Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Have you ever seen a UFO? Then you have had a close encounter of the first kind. Have you ever seen evidence that a UFO was really there, like marks in the dirt from a spaceship landing? That’s a close encounter of the second kind.

And Close Encounters of the Third Kind would be those when you’d actually meet an alien. And that’s what happens in this movie! But it’s not like you would ever think it would be.

Close Encounters is widely considered to be one of the all-time great sci-fi movies, up there with 2001: A Space Odessey, Star Wars, The Terminator, and The Matrix.

Thing is, Close Encounters was made by the master of sci-fi spectaculars, Steven Spielberg. He had made some sci-fi before this movie, which came out in 1977, including Firelight, which he sorta remade into this movie, his first sci-fi blockbuster (but not his first blockbuster altogether! That would be Jaws, two years before).

Well, since Close Encounters, Steven has made one super-collassal sci-fi slam-bang after another! ET, Jurassic Park, AI, Minority Report, War of the Worlds… and the new Insterstellar, coming out in 2009.

In between, he’s made war movies like Saving Private Ryan, issue films like Amistad, action classics like Raiders and the other Indiana Jones movies, and of course Jewish movies like Schindler’s List and Munich.

The star of Close Encounters is Richard Dreyfuss. He plays Roy, this guy who lives in Indiana and has your usual messy family. He fixes phone wires for a living, and one night is out repairing a downed line when he gets a very different sort of long-distance call! Actually, when you’ll see the movie, you’ll see that it was a very close call… a close encounter, even. It’s just that the ones making it are from a loooong distance away!

Also in the movie is Bob Balaban. He plays David, an agent from the government who is trying to determine what Roy saw. But Roy is too wigged out to trust anyone, so they have some really intense discussions! You have seen Bob in a few of our Movies of the Month, including For Your Consideration; in fact, he’s in almost all of Christopher Guest’s “mockumentaries.” We wrote more about Bob in one of the other ones, Best in Show, but he also is in Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. You can see him now in Danny Strong’s TV movie about the 2000 US presidential election, Recount. Other movies of Bob's you might like are Lady in the Water, The Majestic, and Ghost World. His most Jewish movie was the Holocaust film Jakob the Liar.

On TV, Bob was on West Wing, and he was a regular on Seinfeld. But he has been on TV since Maude and The Mod Squad (now that we think of it, the Golden Girls were sorta “The Maude Squad”!). When you get older, you can watch some of Bob’s other great films with Jewish directors, like Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, Woody Allen’s Decontructing Harry, Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, and Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice.

By the way, Steven likes to look at his old movies now and again and make a change or two! So when you go to rent this movie, make sure you get Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Collector’s Edition, which came out on DVD in 2001.

If you like sci-fi, it’s fun to see some of the earlier great movies to see where today’s sci-fi directors get their ideas and images, which they sometimes borrow for their own movies. After all, these are the sci-fi movies they watched when they were kids!