Word: royed
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Despite Spielberg's preoccupation with UFOs in Close Encounters, he prefers to call the film an "adventure thriller" rather than science fiction, and he may have a point. The movie's conception is pure Hitchcock?on an intergalactic scale. The hero, Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), is a Middle American variant on the kind of man-in-the-middle played by Gary Grant and James Stewart in films like North by Northwest and Vertigo. A power-company worker who lives with his wife (Teri Garr) and three kids in Muncie, Ind., Roy is engulfed one night by phenomena he cannot understand: searing...
with alien life forms?but, of course, no one will believe his story. The rest of Close Encounters' plot follows Roy and several other UFO sighters, including a mysterious international scientist (Truffaut) and a neighborhood woman (Dillon), as they overturn their lives in a mad attempt to arrange a rendezvous with the extraterrestrial visitors. When an earthling makes actual contact with aliens, that is "a close encounter of the third kind." (The first kind is sighting; the second, physical evidence...
...appliances and store-bought toys. He also laces the film with humor. In the grand Hitchcock manner, he loves to show his characters passing over clues that are staring them right in the face. For Dreyfuss, he has written throwaway lines that highlight the absurdity that is implicit in Roy's wild dash for the unknown...
...weakest link in Fantasticks is LeoPierre Roy, who plays El Gallo. Roy is a veteran of many Harvard theatricals, and his performance is not a casualty of incompetence, but miscasting. El Gallo is the most difficult role in the show. He must sing the beautiful opening ballad "Try to Remember," introduce the characters, narrate the action, abduct Luisa and allow himself to be beaten by Matt, and philosophize on the Meaning of It All. Roy is a good actor, but he is all wrong for the part, El Gallo is supposed to be dark, handsome, suave, sophisticated...
Costumes are appropriately early '60s-ish. The choreography, done by Patty Woo, lacks flair in the opening scene, but picks up for the musical numbers, which are staged with wit and aplomb, and the sprawling deaths of Roy and Larsen are limericks, if not poetry, in motion...