A bit of rose-tinted childhood nostalgia can evoke memories of when life felt less chaotic and the future was full of unlimited possibilities. I remember seeing Beetlejuice with my friend Mark during sixth grade. I remember it distinctly because it was the first movie I saw in a theater without an adult present. My mom dropped the two of us off before and picked the two of us after the movie. It would not be such a significant milestone today as it was then, as this was long before the Internet, let alone cell phones. We had to look up the movie times in the newspaper and guess at the movie’s runtime based on the start times of when your film would start and when the movie after yours would begin. If there was an emergency or a miscommunication, it involved going to a pay phone and calling your home’s landline, praying that someone home could answer. I hadn’t thought about that day in years. With the 2024 release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I decided to revisit this Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) classic. My recent rewatch of Beetlejuice in preparation for the sequel brought back that fond memory.
Category Archives: 1988
Young Guns (1988)
What is there to say about a perfect movie?
Young Guns was easily my favorite movie for about five years. Seeing it again in 2011, after not having watched it in probably a decade, caused me to ask myself a few questions. The first was, “How is it that I know every line in this movie word for word, but I can’t name half of the presidents of the United States or half of the US state capitals?” The second was, “How was this movie my favorite movie when it came out in 1988 if I wasn’t allowed to see rated R movies until I was sixteen?” I was more perplexed in figuring out the answer to the second question than I was in the first. The answer to the first one was easy. I knew every line of the movie word for word because I’ve watched it over 100 times. Looking at my current list of movies (yes, I have a directory ranking every movie I’ve ever seen), I see that Young Guns is still in the Top 25 and thus receives a rating of A+. The next time I update this list, I will move Young Guns closer to the Top 10. It’s a fantastic movie. If I saw it today for the first time, I doubt I would evaluate it as relatively high, but I can’t push away all of the memories this most recent viewing evoked.
The Blob (1988)
I should have watched the original version of The Blob (1958 – Steve McQueen) before watching this version. It seems, to me, that if a movie is a remake, you have to see the original film first to see that movie. That is if you plan on watching either movie. At the same time, the original is often so much better than the remake that it might make you appreciate the newer version even less. And if you are a big fan of the movie, you might also go a step further and read the book (if the film was based upon a book). No matter how much we, at times, don’t want them to, Hollywood is going to keep remaking movies. Whether Hollywood is out of original ideas or they know that a newer version of a film is a fortune waiting to be happy, we don’t know. We understand that some remakes will be good, some will be bad, and some we will shake our heads and ask ourselves, “What were these movie studios thinking?”