So I was thinking the other day that I know a lot of 80’s movies for someone who was born in 1981 and some of them are strange choices for someone who would have been under 10 years old until 1991. When I was trying to figure out why it could be I started naming some of the weirder ones that I know I remember watching and it hit me. I’m pretty sure my parents had HBO when we lived in the house in Roswell, Georgia until 1991. Most of the movies that I would consider ‘too old’ or just ‘not interesting to a 10 year old’ were released from 1986-1988 so they would have been on HBO during the time we had it. When we moved to Virginia there was a video store that I could ride my bike to and my mom signed a release form that let me rent rated R movies without my parents having to be there.  So I watched a LOT of movies in my middle school and High School years, so this list might be a little influenced by that. And by ‘a lot’ I mean almost every movie that came out on video and then I went into the back catalog, they were only about $1 for older movies, so I’d rent 6 at a time. So what I’m going to try and do here is try to make a list of movies that I’m pretty sure I watched before I was 10 years old. I’ll list the title, the year it came out, without looking at IMDB… what I think the plot was and what my most memorable moment was from that movie.
Examples after the break…
I know that this review is super late, but its really hard to put into words how i feel about this movie. I liked it. I mean I more than liked it, but theres something in there not letting me say that I loved it. It’s so deep and detailed in some respects (visually and acoustically) but story wise its lacking, things seem to just happen. The story plays out like it’s on a rail, a light rail actually. So no matter what’s happening they never seem to be in any danger. Say what you want about Avatar, but at least the simple story made sense within the world. Some things in this play out like He-Man, where all his problems could be solved once he remembered… “Oh yeah, that’s right I’m He-Man!” and would just whip everyones ass. 
It’s like when you see those great pictures of super modern architecture or furniture designs and think “wow that looks so awesome” but then you realize that it’s missing all the things that make a house a home. Pictures of family, interesting tchotchkes, and just any evidence that someone actually lives there. It’s the same thing with this movie, they spent all the time designing the new cool vehicles, (and don’t get me wrong, they are kick ass awesome) but they don’t spend any time on the how or why they eat food or what they serve in that bar. Or why the programs would want to drink at a bar in the first place, it’s all very surface level.
I’m really excited that there’s a documentary coming out about Drew Struzan. I linked to his site a while back, he made some of the iconic movie posters of my childhood. It’s good to see that other people appreciate his work. His stuff is so precise that you’d swear that it’s done in photoshop, but he comes from another era when the details mattered.