Starman (1984)

I remember Carpenter saying he made this film to show that he could do more than just scary films and the studios could trust him to make a film that wasn't full of horror.

One of the last great hurrahs before he began the long slide downhill, too. It was amazing to me to have a Carpenter film that my whole family liked.

Love Jack Nitszche's "Starman Leaves".

**sigh** That last lingering shot of Karen Allen's beautiful face...saying everything.

I think, if you've got a sensitive bone in your body, it's difficult to not be pretty moved by that ending.

You'd think he could have swung from this to something non genre. It has a delicate touch that is missing from pretty much every Carpenter film to follow it.

Starman is a great movie. One of Carpenter's best. If you watch this and Elvis, you can see that Carpenter really could have had any career he wanted, but he chose to remain involved in the horror/thriller genre. The Jack Nitszche score is really good and it still has Carpenter flourishes of course - but the Nitszche bits give it an emotional backbone.

I can see the Close Encounters comparisons. But I always saw this more akin to E.T. Kind of like that movie re-fashioned as a romance for adults. If you look at the basic story structure, it's essentially E.T.

In fact, when Spielberg initially pitched E.T. to Columbia, they turned it down because they already had an alien movie in development that turned out to be Starman.

Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen are fantastic. Bridges, in fact, got an Oscar nomination for this... I say it was well-deserved.

Someone commented that this was Carpenter's last hurrah. I disagree... He still had Big Trouble... and They Live in his system. He was far from done.

Carpenter really had one of the most remarkable career runs from '74 to '88... They're all valid films. Some better than others, but I think they're all good. It's in the 90s that he began to stumble a bit. (But Ghosts of Mars is the only Carpenter film I completely dislike.)

I didn't say it was the last, I said it was one of the last. Starman came out in 84, and in 88 he released They Live, his last good movie.

Cue somebody defending In The Mouth of Madness.

He gets a credit because he developed it with intent to star in the title role with Adrian Lyne directing, but another project caught their eye. Apparently Carpenter came in really late in the game, very hired gun, very last minute.

And that somebody will be me...

Actually, I'll defend two thirds of it as being some very classy, skillful thriller-making. It's the third act that becomes an overblown mess. But I always appreciated what he was trying to do.

There were some good, sharp shocks in his Village of the Damned remake. But I'll admit it was kind of weak.

And I do genuinely like Vampires.

I will agree that They Live is his last unarguably good movie though.

I don't think you can deny that Starman feels like last time he brought an A game without falling back on genre excess. Starman felt classier, like he was swinging for the fences a bit more. By contrast, he did a music video for BTILC while wearing a kimono.

In looking at the crew lists, it seems like the only time he worked with that particular editor. The film feels very different than what you'd expect from the rest of his work.

Phil, my take on it is that Carpenter was a hired gun on this one... And the studio was second-guessing themselves because they'd gotten a horror guy to make their genteel sci-fi romance.

So, Carpenter was working outside his comfort zone and had something to prove. He wanted to show that he could do a mainstream entertainment for the masses - a PG13 picture that wasn't odd in any way and had mass appeal.

That may be why it has that "swinging for the fences" feeling you're describing. He went a little out of his way to make it as "not" a John Carpenter film as he could... But you still see his fingerprints all over.

Harry just twittered the other day about watching this on Blu-Ray, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I don't have a Blu-Ray player yet, but you can watch the whole film on crackle.com.

Just *thinking* about "Starman Leaves" and the final few moments of the film gives me goosebumps and a lump in the throat. One of my favorite endings.

The TV spinoff was shite.

Hear, hear! Because of this I spent months and months trying to track down the score for this on CD... bear in mind this was around 10 years ago; before I met up with the internets.

Love the film, the ending still gets me, dammit!

This is a movie that knows to end at just the right moment. If it had lingered just a few moments more it would lose a lot of its impact.

This is such a sweet, underrated gem with great performances by all involved. It's one of my favourite John Carpenter movies, right up there with "Halloween" and "They Live". I even like it more than "Escape from New York" and "The Thing". There, I said it.

Funny, I was just thinking about this movie the other day, when someone asked me if I thought Sharlto Copley had a shot at an Oscar nod this year (my answer was "not a hope in hell," but I'd love to be wrong), and was trying to remember if anyone besides Bridges and Weaver had ever been nominated for any kind of sci-fi performances.

It really is a gem of a movie that I haven't watched in way too long. Should address that this week.

Just watched this last night and will echo all the things already said about this great flick. It will definitely shoot up to one of my favourites from Carpenter.

What I do want to add is that Douglas also produced STONE COLD. I'm not sure how many other movies he's been involved with on the business side of things, but let's just say he's two for two in my books thus far.

Look him up. Motherfucker produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.