It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here with Scott Tobias, Genevieve Kosky, and Tasha Robinson.

Every week we get together to talk over a classic film, consider how it relates to a current movie.

This week we'll look at the beginning and the likely

end of a franchise featuring weird aliens, cool gadget, sharp suits, and a surprisingly laid-back

attitude about the presence of aliens on Earth. Tasha, can you tell us about this week's pairing?

I was planning on it, but it says in the script, Tasha speaks an unintelligible alien language that

includes syllables never

heard before on Earth and is occasionally interrupted by the sounds of a wet gill opening and

closing. I don't know if I can do that. Oh, right. Well, I just figured Genevieve and Dan could

lay that over in post-production, right? It would sound really cool, and my extremely funny intro

kind of depends on it.

Okay, Genevieve's giving me a look that says, we don't have the resources or budget for that,

so maybe just take a more straightforward approach. And I had just worked myself up to the point

of making wet gill noises, but fine, whatever. Our story begins either in the 1950s, when

humanity first made contact with beings from another planet, or the early 90s, when a small publisher released a comic book called The Men in Black, which eventually caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, who was looking to produce more movies and always had a soft spot for stories about extraterrestrials.

After bouncing from director to director and star to star, it landed in the hands of Barry

Sondfeld, who was enjoying a kind of hot streak thanks to the Adams family films and

Get Shorty, and it landed as it stars Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.

...