So since I recently revealed my love for less than stellar movies, it should come to NO surprise that I love E.T. Like many children of the 1980s, it had a profound impact on my under-developed psyche, representing a high-grade form of formative trauma that balanced out what was a more or less life or privilege otherwise marked by a much lower grade of constant trauma borne from a higher than statistically normal number of flying dishes, the direct outcome of a less than loving marriage.

So in 2001 when the movie was released, I of course had to go see it in big screen. I was pretty sure that despite my love of trash, the movie would bore me, its thrill, extending only out to a 10 year old girls/boys psychology. I mean I knew I would dig the hardware hacking scene but I was fruitfully surprised by the critical complexity of the film.

While at dinner on Thursday with a bunch of anthro friends, we somehow got on the topic of Speilberg movies and most of them, very sadly, loved the Indiana Jones trilogy but did not share my adoration of E.T. (who I love more now that I know my mom thinks of herself as E.T. due to her really wrinkled skin). There was one friend who, however, did not only share my fondness for the brown stodgy creature from the very far-reaches of outer space but LOVES HIM EVEN MORE than me. The news was surely exciting to me and my immediate reaction was a typical 1970s expression of deep inner joy: FAR OUT.

But as it turned out, there was more excitment than I could ever imagine. She revealed that there was a Bollywood, yes Bollywood movie loosely based on E.T, Koi Mil Gaya (and of course the first thing to pop to my IP-obssessed mind was is that even legal and damn where can I rent that?)

But even better is that my friend, which is one of the geekier things I have seen produced by her, has written a fairly in-depth commentary comparing these two wistful movies cocentrating on the social and political implactions within the narrative which ultimately is the journey of boyhood into manhood.

So if you love (or possibly hate) E.T. as much as I do, Gen’s analysis is pretty stellar:

“It is for this reason that Koi Mil Gaya is far more violent than ET and also far more hopeful. In a more human and social world, confrontation is inevitable but victory is possible. Although both stories tell a child