|
|
I'm always getting Starman mixed up with The Man Who Fell to Earth. They're both from around the same time, have a kind of similar plot as I understand it, and have things to do with people I consider generally awesome. John Carpenter and David Bowie respectively. I've also never actually seen either one, so, it's time to fix that, starting with Starman. My expectations are kind of low going in here... and why did I just see one of those "modified to fit your screen" bits in front of a letterboxed movie? Anyway, the opening credits play over the Voyager 2 space probe getting sucked into the atmosphere of a very Planet X looking planet. It's all black and shiny and has a ring of glowing blue particles. Upon seeing this, it sends out the ship from Flight of the Navigator, like, dead on, to wave to earthlings. OK, now, I can accept the Pee-Wee ship having an FTL drive (despite looking like a ship from a movie whose whole premise revolved around not having one) but how did the Voyager probe make such good time here? This movie is from 1984 and not set in the future, so do the math there.
Anyway, while this is going on, Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark is watching old home movies of her dead husband. Said dead husband, according to yon DVD sleeve is played by Jeff Bridges. Now, this poses a problem for me, because these days he's mainly famous for being The Dude in The Big Lebowski, but when THIS movie came out he was the main character from Tron, and is apparently going to be in the dude-seriously-why-are-you-making-a-sequel-to-Tron-NOW? I can't very well call him Tron though, because he didn't play Tron, he played Flynn, and if I say Flynn, nobody will get the reference... except that I just explained it. He also played the dad in Tideland, by which, really, he spent like 80% of a movie lying in a chair playing an increasingly ripe corpse. Ah well, Dude it is.
|
So anyway, the Peewee ship crash lands, and a big ball of blue light gets out and starts poking through all of Marion's stuff. Eventually it finds a creepy baby book sort of thing of The Dude's, containing pictures from which it can make a cool 80s style hologram,and, conveniently enough, a hair sample. It uses these to clone itself a REALLY FRELLING DISTURBING BABY BODY WITH A GLOWING SKULL! What the hell movie! I so was not expecting that! ÊAnyway, this rapidly ages up to an adult Dude body through some really unsettling claymation effects, and tosses some marbles on the floor. Incidentally, Marion heard all this and got to watch the entire process. Wearing, incidentally, a T-shirt, sweater, boots, and sucks, but no pants. She is justifiably freaked the hell out, and pulls a gun on him, but is kind of creeped out at the whole baby monster gradually becoming her naked dead husband thing and drops it. So as part of his standard parroting to pick up the language schtick, he picks up the gun and points it back at her. By all accounts this is a sappy romantic movie, so... just keep this scene in mind as we proceed and ponder why it was here.
Anyway, Marion passes out, so StarDude here can just continue watching her home movies in peace. Oh lovely, movie Dude is trying his gun out, so it's time to shoot windows! Movie Marion though is feeding a racoon and actually says "We mean you no harm" though. Around this point, StarDude remembers how he dropped his marbles and uses the force to pick them back up. Then he wanders outside because he sees some helicopters. I'd make an ADD joke but again, we're doing the whole first contact thing here. Apparently one of his marbles is a communicator, which he talks into by screeching electronically, with subtitles. Short version- Uh, my ship crashed and these people are scary! Marion wakes up again just in time to see him tossing it up into the air to fly home. So... guess it's more of a carrier pigeon. Also, I was wrong, she wasn't wearing boots. Before rushing outside, she now grabs a pair of pants and boots. Note I didn't say she put them on. She grabs them, runs outside, THEN puts on the boots. She still isn't wearing any pants, and we're now switching to a scene where they're in the car and he's fully dressed, but from the camera angle, as far as I can tell, she's still not wearing pants.
|
Anyway, he somehow managed to figure out how to say "please help" despite the fact that I don't recall hearing anyone say it in the home movie. Whatever though, language learning takes forever, I'm cool with skipping it. Oh, and apparently he bailed out of his ship in light ball form before it was shot down by commie-fearing government types over Arizona, because he needs her to drive him there. This is communicated by him using one of his marbles to summon up a cool looking laser map of the U.S. Plot hole time though, it's a political map. It has outlines of all the states. Shouldn't it just be a big outline of North America under the circumstances? We're scoring some points though by having a hazmat crew, NORAD, and SETI checking out the crashed UFO... not that there's much to look at at this point. It's largely a bit of slag embedded in the dirt. StarDude incidentally has this really odd way of talking that's like part-robot, part-Tarzan, and oddly enough, part-Bill Murray.
A redneck draws near! Command? Magic - Fire. Thou has defeated the redneck! Thou earns 5 pieces of gold and 7 points of experience! Specifically, some crazy trucker was kind of randomly being aggressive, and he used a marble to super-heat his lug wrench. Oh, OK. He picked up a lot of language and basic concepts from the Voyager probe. That patches some plot holes up, or at least fills them with a bit of grout. This actually is being handled pretty well now that we're slowing down to explain it though. So at this point we're pretty much just alternating between road trip chat and UFO excavation. Said UFO is looking way less Flight of the Navigatory at this point. Opening it up with a blowtorch they find it to be full of... the same stuff they loaded the Voyager up with. Heh.
|
Eventually, they stop for gas and to use the bathroom. Naturally, StarDude attempts to follow her in, leading to a slight bit of wacky hijinks and CURSE YOU PAN AND SCAN! OK, yeah, I didn't mention it but it stopped being letterboxed fairly early on Êand now I'm having to deal with that nasty jittery pan and scan business that makes it incredibly frustrating for me to watch Ghostbusters on TV. Anyway, Marion leaves a note on the mirror about how she's kinda been kidnapped and is being forced to drive someone to Arizona, but unfortunately, StarDude finds and removes it to ask what kidnapped means. Yeah, they have kind of a weird relationship going at this point. There's some mutual weird calm distrust sorta deal going. Also, I just love this line. "This body has a terrible emptiness. This is called hungry?" I'm not kidding, that is an awesome line. So, flooring it to find a restaurant, StarDude, who's taking a turn at the wheel, he kind of cuts an 18-wheeler loaded up with hay bales off the road. Seems he'd been picking up driving etiquette from her, and gathered that a yellow light means floor it. Wah-WAAAAH!
Meanwhile, back in UFO investigation land, the government types seem to have managed to peace the entire plot to this point together since, you know, they're the government. They're actively investigating stuff, and getting police reports from everywhere in the area, thus learning about there being some crazy guy having crazy road trip shenanigans. Someone sums all this up in a way that makes it sound astoundingly ridiculous. I can appreciate that. Also, here's a scientist giving a schpiel, and both he and his speech patterns are ripped STRAIGHT out of Dark Star. Again, I am amused. Back to the road trip, apparently StarDude is going to die if he doesn't get to his space supplies or something. Also, there's a little bit of killing deer is wrong, and a sappy Dude seriously you took on the form of my dead husband this is emotionally frelling traumatic here! This transitions into wacky table manners hijinks. Our alien visitor declares that apple pie is awesome! Also, Marion is taking this chance to ditch the weirdo and hop on a bus because nice guy or not, he's creepy. She leaves her keys, credit card, and road map for him though, so that's nice.
|
Meanwhile, StarDude is ditching HER to go resurrect that deer off the random redneck number 2's hood in the parking lot. He is less than amused upon seeing the deer is gone. This leads to StarDude learning a new human custom! Savagely beating people up in parking lots! This in turn leads to Marion remembering that she owns a frelling gun, which scares the Redneck and his friends off pretty nicely. So yeah, ditching him probably won't work out. Back to the road trip. And... now we're officially getting all sappy. Again. This is a budding romance between some girl and a crazy space weirdo she just watched hideously transform from a gooey clay blob baby into her dead husband's doppleganger the night before. And now it's time to find a motel and get some actual sleep. It's also time for cops to show up.
Marion almost flashes the camera, but then remembers that this isn't paragraph 3. Also that this is a PG movie. So she just takes a bath in private and goes to bed, while StarDude watches TV. He's watching something sappy and hey, is that MST3k mainstay Peter Agar? Anyway, he's interrupted by a grownup crazy frat boy explaining that the cops are outside trying to break into the car. The helpful frat boy distracts the cops though, allowing Marion and StarDude to make a run for it. In the car no less. It's a pretty good distraction. StarDude figures hey, maybe the gun can be used to scar off cops, much like rednecks! Turns out what it actually does is just make them panic and shoot your friend in the side of the head. Doh. Well, we've already established he can fix that, but first it's time to get out of this situation. So he activates his invincibility power-up marble, plows straight through a few road blocks and a frelling gas tanker, which explodes because I'm not saying he drove by it, or knocked it off, he sets the car all glowy and drives right through the giant fuel canister. I assume nobody was in the cab since that would be totally off this movie's vibe. Anyway, he's down to just two power-up marbles at this point, and he's using one of them to revive Marion. So... just in case you thought these were like Speed Racer car buttons, and each marble had a different super power? No. They're like his MP it turns out.
|
He then ditches her, because oh, it only made the passengers invincible, the car's toast, and hitches a ride with some random dude. He may be totally ignorant of everything, but the whole I'm putting you in jeopardy thing did seem to finally sink in. Upon waking up in the morning, she, Ênaturally, decides to follow him, getting a ride from someone else. Wow, there are a lot of randomly helpful people in this movie. We're like 1:1:1 on amazingly helpful people, rednecks, and surprisingly competent government types. We also have an odd count of classic cars. All three cars which have carried main characters have been rare and nifty. Especially the one Marion's hitching in. The driver of said car agrees to help deal with a roadblock stopping StarDude's car up ahead by tossing a flaming fuel drum off the side of the road and speeding off. Again. Weirdly helpful people.
So, now reunited, and not so much as a thank you to their other accomplices, they hop in the back of a pickup truck of some passing injuns. They're really stereotypically injun in that I can see you're trying to be really really respectful towards an ancient peaceful culture but it's looking a LITTLE racist from where I sit. Anyway, one has a baby, which leads into some talk that reveals that StarDude actually DOESN'T need to be told where babies come from and just wonders why Marion doesn't have any kids. Turns out she's barren. Cue PG sex scene. PG sex scene being in this case a loooot of extreme closeup horizontal kissing.
... did that billboard in the background say "Winston Cupfunkies?" I thought it said cupcakes at first, and it was kind of hard to tell because there was a helicopter landing in front of it but it definitely seems to have been Winston Cup___ies" and seriously, that blank may have been funk. Is that a real product? I've never heard of a Cupfunky but it sounds awesome and delicious. If it isn't, it totally should be. I'm thinking, like, you take a hollow cupcake, like a Hostess sort of thing, and then you fill the interior with... let's say chocolate cream and whipped peanut butter. Maybe some little cookie crumb things in there. And then a chocolate frosting shell and sprinkles over the top. That's a cupfunky and I really want one now. Anyway, meanwhile back in the movie, the next morning StarDude is all "By the way, just so you know? I totally knocked you up last night. I'm basically a clone of your husband so it's PRETTY much going to be a regular human kid, but my funky alien voodoo is going to make him kinda weird. And he's going to be a teacher when he grows up. Does this creep you out? Because I mean, if it does, I can give you a magical space abortion. I really should have asked first after all." Not a direct quote honestly.
|
Oh, they're out of money at this point because, you know, wallet in car, car explode, doh. Fortunately, here's a casino, and while I haven't actually mentioned it, StarDude can make machines do stuff by touching them. It's a pretty standard thing for aliens to do, at least in 80's movies. Oh, and now some proper government jerks have shown up to set up a vivisection table for when they finally catch StarDude, much to the indignation of SETI guy. But anyway yeah, they cheated at a casino to win some traveling money and a new car. Now it's time to talk about StarDude's peaceful monoculture. Seriously, that's what he describes his home planet being like. But now it's time for the cops to finally catch up the next time they stop for food.
SETI guy intervenes and helps them escape. Thanks SETI guy! So now we're finally heading off to the crash site where, presumably, he's just going to get a pick up from a second space probe. Well, that or die tragically. We are very much in that same E.T. space of Space Jesus dying for your sins and all. Oh, and you can't really say "Last warning" after you're already totally missing them with a hail of gunfire army dudes. Aaaaand cue Giant Space Marble. Actually this pretty much looks like what I initially assumed to be StarDude's home planet. We've got the rind and everything. I guess it was actually just a totally reflective mothership or portable planet or whatever. Dropping into atmosphere here though, it really looks like a Monty Python animation effect. So anyway yeah, he's getting his pickup. He leaves Marion his last MP marble to give to her baby that'll know what to do with it once he's born... or maybe after a few years, we're not being that specific.
Now, it would be a really amusingly dark turn if, at this point, the paranoid government dudes just grabbed her and took her off for a lifetime of testing and interrogation... which might actually happen, because the credits roll just as he's teleporting away, leaving that bit to the audience's imagination. Now, I want to say that was actually pretty good for the sort of movie it is, but there is a very good chance that I am giving it subconscious bonus points just so I can continue saying I've never seen a John Carpenter movie I didn't enjoy. Seriously though, how weird is it that this is the follow-up to The Thing? Well, OK, not totally true. Christine came out between those. Actually, you know, looking at John Carpenter's IMDB page, there is some definite variety going on here. Movie that inspired Red Dwarf, tense crime thing, first/only good slasher ever, thing I've never seen, Elvis biopic, mysterious fog containing ghost pirates, silly future action movie, The Thing, evil car movie, Starman here, east meets west meets a beholder action movie, pseudo-hardboiled Chevy Chase vehicle... and it just goes on like this.
Also, I wasn't kidding before. I really really want a Cupfunky now. Does anyone have any contacts in the vacuum packed convenience store confection industry they can put me in contact with? This is seriously something that needs to start to exist.
