SUMMER ENCOUNTERS
O'Brien, Tom
Screen SUMMER ENCOUNTERS FROM HERE TO ETERNITY To review all adventure movie releases this summer, a critic would need the energy of Indiana Jones, the ruthlessness of Conan the Barbarian, the...
...The Amazon is still Nature, with a capita) letter: it is one of the last places on earth where biology reigns supreme, a huge rain forest that supplies 30 percent of the world's oxygen...
...Only forty minutes long, there are too many scenes of mission control in Florida or Houston...
...At least Howard looks at the subject, and perhaps clears the way for more realistic treatment by another...
...Like his master, Zameckis is too loving of American detail not to slurp the soda to the last drop...
...The second is (believe it or not) a Blue Lagoon-type love story: the son becomes enamored of an Indian girl (here played by a Belem high school student one generation removed from the jungle...
...For his own growth as a director, perhaps he should take his interest in water toward less escapist ends, like a film on saving the whales...
...Fortunately, he also filmed its underside, and there reveals its tangled, twisted, garish beauty...
...It was the biggest visual roller coaster ever invented...
...But here it's earth (or at least sea...
...Indeed, the film, shot by the astronauts, proves Kubrick a prophet and Jackson Pollock a realist...
...It relies overly on some trashy "nerd" jokes, humor which is annoyingly predictable and heavy-handed.-Worse, the initial eighties' segment is developed at a gruesomely slow pace, a characteristic problem with all Spielbergian films set in America (as opposed, for example, to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...
...At times the beauty of The Dream Is Alive is disorienting, but in a different way from To Fly...
...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 440...
...Unfortunately, Marty also meets his Mom (Lea Thompson), a nubile seventeen, who "gets the hots" for him...
...The Emerald Forest does not dwell on the politics of development — the Brazilian side of the story, so to speak — but focuses instead on what the engineer and his son learn from primitives, thus echoing early seventies' films such as Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse...
...The film was extremely difficult to make...
...Howard's synaesthetic blend of water, light, magic, and love has been termed "lyrical humanism...
...The eighty-pound IMAX camera, although weightless in space, was bulky, and the cameramen (and women) amateurs...
...BACfC TO the future saves from a fate worse than boredom: a summer without a Spielberg movie...
...The emerald forest ranks as the best serious adventure film in some time: despite Greystoke and The Bounty...
...his real outer space is underwater, and in Cocoon as in Splash he uses symbolism and striking photography to suggest rebirth and renewal...
...With a giant screen, and with startlingly clear cinematic images, the effect of To Fly was to provide the viewer with the actual feel of rapid movement through air, as if one were seated on the nose of a plane...
...The excellent use of dolphins in Cocoon holds that promise...
...Perhaps, like Ballard, he will eventually learn to use its silence to temper the excess noise in his storytelling and to purify his protest into poetry...
...Back to the Future contains several defects, the most subtle being an unintentional racist suggestion about where fifties' blacks got their progressive ideas...
...some wags have even called it Close Encounters on Golden Pond...
...The film concerns the Amazon, and specifically the troubles of an American engineer (Powers Boothe), who directs the construction of one of the world's largest dams but whose young son is kidnapped by jungle Indians and kept in captivity for a decade...
...who, incidentally, has returned here from home...
...The plot goes wacko shortly after when Marty meets his nerdy father, whom he addresses as "Dad," amending it in mid-phrase to "Daddio...
...motif...
...As Marty's mother complains when he warns about smoking, "Really, you're beginning to sound like my mother...
...Fortunately, the weak opening is worth waiting out...
...We experience not dizziness, but surprise and shock when the top of a frame is a brilliant sapphire blue and seems to represent sky...
...Boorman scatters some vista shots throughout the film — boring views of greenback hump after greenback hump — to suggest the vastness of the place...
...A better term might be secular baptism...
...Cocoon's plot involves a group of extraterrestrials (here, as in last winter's Starman, in human shape) and their offer of a fountain of youth to a set of beautiful geezers...
...The Dream Is Alive is the new entry of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum at local museums around the country (such as the Museum of Natural History in New York...
...The movie expresses America's difficulty in coming to terms with aging — or, more precisely, aging prolonged far longer by medicine than nature may have intended...
...Unfortunately, The Dream Is Alive has defects...
...But all Cocoon can do is fantasize sweet escape...
...Howard started as Opie in Andy Griffith, and seems to have retained some elements of his native Southern culture...
...Some views of the Po and Nile valleys, in particular, are breathtaking...
...Despite these drawbacks, and however one feels about the military uses of space, the film itself is literally spectacular...
...It replaces To Fly, the early large-screen film produced by Canadian Graeme Ferguson for what is called the IMAX projection method...
...Here the fantasy involves no extraterrestrial spaceship, but a time machine that accidentally lands a 1980s teenager named Marty (Michael J. Fox) back in the fifties where he affects his parents' lives in comically Oedipal ways...
...Tackling the subject of age is brave, and some of Howard's scenes of heart attacks and death are touching...
...In the film's best scene, when the son must ritualisti-cally steal her away from her father's hut, he drags her out but can't bring himself to clobber her unconscious (as she expects) with a cartoon-like stone-age club...
...For Howard the key is the pond...
...The initial, seemingly trivial references eventually recombine in the plot climax...
...Annoyed at his vestigial chivalry, she stomps her feet and seethes under her breath, "Doit right...
...Its rapid technological development has alarmed many environmentalists and anthropologists — the latter because paving the Amazon means uprooting most of the hunter-gatherers still functioning in freedom...
...Ferguson's The Dream Is Alive might have been better titled To Float...
...There is a typically wise, gentle Indian leader who comments with stone-age sagesse about how he rules: "If I told a man to do something he did not want to do, I would no longer be chief...
...The story bravely tries to link old age and the "E.T...
...The film is directed by John Boorman (of Deliverance and Excalibur), who again uses lush but savage natural scenery as apt background for provocative melodrama and his obsession with humanity's attempt to conquer nature...
...Screen SUMMER ENCOUNTERS FROM HERE TO ETERNITY To review all adventure movie releases this summer, a critic would need the energy of Indiana Jones, the ruthlessness of Conan the Barbarian, the sagacity of Obi-Wan-Kenobe, and the technical know-how of E.T...
...Seen in the film's prelude as fat and dowdy in later years, Marty's mother and her sexual aggressiveness become the source of the film's high camp Freudian comedy...
...Despite these echoes, a sprawling plot structure, and lame passages, The Emerald Forest contains enough surprises to sustain interest...
...The sun comes down in the film, not up...
...The film manipulates the standard Spielbergian setting, the small town of Hill Valley, California, where Marty discovers, in place of an eighties aerobics center, an old luncheonette where he starts the time-travel jokes by asking, with comical results, for "Pepsi Free" and then a "Tab...
...The Dream Is Alive resembles 2007 in its view of space's static beauty, and resembles action painting with its images of earthen landmasses as long swaths of hidden geologic tensions...
...For all its faults, Back to the Future is this summer's best family film, in all senses of the term...
...The most impressive aspect of The Emerald Forest is the forest itself...
...Back to the Future registers amusement at human inconsistency — and the amazement of simply discovering that one's parents had sex lives...
...The comedy brings together, rather than divides generations...
...the dark foreground isn't land, but the opacity of space...
...Back to the Future constitutes the best, sweetest revision of the 1950s to date: here you can sip the spirit of the American past straight through the straw of its ice cream sodas...
...The elderly are played by such veterans as Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, Maureeni Stapleton and Don Ameche (who is rejuvenated enough to do a suave breakdance), and principally Wilford Brimley, that icon of beer-bellied American authenticity who confronts in full the possibility the E.T.s raise: escape from infirmity to a kind of eternal life...
...THE BEST SCIENCE movie this summer involves not fiction, but fact...
...The first involves the father and son: when they are reunited, things don't evolve as one might expect...
...As he says to his grandson (in every film, Brimley seems to have one, attached like a limb), "They don't have youngsters where I'm going, and baseball games and hot dogs, and I guess I'm gonna miss them...
...Finally, filming in space often had to be halted at critical moments (one featured rescue of a failing satellite lacks climactic power because the astronauts had too much to do...
...It manages to make one long for the banal simplicities of that era and even grieve over the passage of time...
...The comedy 9 August 1985: 439 is gentle, however, rather than charging modern adults with hypocrisy...
...Director Zameckis (formerly of Romancing the Stone) seems to need plenty of room to map out his terrain, but risks losing a viewer after about twenty minutes...
...In Cocoon, director Ron Howard manages less surprise than in his Splash, but still fuses his fascination with water and a snappy, inferential mode of telling a story to produce a successful adventure comedy...
...It documents flight aboard the Space Shuttle, providing gem-like views of earth from outer space that far outdo in visual spectacle any still photograph...
...But Cocoon's magic solution to these issues doesn't seem potent, even as fantasy...
...Possessing only some of these, I here focus on the best of the out-of-this-world, weirdo-wacko material now on view — the movies that care enough to combine theme and action and enrich their magic with some substance...
...Like Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf), Boorman has an intuitive sense of nature as one of the world's great battlefields...
...Although directed by Robert Zameckis, the film bears Spielberg's imprimatur as executive producer and embodies his by now characteristic blend of fantasy, realism, and Americana...
Vol. 112 • August 1985 • No. 14
