Newsletter 57: There Remains No Movie Quite Like E.T.

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing.This one’s from June 2017, about seeing E.T. with my sons in the theater at about the same age I saw it in the theater. It remains a perfect movie.

We took the boys to see E.T. last weekend. It was showing as part of the Flashback Cinema series, which shows old movies at multiplexes on select dates at select theaters across the country; you can go see The Princess Bride next week, and Raiders of the Lost Ark soon, and all kinds of great stuff. It’s like having our own, non-indie New Beverly.

I hadn’t seen E.T. in the theater since I saw it when it first came out, way back in 1982, when I was six years old. It’s my second-earliest movie memory — I remember falling asleep in the back of my parents’ van during a drive-in double feature of Taps and The Cannonball Run — and without question my most vivid early one: The scene where E.T. and Elliot surprise each other by screaming is maybe the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. But I was mesmerized by it when I was a kid: There was a time when I was…