25 Years Ago This Month: September 1988

Of course you can see in the September releases that the big summer blockbusters have finished and the studios are trotting out the stuff they think will contend for awards (at least the first of them anyway). So that's how you end up with...

Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.

Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.

Lincoln Movie Review

2300 years ago Euclid proclaimed as one of his common notions that things equal to the same thing are also equal to each other. This is a founding principle of geometry and necessary for the beginnings of modern engineering. It seems self-evident, doesn’t it? Of course Thomas Jefferson held it self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights such as liberty, yet he was himself a slave owner. In Steven Spielberg’s masterful biopic Lincoln, the 16^th President and drafter of the Emancipation Proclamation tries to rely on Euclid’s notion to help him in his decisions regarding slavery that will impact the United States and the terrible Civil War that was entering its fifth bloody year.

The Amazing Spider-Man Movie Review

Was it really necessary for Sony to reboot the Spider-Man series only five years after the last film and ten years after the first? Is Sam Raimi’s trilogy already ancient history? Apparently for the Millenials anything older than half a decade is passé. I don’t mind a new actor in the Peter Parker/Spider-Man role or a new director at the helm. James Bond has changed hands through six actors across fifty years. The problem I find is the absurd need to retell the origin story. The Batman series went through three actors and two directors with a major stylistic shift halfway through without getting back into Bruce Wayne’s history. It was Christopher Nolan who rebooted that franchise by taking a completely new track on the mythology. Unlike Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man which is virtually indistinguishable from the first trilogy.