Close Encounters and a Clown ~ I'm Loving IT!

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time! I'm not sure why I hadn't watched it yet, but the reason I watched it now is because I won the Collector's Edition of the movie from TheGreatWhiteDope, whose blog can be found here:

http://thegreatwhitedope.blogspot.com/

The DVD set would have been a generous prize in itself, but that's not all I received!

I also received a book titled The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition. Prior to opening this book, I knew absolutely nothing about Penny Arcade. So that was something else new for me!

My third gift was an I'm Loving IT t-shirt from http://tshirtbordello.com

For anyone who doesn't recognize the clown as Pennywise from Stephen King's IT...

I've actually never seen Stephen King's IT, which is odd since I've seen a lot of King's movies. I probably should watch IT, if I'm going to be wearing this t-shirt around. I did look up a few YouTube clips from the movie, but I couldn't get over Tim Curry being under all that clown makeup! Recognizing him was just making me laugh. You have to give Tim Curry credit for trying the many different looks we've seen him in!

Here I am modeling the shirt. I ended up with several similar photos, so I put them together to make my first gif!

While I was taking the photos above, I saw a runaway dog zip past the window. I ran outside to see if I could catch it and ran into a neighbor. She was asking me if I caught the dog, even though I was standing there alone. She was also saying various weird things about how "that dog better get caught before he's a splat on the highway", when she got distracted by my shirt. She was kind of looking at my eyes and then down at the shirt. Eyes. Shirt. Eyes. Shirt. She finally just stared at the clown and went "Uhh". So it's getting attention already!

Back to Close Encounters. I'm going to give you a few of my thoughts on the movie. I'll try to leave any spoilers out, on the off chance that I wasn't the last person on earth to see this!

I really enjoyed Close Encounters. Two things that struck me were the optimistic attitude behind the movie, and the slower pace in which it moved. I'm not really complaining about the pace, it's just that I think I'm used to the fast paced, action packed style of more modern alien movies. In a way, Close Encounters showed me a lot of what I expected from a Steven Spielberg film. I say that because the movie was supernatural and magical, but at no point did I feel threatened or fearful of what might happen. Close Encounters was surprisingly nonviolent for a movie involving aliens landing on earth.

The earth in this movie is a planet filled with people who are curious about the aliens and would rather communicate with them than kill them. In fact, I don't remember seeing one gun through this entire movie. There might have been one, I just don't remember it. The closest we got to any aggression was one cynical army officer who plans to spray people who get in the way of his mission with something that will put them to sleep for six hours. Even he is not remotely mean spirited.

Like another supernatural Spielberg project Poltergeist, the plot of Close Encounters involves a family with several children. Unlike the children in Poltergeist, who I found sweet or funny in a sassy sort of way, the kids in Close Encounters are a loud, bratty bunch of little gremlins.  I kept wishing the aliens would appear and somehow beam them up, except I didn't wish them on the aliens. Anyway, these children belong to our main character, Roy and his wife, Ronnie. Without spilling too much of the plot, Roy has an encounter with a UFO and is completely fascinated by the experience. His wife and kids, not so much. Although, in Ronnie's defense, it would be hard to be thrilled with the whole experience while your husband is acting like a nut.

Meanwhile, across town, a woman named Jillian is having her own experiences with the aliens. Her experiences are more scary than Roy's, as her son is abducted. You'll notice that the aliens chose to abduct the sweet, quiet child, and not the brats mentioned before. Here you'll see Jillian and her son Barry during the spooky abduction scene. 

I found Jillian to be really likeable. I kept thinking what a nice person she was, without realizing where I've seen her before! I didn't recognize her as Melinda Dillon, the woman who played another nice mom in one of my favorite movies: A Christmas Story.

Both Roy and Jillian start to see the same visions after their encounters with the aliens. This leads them together on an adventure to learn more and retrieve Jillian's son. I'll stop there and not reveal any more about the characters, in case some of you haven't seen this movie.  I do want to mention the alien's spacecraft, though. It was really beautiful. It was covered in blinking lights and made little musical noises which were a means of communication. The music reminded me a lot of that old game, Simon. Do you guys remember that game? You had to hit these big colored buttons to mimic the noise the machine just made. 

The game even kind of looked like a spaceship! 

I wanted to show you the Close Encounters spaceship in action, so you can see what I mean about the musical noise communication:

This DVD set included a disc full of extras. There was a making-of documentary that was really lengthy and full of interviews and trivia. A highlight of that for me was seeing the little boy, Barry as an adult. He had a lot of cute stories from his days as a four year old, working on this movie. 

Thank you TheGreatWhiteDope for this generous prize pack! I really enjoyed finally seeing this movie and weirding out my neighbor with my new t-shirt. This is a generous bunch of gifts, and believe me I had to work for them! TheGreatWhiteDope really puts together a challenge. I was actually proud of myself for being able to answer the questions necessary to win this!

I'm interested in hearing all of your thoughts on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stephen King's IT, The Simon Game, or whatever else relates to these prizes!