Don't get me wrong -- I think it's a good film on the whole, and extremely well-made. But I still don't care for the way it tried (and apparently succeeded) to pull the audience's chain. If a film wants tears from me, it has to earn them honestly. I was annoyed by the way E.T. tried to do it.
I'd say if that's how it made you feel, then it's valid. Others would disagree, but their response is no less valid. I think a lot of people seek out films to be moved (or manipulated; same thing really, but an entirely different connotation). You watch a comedy when you need a laugh, or an adventure when you need a rush.
Film is a brief medium. A novel has hundreds of pages to build and create and we often live with them for several days or weeks. But a film doesn't have the same advantages, and often has to use shorthand to achieve the same objective. In a novel we can get inside a character's head, but not so in a movie. Thus in a novel we may have an entire chapter where we hear a brooding character's thoughts. In a movie we get a minute long montage of them with a thousand mile stare set to a moody piece of music or particular song.
There's a really great article on the subject of emotional manipulation that I'll link here if you have a few minutes.
http://movies.mxdwn.com/feature/stop-complaining-about-films-manipulating-you/
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A journey into the realm of the obscure: http://saturdayshowcase.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the link. Good article, albeit a bit one-sided, though I did like that the author brought up American Sniper and that film's distressingly simplistic distillation of an immensely complex issue. I still maintain there is a difference between a film like E.T. and films like 12 Years a Slave or Schindler's List, which did get tears from me (in their final scenes) and earned them honestly.
So why one and not the other? I guess it boils down to expectations. I know going into a film about slavery or the Holocaust that it is going to demand a lot from me emotionally, and I'm okay with that -- I have made that choice. E.T.'s illness and death/near death and then all-too-convenient resurrection seemed shoehorned in for no particular reason, and it didn't really jibe (to me, anyway) with the rest of the film.
Oh yeah, totally one-sided, but purposefully so because I thought it made my point far more eloquently than I did, and it made for a good counter-argument.
I suppose I have different criteria depending on the subject matter. With a film that deals with a serious topic or is based on an actual event, I do take offense to it laying on the schmaltz or over-dramatizing. But with something like Field of Dreams or E.T., I want to be moved. I want to soar with them when they take off into the sky, I want to feel the pain of their separation and the triumph of their escape. And to do that, with that particular subject matter and less than 2hrs runtime, you need to use shorthand. That's why music plays such a crucial role in movies. It can cut right to the heart of you, and put you instantly in a state of mind.
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A journey into the realm of the obscure: http://saturdayshowcase.blogspot.com/
feistein,
I'm totally with you on this one. I saw E.T. when it first came out and I was the only one in the theater not crying at the end. I LOVE being manipulated by movies. The Color Purple is even more shamelessly manipulative and still gets me every single time. But E.T. never did it for me. I just re-watched it on Netflix hoping I'd have a different reaction after all these years. Nope. It's just trying too hard. The one scene where I did choke up a bit was when all the bicycles lifted off the ground, because it was such a soaring, triumphant moment. But all the scenes that are trying to jerk tears leave me cold. Funny you should mention 12 Years a Slave. I think that's a great movie until...the final scene. At that moment it tries to out Color Purple The Color Purple, as if Steve McQueen turned over directing duties to Steven Spielberg. To me it was a jarring shift in tone from the unsentimental, matter-of-fact brutality of the previous two hours.
feistein: It's been 30 years since I've seen ET, so I'm not going to comment on whether it's manipulative or not. I just wanted to address the part of your post where you said that SCHINDLER'S LIST in its final scenes "earned" tears from you. My experience was the same as yours; however, I have heard others say just the opposite: namely, that even SCHINDLER'S LIST is "manipulative." (They tend to say this especially about Schindler's "I could have got more" scene, which had me sobbing right along with Liam Neeson.) Bottom line: it's all subjective.
shareThe one scene where I did choke up a bit was when all the bicycles lifted off the ground, because it was such a soaring, triumphant moment.That moment definitely has "an effect", in illustrating how man is no match for E.T. in a context. share
All films do that. It's what they're supposed to do, otherwise they wouldn't be movies.
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