and only then to the far shot and the starfield.

As one who claimed the biggest problem with the also-1977-maimed Star Wars opening crawl was that it no longer properly matched the brilliant John Williams music that was scored to match it, I certainly contend the same holds true for the Close Encounters ending. Williams scored the film to match the visuals ... and when the visuals changed, the score no longer had as eloquent an effect. This is a pretty big difference in my book - - and failure to restore it was just plain laziness and inexcusable error.


Yes, the Directors Cut and now this new DVD restore many of the elements of the 1977 original from the ill-conceived Special Edition. But it’s NOT the 1977 original and it’s just another corporate LIE to claim it is.

The picture quality is remarkably restored in some sections of the film and curiously poor in others. An uneven attempt at visual quality.

All-in-all, I cannot recommend this set ... unless, well, you want to get a fairly reasonable semblance of the 1977 original version of Close Encounters on DVD. It’s a shame to have to pay for the absolutely retarded Special Edition and previously-available Director’s Cut just to get this falsely billed facsimile of the original version.

But - sigh - this is the version I will be watching from now on. And I’ll be cringing at times. In fact, there are parts that are so uncomfortable to me that I may end up continuing to avoid one of my favorite moves of all time.

There’s a scene where Roy runs outside in frustration and shouts to the night skies, "What Is It?!?!" - and then he goes back inside and maniacally starts throwing globs of clay and carving deep gashes in his mini-mountain, all the while fuming, "That’s not right, that’s not right" as the music swells. It gets to me in a very unpleasant way. Because this movie has been so negligently tampered with, with important scenes seemingly lost to time as if it were the most unimportant of films, I have become obsessed with it in a way that vaguely mirrors Roy Neary’s obsession at that moment in the movie. And when he manhandles the mountain that’s been mostly cut out of the movie, shouting, "That’s not right" - that’s exactly what I’m shouting inside my head.

Watching Close Encounters is a bittersweet experience for me. Buy the DVD if you want As-Close-As-You-Can-Get. But be aware it’s all a Big Fat Lie.






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[flippyshark]

*sigh*
That's what I was afraid of. I'll still get it, because the most recent edition I have is the collector's edition laserdisc. (I also have that old unlamented Criterion laser.) I only saw that first release twice, and I was 12 at the time, so the differences won't be so apparant to me. I'll just be happy that it isn't the craptacular "special" edition.

Thanks for the very detailed rundown. I hope this release won't be the last word on the subject.

[Snowflake]

Wow, GC was right, you do know way more than anyone I've ever met!

Is it worth a rental, though?