ConfoundingBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
I've just had a close encounter of the fifth kind?a factual thriller about alien abduction that is actually boring. The Fourth Kind is the kind of film that makes UFO theory appear downright dumb when in fact some academics want to believe, Erik von Daniken is always interesting, and a few of us have witnessed.
But this film confounds me: With a heavy number of disappearances and UFO sightings in the last 40 years, Nome, Alaska, could be the Roswell of the far North except that filmmakers like Olatunde Osunsanmi give it a bad name by presenting scant evidence such as a bedridden levitating man, recorded screeches, and distorted videos. The rest of the time, patients are in hypnotic trances that prove nothing because of the trance.
One salient fact is that a little girl is apparently missing from her home, and almost 10 years later is still missing. The heroine psychologist, Dr. Abbey Tyler (Milla Jovivich), is her mother and loses her hold on reality throughout the film with the loss of her husband and daughter.
The real Dr. Tyler appears as intercut footage sometimes overlapping dialogue and split screen with Jovivich playing out the scenes. Although the archival footage gives an authenticity to an otherwise bland package of proof, even that footage could be taken as the ravings of people who may have spent too much time shootin' caribou with Sarah Palin or watching The Exorcist.
So I'll pull out my copy of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of a Third Kind for a lyrical approach to alien visitation. In fact, I rode my motorcycle to Devil's Canyon partly because of the film's magical description there of the encounter. The Fourth Kind does not inspire me to visit Nome.
On the contrary, I won't even consider voting for Palin, who may well be the reverse of alien abduction?some thoughtful alien dumping her on us.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com