This is my one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seventh blog posting, which is frightening amount of verbiage and daft video clips collected in one place. Most bloggers have long since migrated to other social media like Twitter [where you can find me @davidbishop], but I'm happy to keep blogging my journey as a writer.
To celebrate the imminent arrival of my 2000th blog posting, I've decided to do a themed countdown. And since this is posting 1977, today's posting looks back at the year Star Wars first burst into our consciousness and iconic British comic 2000AD was launched. But I'm ignoring both of them, because they've been well mined here before.
Instead, I want to praise another great leap forwards for science fiction and filmmaking from 1977 - Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Before he opted for cute aliens like E.T., Spielberg came up with this remarkable story of a man suffering chronic depression who abandons his family to chase UFOs.
IN all honesty, I can't imagine Spielberg making this movie now. It's so 1970s, full of bleak paranoia and sinister undertones - a real product of the Watergate era. But I loved CE3K when I first saw it at the pictures, and still think it's a great piece of filmmaking. Below is one of my favourite scenes: simple, yet incredible tension.
Next is a scene deleted from the movie, which some kindly soul has uploaded to YouTube, presumably from a DVD or Blu-Ray special edition [hmm, must get that soon]. I'm guessing this got cut for timing reasons, plus it pulled focus from an already fractured narrative that follows several character's journeys to Devil's Tower.
Last but not least, here's a short scene from CE3K with an inappropriate soundtrack added - aliens bring the noise. Droll. Very droll.
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