kartooner

I’ve always been intrigued by the fan­tas­tic. More specif­i­cally, movies that explore ideas out­side of the box (such as ET and Con­tact) and allow me as the viewer to also think out­side the box. With the mediocre scripts that have been cir­cu­lat­ing Hol­ly­wood cou­pled with sub-par act­ing it’s no won­der the pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies are hurt­ing. The mate­r­ial isn’t alive. It doesn’t shout cre­ativ­ity or imag­i­na­tion. Why? The stu­dios are bank­ing the suc­cess of a movie based on big name celebri­ties, hop­ing they will in fact draw in the crowds rather than focus on writ­ing with sub­stance and pro­duc­tion qual­ity material.

E.T. at the time fea­tured a cast of mod­er­ately ‘unknowns’ — aside from Peter Coy­ote and Dee Wallace-Stone — includ­ing younger cast mem­bers Henry Thomas, Drew Bar­ry­more and Robert Mac­Naughton. Henry Thomas’ per­for­mance was notably excel­lent because he emoted fear and sad­ness suc­cess­fully onscreen, all in front of a mechan­i­cal puppet.

I love E.T. and it will remain my all-time favorite film out of every movie I’ve seen in my life­time. It’s as sim­ple as that with­out com­pli­cat­ing things. The movie is a con­stant reminder of the spe­cial attrib­utes of friend­ship. Look­ing past the fact that it was a movie about an alien and his first-hand encoun­ters on Earth you start to peel away at the lay­ers and find some­thing spe­cial, almost inde­scrib­able and more impor­tantly, heartwarming.

To this day I still see it as one of the pin­na­cle movies of the early 1980s.