Spurned on by my posting on the Signs Topic I watched Close Encounters and Spielberg's War Of The Worlds.
CE3K holds up incredibly well the scenes with the aliens seem a bit disjointed (where did the big spindly one go after his first appearance and the little kids in giant head masks look a little too much like little kids in giant head masks in some shots) but on the whole it's still a wonderful film.
War Of The Worlds is much better than I remembered it the first time around.
I'd still love to see a straight period adaptation of the book (that wasn't the hilarious Pendragon pictures film) but as a modern adaptation it's rather good.
The big problem is the ending (not the ending that's there in the book which upset some boobs when the film came out) but the Kodak moment ending.
There is no way that a certain character could have possibly survived what happens in the film and the whole framing of the scene feels incredibly contrived.
It suddenly stuck me how perfect the ending of The Mist is and how daring it was (I know a lot of Stephen King fans don't like it but it's a really good ending for that film).
It hit me that it would have been a really powerful ending to have that ending as a dream and then show us the reality of that house as pile of rubble, leaving Ray to bring up his daughter in the world after the war with his new found responsibility.
It have been the ideal counterpoint to CE3K where the father leaves everything behind to travel the stars to have a father lose almost everything but stay and rebuild with the one part of his old life he has left.