My cinema year: 1989

According to Wikipedia, the top 10 films released in 1989 by worldwide gross were as follows:

1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
2. Batman
3. Back to the Future Part II
4. Look Who’s Talking
5. Dead Poets Society
6. The Little Mermaid
7. Lethal Weapon 2
8. Honey, I Shrunk The Kids
9. Ghostbusters II
10. Born on the Fourth of July

As a twelve year old, I saw six of these films at the cinema at the time. I have now seen all of them.

I went to the cinema a lot in 1989, perhaps more than all the previous years of my life combined. Conditions were almost perfect:

1. Although I would never have dreamed of going to the cinema on my own, I was now old enough to go without parental supervision.
2. My friend Leon arrived at my school this year and keenly encouraged me to see lots of films on a weekly basis.
3. I was getting more and more interested in cinema and watched Barry Norman on Film 89 regularly. However, I was not as snobby as I would get later (although I d
4. I was exactly the right age to see film such as Batman and Look Who’s Talking which were released under the brand new ’12’ certificate launched in 1989 (although I still couldn’t see ’15’ or ’18’ rated movies).
5. I lived within fifteen minutes’ walk of the city’s Odeon cinema.
6. The new Showcase was showing more films than ever.

This last point was a mixed blessing, however. The Showcase was out of town and seemed to have been designed to be as inaccessible to pedestrians as possible, being surrounded by a network of busy roads, tall hedges and unfriendly housing estates. I did not drive anywhere when I was twelve. I still don’t.

The Showcase also nudged the city’s Canon cinema out of business almost immediately. Within a few years, it would have done the same for the Odeon.

I’m pleased to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at the top of the list (I’ve never liked Batman much). It is probably one of the most consistently entertaining and satisfying movie blockbusters that I have ever seen. I remember watching it with Leon and his friend who was visiting from Leeds. My Dad, who had given us a lift had also decided to watch it with my younger brother, but sat separately in the same room, so as not to cramp my style. At the same time, another group of kids we knew from school sat watching nearby. It is an odd memory.

Back To The Future II and Ghostbusters II were both okay, but definitely less satisfactory as sequels. I loved all the futuristic stuff in BTTF 2 – Jaws 17 and the hover boards, for example, but I’d already seen most of that in the clips on TV already. The film doesn’t really end properly and even has an actual trailer for the third film included within the film itself! Neither of the Back to the Future sequels are bad exactly, but both fall a long way short of the charm of the original. All the bits where Michael J. Fox plays anyone other than Marty are crap.

What else? I was interested in Dead Poets and Born on the Fourth, but was too young to see them. I wasn’t interested in Lethal Weapon II at all. I hadn’t seen the first one then anyway and am surprised it made it into the top ten. I was too old to see The Little Mermaid.

I was a little old to see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids too, but saw it anyway (it was very overhyped). For some reason, we were taken to see it again by the school. For this reason alone it remains the only film I have ever seen at the cinema twice. It was not really a bad movie exactly though (inspiring the sequels, Honey, We Blew Up The Kid and Honey, We Blew Up Ourselves). In fact, with the exception of Look Who’s Talking (which I liked at the time anyway), it’s not a bad top ten.

Many of the films I saw in 1989 (such as Police Academy 6: City Under Siege and Erik the Viking) did not enjoy these levels of box office success. The Abyss? I did not even know what an abyss was when Leon first suggested seeing it, but was glad I did. I also thought Fletch Lives was called Flesh Lives at first which makes it sound like some sort of David Cronenberg horror. The cousin Ruprecht sequence in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was also enough in itself to make me a Steve Martin fan forever. “This is the happiest day of my life! I think my testicles are dropping!”

Ten years on: Iain M. Banks (1954-2013)

Two great Scottish authors died on 9th June 2013. One, Iain Banks attracted a deluge of controversy with his debut, The Wasp Factory in 1984, following it up with fourteen other novels amongst them The Bridge, The Crow Road, Complicity and The Quarry.

The other, Iain M. Banks produced a similar number of volumes of science fiction. These included his series of novels about the Culture who have been described as “a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens, and advanced super-intelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way.”

Edgar Wright’s 2006 film, Hot Fuzz (2006) includes a scene in which two policemen, played by the comedian, Bill Bailey, who are subsequently revealed to be identical twins read books by the two authors.

Of course, both writers – Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks, were the same man.

Saving Mr Banks

Banks died, much too young, ten years ago. By a tragic coincidence, he was close to finishing the novel which would turn out to be his last, The Quarry, a book which features a character dying of cancer, when he learned he had terminal gallbladder cancer himself. He finished the book and quickly married his long term partner, Adele Hartley at the end of March after asking her, if “you would do me the honour of becoming my widow.” Publication dates for The Quarry were pushed forward to the middle of June. This was still too late for Banks who died on June 9th 2013, at the fifty-nine.

In The Quarry, Banks describes cancer like this: “Cancer makes bits of you grow that are supposed to have stopped growing after a certain point, crowding out the bits you need to keep on living, if you’re unlucky, if the treatments don’t work.” 

He would not actually be very old even if he was still alive: his 70th birthday would have been next February. Selfishly, I cannot help but mourn the seven or eight books which he would probably written over the course of the last decade had he lived, books which will now remain forever unwritten and forever unread.

Culture wars

He would doubtless have had much to say about the events of the last ten years too. He would have been disappointed to see that the Conservatives are still in power after thirteen years of a dismal lack of achievement. “I’m not arguing there are no decent people in the Tory party,” he once wrote, “but they’re like sweetcorn in a turd; technically they kept their integrity but they’re still embedded in shit.” He would have been horrified and angered by Brexit and by the rise of Johnson and Trump. “Look me in the eye, you twat, and tell me you weren’t tempted to vote for him (Boris Johnson),” argues one character. in his final book “You’re more of a Blairite than that lying, war-mongering scumbag is himself.”

I don’t know for sure what Iain Banks would have written about any of the events of the last turbulent decade. However, I am quite certain it would be funnier and more insightful and wittier than anything I could come up with myself. As both an author and a social commentator, his presence has been sorely missed.

Memory Banks

A selection of quotations from his works…

“Looking at me, you’d never guess I’d killed three people. It isn’t fair…I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.” The Wasp Factory (1984).

“This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.” The Player of Games (1987).

“There’s this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it’s mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, ‘I don’t know; it all happened so quickly…” Espedair Street (1987).

“We are what we do, not what we think.” The Player of Games (1987).

“The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!” Use of Weapons (1990).

“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.” The State of the Art (1991).

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.” The Crow Road (1992). Opening line.

“When in Rome; burn it.” The State of the Art (1991).

“People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots… in fact I think they have to be… a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.” The Crow Road (1992).

“Collective responsibility. Also known as sharing the blame.” Excession (1996).

“Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite.” Dead Air (2001).

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.” Transition (2009).

“He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.” Surface Detail (2010).

“One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.” The Hydrogen Sonata (2012).

“After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.” Raw Spirit (2003).

“Well, we’re all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.” The Crow Road (1992).

My cinema year: 1988

According to Wikipedia, the top 10 films released in 1988 by worldwide gross were as follows:

1. Rain Man
2. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
3. Coming to America
4. Crocodile Dundee II
5. Twins
6. Rambo III
7. A Fish Called Wanda
8. Cocktail
9. Big
10. Die Hard

I saw two of these films at the cinema as an eleven-year-old. As of 2023, I have seen eight of them.

I wasn’t a big film buff as a child. Although never sporty or outdoorsy, I had lots of other things to do. I played. I rode my BMX around the park. I learned to swim. I drew cartoons and wrote stories. I read books: I first read Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books. I also still enjoyed comics like Buster and Oink! I played computer games: we got an Amiga around this time. I was not yet really into music (although did watch ITV’s The Chart Show) and was as yet untroubled by girls.

But films? Occasionally, I’d watch Police Academy films during sleepovers but that was about it.

In December, I went to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit to celebrate my twelfth birthday. This was quite a big deal, not only because of the film itself, but because it was our family’s first outing to Peterborough’s brand new Showcase multiplex cinema. A few well-behaved friends came along too.

In those days, the very idea of seeing live action characters and cartoons interacting on screen was still so novel that even seeing clips from Pete’s Dragon or even much older films like Anchors Aweigh (in which Jerry the mouse dances with Gene Kelly) or the politically incorrect, A Song of the South was still quite exciting. The prospect of an entire film where this occurred throughout was thus very thrilling indeed.

I thus enjoyed it. I even got a big poster of the film as an additional present too. But this was 35 years ago now and, I confess, I’ve not seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit again since, so have no real idea how it holds up today. I do know that my parents, who were then about the same age then, as I am now, did not enjoy the experience. Never big fans of cartoons in any form they fond both the film and the new cinema noisy and unpleasant.

As far as I can remember I saw only two other films at the cinema during 1988: the fantasy film, Willow, which was good but a flop and Crocodile Dundee II which was rubbish but a success.

I’ve never seen Rambo III and doubt I ever will now, although I enjoyed the first Rambo when I saw it years later. Twins has been on TV lots of times. I’ve seen bits of it but have never felt moved to watch it in full.

More than half of the films in the top ten would actually have been unsuitable for me to watch as an eleven-year-old. Two feature Tom Cruise. Rain Man features one of his best ever performances. Cocktail is one of his worst. I didn’t see Coming To America until a few years. It wasn’t worth the wait.

I did enjoy Big, however, which I saw fairly soon after it came out on video. I suppose I was a similar age to the boy in the film, although unlike him I was always tall for my age. It was a good film which I watched with my family. We already knew Tom Hanks from Splash! It’s an enjoyable film although a slight note of unease creeps in when the main character, still psychologically a child, has sex with an adult woman.

As I was already a Monty Python fan, I also saw A Fish Called Wanda on video as soon as I could. For me, the real revelations in the film were Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis, not Michael Palin or John Cleese. Although, to be fair, I was already very familiar with them.

All the films on the list pale in comparison to Die Hard, however. I finally saw it when I was fourteen or fifteen. I felt very grown up watching it at home one Saturday night with my older brother and his soon-to-be-wife. It’s a brilliant idea, beautifully executed. Bruce Wills isn’t always great in everything but was perfect for this. And has there ever been a better screen villain than Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber? I don’t think so.

It’s a film which changed cinema forever.