The Nineties on film. My cinema screenings. (Concluded)
1998
Fallen
Deep Rising
Dark City
Sphere
The Big Lebowski
U.S. Marshals
Wild Things
Species II
Nightwatch
Deep Impact
Jackie Brown
As Good as It Gets
Godzilla
A Perfect Murder
Insomnia
The Truman Show
Armageddon
The Mask of Zorro
Saving Private Ryan
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
Snake Eyes
The Avengers
Blade
Rush Hour
Ronin
Soldier
Vampires
The Siege
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
Enemy of the State
Very Bad Things
Little Voice
A Simple Plan
Star Trek: Insurrection
1999
Virus
Payback
My Favorite Martian
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
The Matrix
Entrapment
The Thin Red Line
The Mummy
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Lake Placid
The Haunting
Deep Blue Sea
The Sixth Sense
The Thomas Crown Affair
The 13th Warrior
Stigmata
House on Haunted Hill
Three Kings
Sleepy Hollow
The World Is Not Enough
End of Days
2000
Any Given Sunday
The Beach
U-571
Gladiator
Mission: Impossible 2
X-Men
What Lies Beneath
Space Cowboys
The Cell
The Exorcist (re-release)
And that was basically it.
Our regular Sunday outings came to an end. Mainly due to two factors. Three of us bought dvd players in the summer of 1998. Back then releases were staggered in cinemas. Something could be out on American dvd months before it came to UK cinemas so we'd buy the film on import dvd meaning there was no reason to go to the cinema to see it. They could cost anything north of twenty quid a film to buy so there was no way i'd do that then go and see it at the cinema.
The other reason was a bit odd. We'd religiously go every Sunday to the UCI at a Preston retail park. It was a forty minute drive, we'd park up watch the film then go to Mcdonalds afterwards to discuss it. It was an enjoyable afternoon out and always at least two of us went. Usually it was three, on occassions up to six depending on the film. It turned into less of an afternoon out when a cinema - the Hollywood Park - opened in Burnley. We could do just the same thing as we'd done at Preston and sometimes Bury, but it didn't feel like an event, it became mundane, nor did it seem reasonable to continue traveling to Preston when there was a new multiplex on our doorstep. Although we went for months to Burnley it just wasn't the same, plus there was the dvd phenomenon as well.
That's not to say it was the end of cinema going for us. We'd go to the odd event movie that we hadn't purchased on dvd such as Bond or Star Wars, or LOTR or one off screenings of classic films but our 90's film festival came to an end.
All good things eh?
Looking back and compiling these lists has been both fun and sweetly nostalgic with just a touch of melancholy thrown in as well.
We saw some fantastic films (and one or two clunkers as well) and the over riding feeling is that the 90's were one hell of a decade for film making.
The amount of good to very good films we saw i'd reckon was about 90% and the best thing about them was they were all original movies. Barely any remakes or sequels and the screens weren't cluttered up by superheroes or paranormal non-entities meaning that when we did see a superhero film like Batman Returns or Blade or even Spawn or a horror film like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Scream or In the Mouth of Madness, it felt like an event in itself.
I almost feel privileged to have seen the likes of LA Confidential, Saving Private Ryan, Pulp Fiction, Interview with the Vampire and Gladiator, to name but five, on the cinema screen.
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