popular thinking

WAR OF THE WORLDS: Early thoughts from a Monday night preview screening...if you're sitting between your paper's film critic and a woman who used to co-host a nationally syndicated movie review show, you're bound to get opinions and questions fired at you. That said, Dixie Whatley, why are you testing out your wit on me right when the space monkeys start vaporizing the humans? Trying to concentrate. Some of us actually don't talk during a movie...but many of us laugh when Steven Spielberg throws us a major league knuckleball near the end...funny that all of the pre-movie talk was about how crazy Tom Cruise is, and yet, Spielberg's visual effects (with nods to the cinematographer and ILM, natch) are quite stunning and make you forget about all that tabloid fodder for a couple of hours...for a fun game, if you've already read the book or seen the movie and just want to play film student, keep track of all the previous movie references Spielberg drops (spaceship sounds not quite as rhythmic as Close Encounters, a hide-and-seek reminds you of the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park kitchen, when in doubt, make the vulnerability come from Independence Day/Star Wars, and so on and so on). But hours later, thinking about what I'd seen, one idea kept coming back to haunt me, and for that, you must wait until Friday's paper when my story runs. So go see the movie before then, and you'll be up to speed. Just don't pay $10. And hope that the inane no cell phones, no handbags rule was only for preview screenings. What was the studio worried about exactly? It's not as if people wouldn't have some idea of the plot of an 1898 novel turned into an infamous 1938 radio broadcast turned 1950s movie beforehand...psst: Not all aliens are like E.T. Pass it on.