E.t Film Quotes

David Bowie could not only sing, he could also not act, and appeared in several films, playing the homesick alien title character in E.T., and a sort of Duran Duran fairy king in the family film Muppets Vs The Goblin Crotch. He even took over Christmas, singing a special carol with Bing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who’d forgotten the words, and being at the start of that cartoon about the snowman sometimes.

Berlin. November 18, 1917. Sunday. I think Grosz has something demonic in him. This new Berlin art in general, Grosz, Becher, Benn, Wieland Herzfelde, is most curious. Big city art, with a tense density of impressions that appears simultaneous, brutally realistic, and at the same time fairy-tale-like, just like the big city itself, illuminating things harshly and distortedly as with searchlights and then disappearing in the glow. A highly nervous, cerebral, illusionist art, and in this respect reminiscent of the music hall and also of film, or at least of a possible, still unrealized film. An art of flashing lights with a perfume of sin and perversity like every nocturnal street in the big city. The precursors are E.T.A. Hoffmann, Breughel, Mallarmé, Seurat, Lautrec, the futurists: but in the density and organization of the overwhelming abundance of sensation, the brutal reality, the Berliners seem new to me. Perhaps one could also include Stravinsky here (Petrushka). Piled-up ornamentation each of which expresses a trivial reality but which, in their sum and through their relations to each other, has a thoroughly un-trivial impact. All round the world war rages and in the center is this nervous city in which so much presses and shoves, so many people and streets and lights and colors and interests: politics and music hall, business and yet also art, field gray, privy counselors, chansonettes, and right and left, and up and down, somewhere, very far away, the trenches, regiments storming over to attack, the dying, submarines, zeppelins, airplane squadrons, columns marching on muddy streets, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, victories; Riga, Constantinople, the Isonzo, Flanders, the Russian Revolution, America, the Anzacs and the poilus, the pacifists and the wild newspaper people. And all ending up in the half-darkened Friedrichstrasse, filled with people at night, unconquerable, never to be reached by Cossacks, Gurkhas, Chasseurs d'Afrique, Bersaglieris, and cowboys, still not yet dishonored, despite the prostitutes who pass by. If a revolution were to break out here, a powerful upheaval in this chaos, barricades on the Friedrichstrasse, or the collapse of the distant parapets, what a spark, how the mighty, inextricably complicated organism would crack, how like the Last Judgment! And yet we have experienced, have caused precisely this to happen in Liège, Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, even almost in Paris. That's the world war, all right.

If you want to know why modern man has settled on a base-10 number system, just spread your hands and count the digits. All creatures develop a number system based on their basic counting equipment; for us, that means our ten fingers. The Mayans, who went around barefoot, used a base-20 (vigesimal) number system; their calendars employ twenty different digits. The ancient Babylonians, who counted on their two arms as well as their ten fingers, devised a base-12 number system that still lives today in the methods we use to tell time and buy eggs. Someday a diligent grad student doing interdisciplinary work in mathematics and the history of film may produce a dissertation demonstrating that the residents of E.T.’s planet use an octal number system; the movie shows plainly that E.T. has eight fingers. For earthbound humans, however, the handy counting system is base-10.

(We may owe Superman and E.T. to Jewish film directors, but there’s no doubting that it’s the Christian story we’re being told.)