Popular Nostalgia

Some movies mark decades. Some disappear into the ether. Remember them all here – the hits and the misses. The great successes and the catastrophic failures.

I remember watching the Sinbad films on a weekend. I always thought the creatures were really funny because they didn’t move properly and the special effects were always shaky, when in fact they were ground breaking in their time -created by the same man who did special effects for Jason and the Argonauts. The Sinbad […]

Clueless typifies teenage girls in the 90′s. Well, how every girl wanted to be in the nineties anyway. For some reason, I always thought that Alicia Silverstone (who plays the main character Cher) was the same actress as Joan Hart (who plays Clarissa and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch). Compare these two images yourselves. Every young […]

How many times have you seen that glass-of-water-scene recreated since Jurassic Park came out in 1993? Responsible for the nightmares of a whole generation of ten-year-olds, this uber-blockbuster was a great excuse to show people getting eaten by dinosaurs. The most horrifying part was when the guy got eaten whilst on the toilet and the […]

This song sums up everything nostalgic about Christmas. Christmas in Australia just wasn’t the same without chestnuts roasting on an open fire or snow glistening outside. Bing felt the same way when he sang this classic as part of the 1942 classic “Holiday Inn” and later the 1954 hit “White Christmas”: Lyrics I’m dreaming of […]

Romeo & Juliet – the first time I cried at a film -and one of the last. Deeply upsetting for 11 year old girls the world over. The good chest shots throughout this film made it even harder to part with the photogenic Leonardo Di Caprio. Good job that every girls’ magazine had printed a […]

“Jack, Jack,” Rose whispers as he slips into the depths of the Atlantic… …and the sound of a thousand little girls’ hearts breaking. Everyone wanted to be Kate Winslet in this epic movie until they saw the inevitable. In the same way as Sixth Sense, someone spoilt this film for me by telling me that […]

Donatello, Michaelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo -the heroes in a half shell. Their mentor Splinter is a mutated rat and Shredder and Brains their enemies. Owing to the controversy surrounding whether these cretins were Heroes or Ninjas I have left the title ambiguous for now. Now all together: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles […]

Wayne’s World was a movie phenomenon in the league of Ferris Beuler’s Day Out, Grease, Dirty Dancing and all the other coming-of-age-films. Except Wayne’s World was cooler. I once gave myself whiplash trying to re-enact Garth’s blonde head-banging to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. This film is single-handedly responsible for a whole generation ending every sarcastic […]

I’m quite embarassed to admit that have actually seen Power Rangers: The Movie. I’ll put this down to the young age of my cousins at the time. Back in the day I too used to watch Power Rangers, but this was the original power rangers. I thought it was pretty cool when the green Power […]

A film that touched a generation. The Goonies is a perfect example of children’s movie making: it taught us tolerance, perseverance and how to triumph over adversity. I can’t quite remember exactly why, but the story was about how a group of misfit children went underground in a building to find some pirate gold. There […]

Before Kes started hanging around on Craig David’s arm in Bo Selecta, he was actually a film star in his own right, in the self titled film of 1969 called “Kes”. This film was great Northern hardship stuff, based on the book “A Kestrel for a Knave” and tracks the life of a little boy […]