Something of a cross between Late for Dinner and, oh, let's see, out of unnumbered E.T. imitators, let's pick Starman. Ostensibly an ode to emotional openness and honesty, formulated in terms of a science-fictional gizmo and an unlikely chain of plotmaking convenience. The gizmo -- what looks like a locomotive coffin but is in fact a cryonics capsule patented 1939 -- just happens to be ready for its first human experimental subject when the hero (Mel Gibson), a test pilot by trade, is grieving over his comatose sweetheart and needs some help getting through the next several months. The gizmo's inventor happens to be his best friend, and happens to have just lost his sole candidate for a human guinea pig. How perfect. But then no one revives the hero until a half-century later, when a couple of kids happen to be rummaging around in a dusty military warehouse and happen to throw the necessary lever. Little is made of his Rip van Winklesque culture-shock: phone-answering machines (although no hesitation over touch-tone phones); the casual use of expressions like "prick" and "asshole" by the woman of the Nineties; Suzanne Somers's TV spots for Thigh-Master. The ending, hell-bent on producing a lump in your throat, rams a fist into your mouth all the way up to the elbow. With Elijah Wood, Jamie Lee Curtis, and George Wendt; directed by Steve Miner. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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