Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The Doctor is back again—in stereo! This time, he's hosting me for a look at Steven Spielberg's incredible 1977 masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We don't have a cross word to say about the film except perhaps that the aliens seems to act more like raccoons than visitors from another planet. The Doctor and I converse on the UFO phenomenon of the 1970s, Indiana geography, alien biology, Richard Dreyfus's insanity, and Steven Spielberg's belief that aliens and angels are the same thing. We discuss the film as a character piece, as a horror movie with no horror, and as a treatise on communication in general. We discuss the possibility that the aliens are a rock band. And we imagine Lance "Itchy Trigger Finger" Henriksen having a flash-forward to his other films and shooting up the aliens. I forget to make a joke about the Harper Valley PTA (that's where Dreyfus is driving when he has his initial encounter). And we forget to mention that this is the first of our five collaborations where none of the main characters is liquored up a good part of the time.