Title: |
Release Date: 1994 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 86 Minutes |
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Distributor and Production Company: Lions Gate Films; Viacom, Citadel |
Director; Writer: Arthur Kopit |
Producer: |
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen, Dwight Yoakam |
Technical: Regular, Video, Dolby |
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Review: Viacom presented Roswell:
The U.F.O. Cover-Up in 1994 on cable, and the film came across as a
rather microscopic account of a possibly important incident in our military
history, the The scenes with the aliens, including one live one, are interesting and remind one of the infamous British “alien autopsy” videos. The grays seem to have no gastrointestinal tracts and no reproductive organs or genitalia; they seem not to be autonomous individuals as we understand them. But the most important value of this film is the roundabout discussion on “truth.” Six Days in Roswell (1999, at the 2000 Minneapolis-St.
Paul international film festival), from Benevolent Authority Films, directed
by Timothy B. Johnson, is a narrative documentary (85 min, PG) of a
homebody’s (Richard Cronfeld, apparently playing
himself) taking a bus trip from his native Minneapolis to Roswell for the UFO
festival in July 1997. In fact, the protagonist’s domestic personality is
most striking: he lives at home and takes care of his ailing mom, works in an electronics shop and expects little—never
having left In 1998, I visited The film presents the theories—the 1994 release that the Air Force was using crash dummies, for example, and that there had been various secret Cold War experiments. There is a curious pro-government demonstration in one scene. The mylar-metal of Jesse Marcel is mentioned. There’s an off-off-off-Broadway musical that dramatizes the aliens. I can’t say how convincing it all is, but it’s a good introduction for the novice. When will the The History Channel has presented a Roswell: Case Closed
program, which seems to explain And, by the way, the “aliens” of The Mothman Prophecies (Sony Screen Gems,
Lakeshore Entertainment, 2001, starring Richard Gere)
seem a bit off track. (There once, in the 80s, was another sc—fi thriller called “Prophecy.”) They come up in the
imaginations of the The Sci-Channel broadcast a
2-hour documentary, The Bermuda
Triangle: Startling New Evidence, in Nov. 2005. The documentary, using
several well known network news reports, traced the familiar stories,
especially the disappearance of the five Navy Avengers in December 2005. The
possibility that Atlantis could have existed in the Bemini
area 10000 years ago when sea levels were lower is presented. There is also
the idea of a vortex with a singularity or time warp in the eye, perhaps
produced by aliens. (I will accept nothing less!) But there is little or no “new evidence.”
This documentary prepares for the Sci-Fi channel miniseries “The Triangle”
starting National Geographic has Extraterrestrials (2005, 60 min), a richly animated documentary showing how earth-like life could have evolved on two different worlds within 50 light years of so of the Solar System. One planet revolves around a red dwarf, a stable star that can last about 100 billion years. One side faces the star all the time, so the far side is frozen, and at the hottest point there is a perpetual Hurrincane Katrina. But in the temperate areas there is a kind of Jurassic park, with large parasol plants (reddish in color) and dinosaur like animals. The biological kingdoms resemble earth’s. A sea Portist has the ability to form huge slime or blob colonies that go on shore and attack animals. The other world, “Blue Planet,” is a moon of a gas giant relatively close to a sun-like star. It is about twice as big as earth and has a thick, oxygen-laden atmosphere where much life is airborne, including sea whales. Algae float in the atmosphere also. See associated blog entry about the discovery of a new “Earth 2” like planet 20 light years away around a red dwarf. Communion
(1989, New Line, dir. Philippe Mora, 101 min, R, based on the book by Whitley
Strieber, 1985) is a UFO film du jour. On
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