If you hate your job or if your love life is a mess and when the things you take for granted are threatened, there is nothing like an alien invasion to put things in perspective and inspire your sense of humour!
One may call it a historic movie, a heroic one, a science fiction or a human saga, or a little bit of everything thrown in. The movie is wired around many things. At a glance it shows that every technology invented by man is unbeatable.
Creatures of other planets could well have equal or more advanced technological wisdom. But the movie as a whole is in keeping with the motto of all the world's space researchers i.e., to find a race superior to us (humans). But the movie demolishes any such belief, if anyone were to have one, at the end by showing that at least with one type of alien we are superior.
The story is about an alien invasion. It starts on July 2 and ends on July
4. On July 2 (in a near future time) a humongous spaceship enters earth's
atmosphere and hovers over major cities of the globe. Something X-files fans
would have been waiting for to happen but Mulder and Scully would not have
wanted.
The film seems to promote cheering humanistic values. It proposes: human beings as opposed to aliens are good. Never so much did they corporate and play together as a team fighting for survival of humanity as a whole. It releases you from your neurotic anxiety.
If you hate your job or if your love life is a mess and when the things you take for granted are threatened, there is nothing like an alien invasion to put things in perspective and inspire your sense of humour! The director does not take you on an artificial swing over ashen land with only sad music. But the movie is out with such imagery that anyone would first feel a sense of loss or impermanance and then a sense of insecurity which in the next moment turns to a feeling of patriotic necessity to fight.
And at this time the very people who would be prime suspects if this destruction was man-made, are part of the solution. So the movie does say much more than one thing.
"There is a sense of unplugging from political activity, civic duties or even responsibilities to our neighbours by saying that there are things that are at least greater than us and hidden from us. We are a superstitious species, we need to look outside ourselves for something larger that will bring either calamity or wisdom or both," says Clive Barker author and critic.
That is why the movie is a universal one. There is no single hero. No one man could have done it. Till the end there is heroic sacrifice by every man who fights. Independence Day is unlike X-files. X-files seems to bring in a new 90's twist to science fiction and its not so much of sci.fic. but pychoanalystic fiction. Independence Day does not go to psychic extremes. It catches the aliens straight out of the universe and shows what they can do and what they can't.
The movie consists of two things. One is man's courage, born out of necessity, calamity and chaos. The volunteer pilot sacrificing his life to launch the last missile and the President's going back to his old job as a pilot in order to fight the evil.
Biology helps earthlings to understand that nuclear attack could finish the aliens and so they attack the ship till the very last alien is destroyed.
As far as the characters are concerned the movie basically revolves around three main characters. The first main appearance is David Livingston (Jeff Goldblum), the computer wiz-kid. Jeff plays an intellectual role with the typical intellectual eccentricity thrown in. He can break a computer code of an alien ship. He is not worried about the broken marriage. He rides the bicycle all the way in to the office room.
Jeff is introduced as a genius and he is kept there. Despite being one of the indispensable heroes David's character has very little to be commented on. However this remark has to be made i.e., unlike the other two main characters there is no development in David's character. There is simply no necessity for that.
The next main character is the President (Bill Pullman). The President, Thomas Whitmore, is elected as a Gulf War hero. An indecisive person in the beginning, at most times misinformed or not adequately informed. But towards the end he develops into a mature character. He is a man put to the test, who grows up as the movie develops.
He portrays a portly gentleman and is a cross between Kennedy and Clinton. A good President, good enough for Hillary to tell the actor that he could let Clinton take a few days off.
Will Smith plays the next important character. Though Smith is portrayed to be an evolved hero like the President the other beauty in his character is that the director has not made Smith lose his humour which was the genesis of his screen like, (especially when he drags the dead alien across the desert giving it a kick for having ruined his holiday-in one instance.)
Doomsday aside the movie fulfils the prime promise of the movie to deliver. A consistent weird upbeat mood prevails. The movie may be goofy but not dumb. It barely cheats at story level and hints at lives beyond the frame. It does not have an emphatic pulse that forces hearts into throats and keeps them there. No shedding of tears. But we shake off the fear only when the lights come up saying its only a movie.
He couldn't change his bed sheets without a shrink, former lover tells TV interviewer Wounding disclosures about Woody Allen, the American film-maker, are to be made by his ex-lover and muse, Mia Farrow. They include the claim that their relationship was complicated, like the Prince and Princess of Wales, by a third party - however, not a lover but Mr Allen's psychiatrist.
Miss Farrow, a waif-like actress whose relationship with Mr Allen crumbled horribly after he fell in love with her young adopted daughter, Soon-Yi gave an interview which was broadcast on American television.
At the very least, it is likely to send the unfortunate Mr Allen back to his shrink for yet more analysis.
In the interview, a "tranquil" Miss Farrow tells Barbara Walters, her sympathetic inquisitor, that there were effectively three people in her affair with Mr Allen whom she calls "a very, very analysed man". So obsessed was he by his Manhattan psychiatrist, says Miss Farrow, that he would not even buy mundane household items, such as bedroom linen, without discussing the matter at length on the psychiatrist's couch.
Mr. Allen's film characters encapsulate the twitchy New Yorker who is bound inextricably to Freud, Jung and similar figures. It is a caricature the bespectacled actor-director has perfected over more than two decades.
All too many New Yorkers, many of them quite sane, make regular visits to a shrink. It is hard to say if Mr. Allen's films portrayed real life, or if real life has emulated his art.
In his own life, according to past accounts, Mr. Allen is a more composed personality. Interviewers have long found him to be a creature of self-control, with a well-creased daily routine, a life of cardigan comforts and a sure view of his artistic aims.
The disenchanted Miss Farrow, who has reportedly been much peeved by the outside world's general tolerance of his affair with young Soon-Yi and his own apparent lack of embarrassment, offers a different view.
"He had polyester sheets and I wanted to get cotton," she tells Miss Walters. "He discussed it with his shrink many times before he made the switch. And he's been in therapy since he was like 19, so we're talking about 40 years of therapy."
She also dwells sorrowfully on Mr. Allen's failure to marry her during their 12-year relationship. Throughout it, they maintained separate homes on opposite sides of the island of Manhattan.
Miss Farrow, 52, whose broken loves have included marriages to Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn, said Mr. Allen had a peculiar loathing of pink. She says he becomes "quite angry" at people who wear the colour. He prefers them to clothe themselves in the greys, browns and off-whites that he wears mostly.
When she found out about his love for Soon-Yi she was "stunned; it was like an axe fell through me. I was totally traumatised". Miss Farrow, who said she still loves Frank Sinatra, told Miss Walters she would not find it easy ever to trust anyone again.
Filming of the ABC 20-20 interview with Miss Farrow took place at her house in Connecticut. She appeared relaxed, wore a casual sweater and jeans and, according to a gooey Miss Walters, "radiated warmth during their discussion, despite the chilly nature of her disclosures.
The interview marked the start of publicity efforts for Miss Farrow's published memoirs, which will be celebrated tomorrow with an Upper East Side party attended by a number of luminaries.
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