Word: starman
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Director John Carpenter (Halloween, Starman) propels things faster, and way smoother, than a speeding '40s serial. But Co-Screenwriter W.D. Richter, who directed the definitive smarty-pants action picture, Buckaroo Banzai, is the evil genius behind Little China. He has everybody talking as if time-warped in some poverty-row thriller. "My destiny rests in your capable hands," the engaging Dun tells Russell, who is trying to be Harrison Ford trying to be John Wayne trying to be the Surly American. Everything else in the film is at the same three removes from reality. Little China offers dollops of entertainment...
...casting would have aroused excitement on Broadway. Joanne Woodward as Amanda Wingfield, the desperate matriarch. Karen Allen, star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman, as the soulful daughter Laura. TV Star James Naughton (Trauma Center, Planet of the Apes) as Laura's "gentleman caller." And John Sayles, filmmaker (Return of the Secaucus Seven) and novelist (Union Dues), making his professional stage debut as Tom, the restless, seething son who narrates Tennessee Williams' doom-struck "memory play" about his family. Add a designer who has won a Tony nomination, a director who has mounted more than 100 productions...
...festooned with cotton-candy aliens and the air of suburban benevolence, could be refreshed by making contact with the laws of dramatic gravity? As it happens, Cocoon has many familiar elements: it could be called E.T. Meets the Over-the-Hill Gang, or On Golden Pod. Like last Christmas' Starman, it contains a love story ^ between an extraterrestrial (Tahnee Welch, Raquel's lithe and stunning daughter) and a young American (Steve Guttenberg); here sex is represented as a love-light that ricochets around the swimming pool. Like E.T. and a dozen other fantasy films, it boasts gorgeous, if insubstantial special...
...Starman is not so much a clone as that familiar subspecies, the Hollywood hybrid. If any scene worked in any earlier movie, it is used here, and it works here. Start with the collected works of Steven Spielberg (E. T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Sugarland Express), add the opposites-attract love story of every road movie from It Happened One Night to Romancing the Stone, and give it the glaze of cerulean romance. It is as if the United Nations had launched a videodisk containing snippets from every Hollywood genre, which had then been synthesized...
...years back, Columbia Pictures chose to produce Starman instead of a children's movie with a similar theme: E. T. It is easy to see why. This is a fairy tale for adults; the impossible dream realized here is not a cuddly playmate for a lonely boy but the resurrection of love in a life gone sour. Starman's appearance to Jenny is a double shock: he is both the incarnation and a parody of her lost love. He speaks in the tones of a computerized Muppet and moves in twitches, like a punk robot...