Jakester I finally caught up to this film 30-plus years after its release - I've been eager to see it for all these years - I remember very well the positive critical buzz it got, back in the day, from Roger Ebert and especially Janet Maslin in the NY Times. I was heartened by a review here at IMDb that says something like "one of the best best science fiction movie ever made" - whoa, really? On par with "2001," "Star Wars," "Close Encounters"?? Well....no. Not at all. It's on the level of "Forbidden Planet" - worth watching if you've got some time to kill and/or if you're curious about the science fiction genre. I came away from the movie with exactly the same feeling I got from "The Fog" (another John Carpenter film) - cool premise, lots of potential, but ultimately air-headed with no deep satisfaction.The strong suit of Jeff Bridges is his affable American naturalness and accessibility; here, he is denied the chance to portray those things in favor of stiff alien chilliness and a modestly-charming goofiness that wears thin before their cross-country trip reaches Nebraska. He ends up merely showing off for Academy voters (they bought the shtick).Karen Allen is beautiful here - she's never been photographed better - those big eyes are amazing, every close-up is a masterpiece of lighting, composition, and makeup, and she wears jeans as well as any actress ever. But she's asked to carry way too much of the load. She's a good supporting actress but not really a leading lady, she hasn't got the likability chops. (In the wake of this film's mediocre box office performance, was she ever again asked to carry a big budget film?) Charles Martin Smith is OK but gets too much screen time (because Starman and Jenny don't have much to say to each other). He seems to spend an awful lot of time climbing out of helicopters and hiking across tarmacs. A little sprinkling of government agents goes a long way. The plot has too many holes. Starman can bring various lifeforms back from the dead but can't conjure up a way to keep Jenny awake? (I realize he needs to ration his little energy balls, but their stopping at the motel is just so obviously a plot device. Some better excuse needed to be found for their stop. (How about Starman has a need to watch TV to understand our culture? How about TV provides him with some sort of nourishment? How about he wants to observe the mating rituals of high school kids? Hardly any kids have been seen in the movie up to this point; surely he would need to understand age differences. So: they stop at the motel to buy Coke, he sees a young couple or two going into a room, he demands to know what's going on, Jenny thinks he's crazy but they get a room, she falls asleep, he watches TV and learns what he needs to learn from Burt and Deborah on the beach.)Would the government really institute a roadblock on a major freeway without posting many highway patrol cops telling drivers to slow down? (Answer: no possible way; the liability issues are massive.) Would the cops in the diner at the end of the film really not have a description of Starman?When the government team cracks open the alien spacecraft after much effort, would the whole team really gather around the capsule door as it opens, or might there be some cautious exploration first by a Haz Mat team? (Which could have been shown in the background.) Movie-goers of 1984 were almost certainly familiar with the radical steps taken by NASA in 1969 to protect Earth from possible space germs - these steps were one of the most marked and interesting things about the moon shot. To this day (2017) NASA has a full-time staff person in charge of protecting us from space microbes. The crater sequence at the end obviously cost a fortune, with more helicopters than "Apocalypse Now." But the sequence just kind of sits there, there's no electricity. (The musical score during the chopper attack might have evoked "Ride of the Valkyries" as a little nod to Coppola.) The film has its good moments of course; you can't spend $22 million and not generate at least a few such moments. The smoking-a-cigarette scene is hilarious. The railroad car sequence is sweet and charming; it could have been made truly witty if Starman had demonstrated superhuman sexual stamina (for example, Karen could check her watch at 5 p.m. and the next thing she knows it's 10 p.m., they're still doing it, and "Do That To Me One More Time" gets evoked in the score.) If you have a yen for a road picture and want really good entertainment, you have many choices in this splendid genre, including "The Sugarland Express," "Sullivan's Travels," "The Last Detail," "Thelma & Louise," "Y Tu Mama Tambien," "Borat," "Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed," "Almost Famous," "Pierrot le Fou," "The Motorcycle Diaries," "The Straight Story," "Journey to Italy," "Road to Morocco," "Mad Max: Fury Road," "Harry and Tonto," and "Easy Rider."

Blueghost This was one of many well budgeted and well crafted science fiction films to come out in the 1980s, and it shows.It's exceptionally well shot, respectably acted, and has an excellent story, even if it skews towards what Nimoy and Gil Gerrard called the "female fantasy" of today's market trend. Even so, "Starman" tells a heart warming story of a being answering a "message in a bottle" communique from NASA, Earth. As usual we have a paranoid who is hell bent on nabbing Bridge's character for the sake of security and whatever else he might have in mind. Karen Allen, a recent widow must come to terms with both the loss of her husband and the person who has entered her life with unusual abilities.Both navigate one adventure after the other in order to reach their ultimate goal.Bridges presents the naive tourist who comes from a civilization that is a bit more socially advanced than our paranoid backwards ways, and comes to lock horns with one or two of the locals. The real pleasure about this film is that it is so well crafted. The acting is natural but also professional. It's not understated and "real" as is today's trend, nor are there any real "pretty", "handsome" nor any real "attractive" actors to detract from the story. Everyone here is a seasoned thespian who delivers well modulated performance energy. No one here is over the top, save for Bridges as he first adds life to his character, but that's to be expected given he's playing an alien.This is the kind of film that they don't make anymore, but should. Or rather it's the kind of film I'd like Hollywood to make. It's not fast paced. It's aimed at adults and anyone who is reasonably mature regardless of age. The story is not about good guys verse bad guys (mostly). There's very little gunplay here, though there is some mild violence. There's no massive CGI to awe and impress the otherwise jaded teenage viewer. The dialogue is not juvenile. The actors and characters are well rounded mature adults. There are no young nor obviously pre-teen at heart males popping off at the mouth with put down humor. This film was not test marketed (not much anyway) as today's films are.And that's why this film is worth seeing. In fact, it's worth owning, in my opinion. It's not heavy drama, but there are dramatic moments. There aren't any rapid fire vulgar jokes, but there is humor here. The characters are sympathetic, warm, and likable, except for the one bad guy, and even then you don't really have to put on your "white-hat black hat" glasses to understand what's going on.And that's the kind of film it is.Give it a shot and see what you think. Highly recommended.

Red-Barracuda Starman is certainly a bit of a departure for director John Carpenter. It seems that after the box-office disappointment of The Thing (1982) he decided that his next return to the alien film should be something less scary and more in line with the E.T. (1982) template. The result is a John Carpenter film that is decidedly more gentle natured than we had seen up to that point. After learning about humanity from the space probe Voyager 2 an alien crash lands on Earth and assumes the identity of a dead man. He enlists the reluctant help of the wife of this deceased individual in his mission to return home. Needless to say, the authorities pursue him, hell bent on preventing his departure.This change of pace for Carpenter is another film which shows the care he gave to all his movies. The story is solid, if nothing especially great. But it's nicely shot and paced, with some engaging performances, especially from Karen Allen as the bemused woman taken along for the ride by the alien. Jeff Bridges puts in an original enough turn as the starman, although it is definitely quite surprising he was Oscar nominated for it. In essence this is a road movie with a romantic sub-plot that is based around a sci-fi premise. It's fairly successful in each of its sub-genres and is a very likable piece of work overall. And for what it's worth, I much preferred it to E.T.

lasttimeisaw John Carpenter's STARMAN is a sympathetic star-crossed romance between an alien aka. Starman (Bridges) and an earth woman Jenny (Allen), a rare item in his otherwise horror and action packed works, it is my second film from him, after the disappointingly topsy-turvy BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (1986, 5/10). First of all, it is a cruel joke on our earthlings, we set off a welcome message into the outer space, and some unspecified highly-intelligent species responses by sending an explorer to our planet, however, the first thing humans do is shooting the vehicles down, then hunting down the e.t. in order to put him on the operation table for dissection. But don't worry, as annoying as the authoritarian NSA chief and the military ostentation and extravagance, things will not descend to that ground. Jenny is recently widowed and still overindulges in the then-sweet-but-now-tormenting memories of his dead husband Scott, so the intrusion of Starman who regenerates himself into a human form of Scott through his hair kept in Jenny's photo album actually gives an impossible chance for Jenny to fall in love with Scott again, thus despite the initial terror to witness the metamorphosis of an unearthly creature turning into Scott, Jenny accepts him almost instantly as subconsciously she knows that her dream comes true in a supernatural version. The pair drives across the country to reach the picking-up location in Arizona, where a mother-ship will take Starman back as it has planned.En route, the affecting binding progress between them takes a lion's share of the film and romance burgeons inevitably and a nice job done by generously allowing Starman some time to learn in his new form as a male human in this three-day span, the film never intend to be a taut action piece or a CGI-ridden arena for Starman to show off his superpower other than when the plot requires, emotion always comes first, even poetically, which one might find it unexpectedly against Carpenter's grain, Jenny and Starman are each other's savior, once they builds the trust and affections, they are inseparable. As corny as that he resuscitates her from death, cures her infertility and gives her a baby boy, whereas she has the relentless will power to bring him to the appointed venue, to eventually save his life, Carpenter and his two leads pull it off satisfactorily. Bridges garners a surprising Oscar-nomination here, he demonstrates a primitive method as a newcomer habituating, mimicking and grasping human behavior, impressively carries on his otherworldliness through the journey with advanced nuances in gesticulation and language capacity. Allen brings about a force of momentum in her more mundane part, overwhelmed by the frisson of regaining and losing again of her true love, she and Bridges share many intimately heartfelt moments in this fanciful tall-tale, its CGI effects inescapably seem dated, but the kernel of its message - to evoke the basic humanity within us, leaves viewers a somewhat palatable taste which injects the movie a vital strength to be finely appreciated.