Finally we can stop talking about porn!

And I've kinda been lucky with the two girls I dated we saw good movies...Crank for the first and Juno for the second. Needless to say neither girl lasted long, but it was more my fault.

Maybe there is a correlation between dating and movies?

With 'dates' I've seen: Home Alone, Jumanji and Life is Beautiful (I married the last one *grin*)

I'm curious. What were your thoughts on An American Tail?

I'll certainly never forget January 28, 1986. I lived in Florida back then, about 100 miles away from the Cape. When I got to work that morning, it was cold. Real cold, especially for central Florida. I started casually talking about the launch that morning. Shuttle flights had become routine, but this one was special with the first teacher in space. Pauline, a 60-ish woman who worked with me, was always worried about something. So she started complaining that this launch was a bad idea: she was convinced that it was far too cold to send people up in a rocket. I laughed at her naivete. I told her how NASA had sophisticated models for weather like this, and there was no way these talented engineers would let the shuttle fly if there were any worries about the weather. Of course, it turned out that I was the naive one.

Many of us lost a part of our innocence that morning. Godspeed to all the astronauts; there is another flight scheduled this weekend, and they will never again be routine to me.

Unfortunately, my one and only movie date was Pearl Harbor and while the movie itself was predictably underwhelming, the experience was fun. Back to the topic at hand...

1986 was kind of an important year in my life even though I don't remember much about it. First, it was the year that my immediate younger sister was born; it was also the year the we first moved to Wisconsin, where I would spend nearly two decades of my life (first in Madison and then in Milwaukee).

I've only been in one real relationship (sad at 25), and that's who all my date movies have been with. The only three I recall are "Rocky Balboa," "Deja Vu," and "We Are Marshall." I remember the movies more than the relationship. I still like "Rocky Balboa" but man, "Deja Vu" was awful. "We Are Marshall": the girl loved it (she was into cliched feel-good sports dramas) but I remember being bored to tears...I mean, I literally saw every line and every scene coming.

Oh, wait. I remember seeing "Wall-E" on a one-time date about a year ago.

Yes, please share, James. I vaguely remember watching that movie often as a kid. (I still can't remember if I liked it or not).

I remember it being darn depressing.

What? No review of the oscar winner for best movie ever, Highlander?

But doesn't James look down on documentaries filmed in real-time?

(I sure hope that ATHF is still relevant enough for people to get the above line.)

I was in HS at the time of the Challenger explosion. And since I was in NH, there were TVs all over the school tuned in to the launch, since Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher on that flight, was from NH. So the entire school shared in that tragedy the moment in happened, making for a rather intense emotional experience.

Wasn't Amadeus from 1986? I still think that is one of the best movies ever.

I have no memory of it whatsoever beyond having seen it. Typically, that means I thought it was mediocre. If I liked it or thought it was terrible, I would remember my reaction.

There was an odd feeling about that launch even before it happened, in part because of the "teacher in space" thing and in part because of the delays due to the cold. I remember waking up that morning to Charles Osgoode whose daily 5-minute report was about the cold and the shuttle. I don't think anyone expected it to blow up, but there was a shadow hanging over everything.

I was cloistered in my room all morning and into the early afternoon, studying for an exam and writing a paper. I didn't find out about the explosion until I went to my 3:00 class. Everyone was talking about it. I left the class, went back to my dorm room and turned on my little b&w TV, watched about 15 minutes of news coverage (at that point, everything they knew about the disaster could be covered in less than 15 minutes, then they just started repeating themselves), then went back to class. The professor was understanding of my mid-class absence. (It was a class of only 8 people, so my departure and return didn't go unnoticed.)

1984

I was in first grade living 25 miles from Cape Canaveral, as I still do, in Florida when Challenger exploded. We watched every shuttle launch and we watched from outside. My entire elementary school was outside watching the launch, it was a big deal because there was a teacher on board and it was talked about a lot by the teachers. There was a since of pride. I will always remember standing outside watching the shuttle explode and then back in the classroom the tvs running trying to understand and report what had happened.

1984 actually and James already reviewed it here.

These 80's columns are bringing back alot of good Memories for me.

Aliens. Probably in my top 3 theater experiences of all time! What a great flick to see for the first time.


James, You need to let us know what happened to Tracie??

She died in a car accident in October 1988. We were together from January 1987 until her death. I haven't written the 1987 or 1988 commentaries yet, but I imagine she will feature quite prominently in them since she was a huge movie fan and I inherited some of my appreciation for certain films and genres from her. I don't plan to dwell on her death. It's a fact so it has to be stated, but the goal is not to to turn these columns into something maudlin.