On January 1, 1980, I was 12 years old and roughly half-way through seventh grade. It was, as Charles Dickens wrote, "the best of times… the worst of times." Junior high school was hell. In those days (and I suspect it hasn't changed much), ...
The problem with being 13 years old and wanting to go to the movies every weekend was that transportation was an issue. With the nearest theater not within bicycling distance (my preferred means of traveling to most nearby destinations), that meant ...
The thing I remember most forcefully about 1982 isn't the Falklands Islands conflict, the crash of Air Florida Flight 90 into the Potomac, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, or the death of Brezhnev. It was the arrival in theaters of ...
For me, 1983 was an "off" year as far as movies were concerned. The reason? No new Star Trek films. In fact, when I think of that year, the first thing that comes to mind is the snowstorm of February 11, which dumped nearly two feet on Southern ...
Hardly a day passed in 1984 without someone mentioning George Orwell's novel. For me, the year was less about whether we were inching nearer to a society monitored by Big Brother than of the freedoms afforded by turning 17. Beginning September 25, ...
On a global scale, not a lot happened in 1985; this allowed trivia to dominate the news cycle. Ronald Reagan officially began his second term but no one really noticed. It had long been assumed that the Great Communicator would be in office for ...
My memories of 1986 are not much about movies, although it can't be said that I avoided multiplexes during the course of the year. Rather, when I gaze back through the mists of time, other things dominate my thoughts about the year when I ...
If I was going to choose a year in which I became more than a casual movie-goer, it would be 1987. My total that year, when combining theatrical and home video titles, came in around 100 - far more than in any previous year. In the past, my bread-...
1988 was a strange year for me - one in which I felt dissociated from the world at large. In the pre-Internet era, it was necessary to seek out news by turning on the television, listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper. For the most part, ...
If 1988 was lacking in earthshaking current events, 1989 more than made up for it. The first major international news story began percolating in late April; at that time, most of the news outlets either ignored it or relegated it to a back-page item...
After seeing Coraline, I was hopeful that the hype emerging from the major studios about 3-D being the "wave of the future" might have a basis in reality. Granted, 3-D wasn't used perfectly in Coraline, but it seemed to be at best an enhancement and...
It's that time of the year again. As December winds to a close, critics of all sorts gaze back at the past 12 months and try to provide intelligent, insightful reflections about things that happened, trends, and so forth. You won't find any of that...
It's no secret that I have been critical of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), the organization that doles out motion picture classifications (or ratings) to movies in the United States. My criticism comes on two fronts, both of which...
When it comes to reviewing older movies, I'm at my best when some kind of "series" is involved. So, after completing my nostalgic journey through the '80s, which resulted in my watching about 90 movies and reviewing a little more than a third of ...
As has been widely reported, movie theater attendance is up about 10% in 2009 over a similar period in early 2008. A paradoxical aspect of this stat is that the spike in attendance comes at a time when excitement about films is at a low ebb. People...
If the 1990s represented the early years of the Internet (not really its birth, but the time when the general public first became aware of it), the 2000s were when it came of age. Most of the common applications and sites we use on a regular basis ...
The Internet can be a hell of a nasty place in which to interact. It's a chicken-and-egg situation. Is the unpleasant and hostile on-line an environment the result of a growing cultural incivility and impoliteness, or are we becoming more ...