Film
ELLIOT: He's a man from outer space and we're taking him to his spaceship.
GREG: Well, can't he just beam up?
ELLIOT: This is REALITY, Greg.
Twenty years since Spielberg's seminal work of family cinema was first released, one still struggles to find a more positively engaging reality than the lens through which ET is told. It is truly a child's mind; Elliot draws us into the confusion and innocence of his world, a universe bounded by the adult realities of authority figures and the difficulties of his parents' divorce. Despite the sometimes awkward fit of childhood innocence and experience into this rather adult mould, Spielberg makes the script travel great distances to marry the two mindsets between which the film balances. It is an exciting and unavoidably absorbing journey, backed by the majestic crescendos of Williams' score and some adept cinematography.
At times sentimental, at others laced with subtle humour, ET is always iconic. So much of the so-called children's cinema that has dominated the last few years was born, conceptually speaking, with the release of ET. Thankfully, this remastered version retains, and makes more vibrant, the lynchpins of the original's success. Spielberg has changed little, re-inserting only a few minutes that had originally been left on the cutting room floor. Drew Barrymore is unmistakable as Gertie, while Henry Thomas' gifted portrayal of Elliot still resonates with all the anxiety and sensitivity that is the film's lifeblood.
It is a testament to its sheer brilliance that so much of the last two decades of cinema derived their inspiration from a film intended as children's entertainment. Spielberg's subsequent attempts to straddle several genres have since been criticised as reducing the industry to juvenilia, but unquestionably these 115 minutes of film are the watermark against which his later work would be measured.
Like so many of its child stars - Erika Eleniak, Henry Thomas and Peter Coyote - ET has faded in the memory. Thankfully this re-issue has restored one of the great films of the 1980s back to its rightful podium.
"Almost every important British band of the late '70s started out by going to a Sex Pistols gig" - this smug phrase, pulled out by rock critics and writers to explain how a band or artist which seemed risible or unimportant in its day came to become canonical, is now something of a cliché.
24 Hour Party People takes this piece of rock mythology as its natural starting point, dating the Mad-chester of 1992 to the day in 1976 when the Pistols played the Lessing Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in front of an audience of 30 which included what would become Joy Division, The Fall and, umm, Mick Hucknall. Organising the concert was Howard Devoto, who enjoys a cameo as a toilet cleaner in Winterbottom's film - this is a perfect irony, given that Tony Wilson (Coogan), local impresario, scene-maker and ostensible star of this movie, was also present at the gig. Going on to make Manchester the centre of the British music scene, Wilson's fingers were deep in pies like Factory Records, The Haçienda Club, Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays; few events of significance in Manchester's music scene are very far from his influence.
The depiction of the bands is indeed the area in which the movie is obviously in danger of overreaching itself. You don't want to see a comic-book mock-up called something like the Sexx Revolvers pretending to be mean - the Pistols were all acting their parts out anyway - but also it's vital that the very real tragedy of Joy Division, with the suicide of Curtis, is handled properly. In fact, the Ian Curtis scenes are amongst the most moving and gripping in the whole film, and I doubt the suicide and its fallout could have been approached more effectively than they are.
Although 24 Hour Party People is 'about' the Manchester scene, it's also about Tony Wilson - he isn't employed merely as a narrative device, to provide continuity to a very disparate 'scene.' The man is sold by Coogan as a grotesque proto-Partridge, a Hercules of amateurism with just enough peculiar talent to rise above the failure in his bones. Throughout his career as promoter, manager and impresario, he was also a reporter for Granada, well known for blundering interviews and Stapleton-esque broadcasts on duckponds. Everything he creates is doomed, it seems, but Wilson is a force of nature and his defeats - the closure of the Haçienda, the folding of Factory, and the suicide of Curtis - betray a lack of control which makes him more, not less, compelling. Coogan does a fine job of portraying Wilson's Partridge-like weaknesses, whilst the film as a whole delivers as memorable a vision of its subject matter as is ever likely to be made.
Jeff Bridges plays psychiatrist to Kevin Spacey's patient who thinks he's an alien from the planet K-Pax. Is he really from outer space or just out to lunch? You decide, in this baffling sci-fi mystery.
Absolute power corrupts in this tense and brutal thriller based on the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.
Wesley Snipes kicks vampire ass again, while Luke Goss frightens off any debtors still hanging around from his Bros years with a gruesome turn as Blade's evil nemesis.
25th Apr 2002