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Show Page 12 Thursday, August 14, 1980 The Newspaper Btl Wirldl by Itiek Brough HTFF7 The Flower Box is coming to Park City Delivery Every Thursday Arrangements From $12.50 For Conventions and Special Occasions Delivery Arranged Our Specialty is Personal Service. Our Flowers Fresh and Beautiful, Our Design Creative FTD Florist Visa Master Charge 272-9497 i7 Olympus Hills Mall 'Close Encounters' Leads to Court Encounters A Classic Recommended Good Double feature material Time-Killer Formasochists only - Close Encounters An attorney named Robert Rentzer is suing Columbia Pictures, claiming they tried to convince the public their "Special Edition" of "Close Encounters Encoun-ters of the Third Kind" (CE3K for short) was an entirely en-tirely new movie, instead of a re-release with new scenes. . The L.A. lawyer, suing on behalf of his wife Gail, said the movie was unchanged except for "two or three minutes added to the ending, where the camera pans the 614 Main St 649-9066 G U COM 314 WOODSIDE AVENUE -' ' $it?-m ' lit- V 1 ' -V A Victorian Duplex in old Park City. Two bedrooms, 1 12 baths with 1,050 sq. ft. plus a one bedroom with 400 sq. ft. Remodeled with new plumbing and wiring. Great investment and rental property. Skyline Land Co., 649-9066. II Restaurant Seafood Beef Oyster Bar Set Sail For Park City's Finest Restaurant pi SERVING DINNER NIGHTLY FROM 6:00 , At the Resort 649-7778 interior of a spaceship," a complaint shared by critic Gene Siskel. (But at least he didn't sue.) Others, like critic Charles Champlin, say the new version is a dramatically improved version. ver-sion. The truth lies somewhere in between director Steven Spielberg has made a number of small changes, most of them to the good, and added one scene that improves the overall conception of the picture. I don't think Rentzer has a leg to stand oh in claiming Columbia promised a new picture. Their TV ads used familiar scenes from the film, talked about new scenes, and called the movie a "Special Edition." (You don't expect the Tribune's "Morning Edition" to be a completely different paper, do you?) It's not a novelty these days for a director to re-cul his masterpiece. On TV especially, scenes are often added to a movie to fill out a three-hour time slot, or cut, so that a film-maker's R-rated R-rated flick is still an artistically ar-tistically solvent PG on the tube. Francis Ford Coppola stitched stit-ched "Godfather" I and II together, in chronological order or-der and threw in new scenes for a massive TV mini-series. mini-series. The new bits were out-takes and looked it, with one exception; among Marlon Brando's other activities ac-tivities on Connie Corleo,ne's wedding day, we now saw him visit his dying con-sigliore, con-sigliore, who begged the godfather god-father to save him from Death. "You cannot refuse a favor on your daughter's wedding day," he pleaded, in a truly chilling moment. Spielberg added one scene to "Jaws," to his detriment. Whereas the movie introduced in-troduced Robert Shaw in that unforgettable fingernails finger-nails down-the-blackboard shot, the TV version first showed Quint in an innocuous in-nocuous scene buying tackle. Spielberg has shown more sense in re-editing "Close Encounters." What I'm going to do now is rely on an imperfect memory of the three showings I saw (two in 1977, one recently) and provide you with the most complete, comprehensive, and thorough rundown anywhere (as Ed McMahon would say ) of the changes : The short scene of Roy Neary coming to work at the power station, and being sent out on assignment, is cut. Now we follow him directly from his home to the Close Encounter. -In the old CE3K, a police car crashed through a guard rail in pursuit of a glowing blip. The director has added a few shots of the cop inside babbling into his radio, and screaming as he crashes. There was always a faint "Keystone Kops" aura to that incident, and Spielberg has now made it clear he didn't intend that. Their aliens are seriously reckless children. Gone now is the scene at the Pentagon,- where Neary and other UFO spotters debate a condescending officer of-ficer who debunks their claims by showing how even a Frisbee can be mistaken for a flying saucer. This was part of Spielberg's "Saucergate" sub-plot about the military-scientific team headed by Francois Truf-faut, Truf-faut, covering up their own efforts to contact the aliens. The scene arouses our hostility, not only against the military but also Neary's wife (Terri Garr), who appears ap-pears here at her most unsympathetic, un-sympathetic, with her hair tightly bound up, cold and embarassed. The unfriendly vibes of this scene always mitigated ' against the movie's star-struck optimism, op-timism, and cutting it was a wise decision. A completely new addition ad-dition shows Truffaut's team making a mind-boggling discovery in the middle of the Gobi desert. It's Park City Live! 'y 1 M 'V 4 I S ' V - ... -v ' 4' A 'ill ?: Tom Distad will be playing a blend of classical, contemporary contem-porary and folk music this Friday and Saturday at Adolph's from 7:30 to 11:00 Tom Distad p.m. The Steel Blue Band will be playing at Jody's Aug. 13-16 13-16 from 9:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Playing at Sneakers during Sunday brunch will be Ronn Cooper and Dave Ervin. Mash Wsds by Jack Hash The weather is a stinker. It's ninety-nine when you're standing in a cold shower and it's ninety-nine when you get out. To get my mind off frozen daiquiris with a kick in the head like Hollywood out on strike, I'm doing some Christmas shopping. Something Irv Gerkin said gave me the idea. Irv's a friend of mine from down the street. He's a deejay and he has a call-in show on WWUT, the Whut's Up station. He abuses people preety much and cuts off anybody who wants to talk about KGB stooges in big business or Ronald Reagan's role as Lt. Brass Bancroft of the Secret Service. 'It's a pretty popular show and Irv does a lot of his own commercials. One he does is a thirty second spot for Suave Furs. Irve was saying that he bought a ranch mink at a big discount at the Suave Furs summer warehouse sale, as a Christmas surprise sur-prise for his wife Louise. He didn't say so, but Irv probably gets a bigger discount than you or I would. He's a personal friend of Harold Suave and his brother Jack and really throws his heart into their commercial. I decided to do some Christmas shopping, too. All I needed was a catalogue. My wife likes a plain cloth coat herself, or sometimes just a heavy sweater, so there wasn't any call to go out to the warehouse in all this heat. Luckily, a catalogue fell out of the Sunday paper as I was taking it out to the trash on Monday. It's put out by the people at Homefrolix Gifts, who happen to be having a prive-shattering 88 cent sale. They have over 115 new and useful items listed, and if you mix or match six of them, you can get anything for just 88 cents, even though it may be worth a dollar ninety-nine anyplace else. At these prices, I can afford to get gifts for people I normally wouldn't give anything to Miss Hedgepeth, for instance. Miss Hedgepeth was my music teacher over at the junior high. She wore spike heels and the kind of skirt that needs a kick pleat so you can walk in it, and she had black hair like a wind-swept moor, blood-red talons and a lot of bracelets. We'd hear the bracelets and the heels on the linoleum long before her Chanel No. 5 ever knocked us back in our seats. She made us sing Rock My Soul In The Bosom of Abraham. There were twenty-eight kids in our class and none of them could say bosom. She also made us sing solo. I had to sing June Is Bustin' Out All Over. June had to sing it, too. I found something in here that I think Miss Hedgepeth is going to love. It's a Treble Clef Bud Vase, made of crystal-clear poly-unbreakable, poly-unbreakable, so you can't ruin it no matter how many times you throw it on the floor. I know it will look nice on top of Miss Hedgepeth's upright and it's only 88 cents, marked down from a dollar twenty-nine. Since I'm in the mood to cheer people up, I think I'll send something off to some people who are trying to do a little business down on Spruce Street. The people who live on Spruce Street have gotten so disgusted with the crime and prostitution in their area, they've taken to pelting the pimps and hookers with water balloons and watermelons. Some people think throwing a baseball is hard work. As I see it, by Christmas the hookers will probably need a rest from all those little sprints up and down the street. That's where Zany Fingers will come in handy. It's a set of four Lifesize Plastic Flesh-tone Hooks that Beckon. They screw-in, glow in the dark, and come with an optional leer. I figure the girls can screw them into the side of a purse or carry-all or just tuck them unobtrusively behind the ear. I have four more choices to make and it isn't going to be easy. There's the Comic Yule Roll to think about, and the Handy Belt Holster for Pen & Eyeglasses. That Precision Tweezer with Built-in Light on page two is something I know somebody won't want to be without. The only problem now is finding enough deserving people. I'll just put myself in Richard Nixon's place. basically a variation on the film's first scene, where a group of 1945 warplanes are plopped down in a Mexican airfield. A good, but not essential change. Spielberg has excised the obnoxious sequence with Neary tearing up plants, bricks, and dirt to build his livingroom Devil's Tower. He has substituted, for that paroxysm, a family fight which takes place the night before Neary's family leaves him, with Neary in the shower fully clothed, his wife screaming at him, and the frightened children slamming slam-ming doors against the wall in a frantic effort to stop their parent's fighting. Spielberg originally dropped it from the story because it was "'Death of a Salesman' in the middle of 'Close Encounters'," En-counters'," in his words. It is a frightening picture of family strife, especially because Dreyfuss plays it drunkenly, almost for comedy, which shows how sadly out of synch he is with his hysterical loved ones. There' are a number of minor changes. A short long-shqt long-shqt after the first Encounter Encoun-ter shows the saucer's huge shadow looming over Neary, in his speeding truck. The kidnapping of Barry Guiler is a bit longer; and the alien clouds at Devil's Tower go in for some prolonged rumbling rum-bling and grumbling before the saucers appear. Best of all, there is a nice touch of Spielbergian color at the Wyoming train station where people are buying gas masks or "canaries" to guard against the military's phony gas scare. One enterprising enter-prising vendor is not only wearing a mask himself, but his dog is, too. "Your life's worth as much as a dog, ain't it?" he hails passing customers. The single most important impor-tant change in the movie is Neary's introduction. The original short scene showing him around the electric trains is now a cozy, set-piece, set-piece, as Neary tries to talk his, kids into going to see "Pinocchio" the movie he "grew up with." The kids want to play miniature golf. The episode changes our perception of Neary as a guy who suddenly goes around sculpting mashed potatoes and yanking up shrubs. Even before his Encounter, Neary is a man whose curiously preserved sense of innocence innocen-ce tends to separate him from his family. It ties him closer to little Barry Guiler, the only other person we see "taken" by the aliens. And it reinforces the Trivia Tet Disney-inspired style of the film, especially since "When You Wish Upon a Star" is used for the end credits and the interior spaceship scenes. The latter, incidentally, inciden-tally, are as disappointing as critics have charged. (One point for you, Mr. Rentzer. ) It's essentially shots of brightly colored walls, towers, and fireworks like seeing Radio City through a drug haze. Such flaws don't diminish the essential power of the film. When I first saw the film, it seem seriously flawed. Science-fiction writer (and iconoclast) Harlan Ellison attacked the film viciously; it showed Mankind being saved by the Pillsbury Doughboy, he said. I objected to the film on grounds of 1) logic and 2) morality. The movie was full of holes so big you could drive the mother ship through them. You never understand how the aliens could transmit to humans via Earth-devised hand signals, use measure of longitude and latitude everything short of showing their Zip Code! And how did the scientists know exactly what night they could expect the aliens, and what kidnapped kidnap-ped time-travelers they were going to return? Even worse than logic was Spielberg's sour-sub-plot. The saucers stir the emotions of people all over the world, but Trauffaut's military-scientific cabal ropes off the show for themselves, them-selves, manipulating, lying to, and even gassing those ordinary folk who try to crash the party. If we still act like that, are we really ready to meet other races? The mistakes fade in retrospect. I'm a little more prepared to forgive the scientists for their excesses; they're big kids with slide rules, running amuck like Neary, but on a much gran-' der scale. And they can reveal their humanity. Remember the technician running for the toilet at his first sight of the mother ship? "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is a film that rewards the viewer ' on repeat showings, and someone told me once that was the definition of a classic. Mr. Rentzer should be patient; there are numerous possibilities for a sequel. (What about that Elizabethan maiden stepping step-ping off the spaceship?) Until Un-til then, revel in the glories of a Close Encounter of a Third-and-a-half Kind. .-- . ..... , - -.. . . i " i ''I Debbie Black Debbie Black is back, correctly answering last week's Trivia Test with the Beale St. Blues Boy, Philadelphia Athletics with Connie Mack, and third. Debbie has won a free lunch compliments of the Main St. Deli-Market for her grasp of the trivial. To win your free lunch, be the first person to correctly answer this week's brain teaser. Submit Sub-mit your answers to The Newspaper at 419 Main Street, or call 649-9014 by noon Tuesday. This week's questions are : 1. Fifties rock 'n roller Chuck Berry made a comeback to the Top 40 charts in 1972 with what hit song? 2. There have beec many makes and remakes of the Dumas classic "The Three Musketeers." Which of the following never played a musketeer? Oliver Reed, Lloyd Bridges, Gig Young, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Alan Hale, Jr., Richard Chamberlain, Moroni Olsen, Don Ameche. 3. What's the name of the new thrill ride coming to Park West? |