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Jun 25, 2022

Going to Movies in 1989: Keanu Reeves was still funny, Patrick Dempsey was still hot, and gay people still did not exist


 I did a lot of wandering around in the spring of 1989: a month in Turkey, visits to Paris, London, Tel Aviv, and Cairo.  But by fall, no longer in grad school, I needed a "real job," so I went to work at the Getty Consternation Institute.  How can people stand sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, five days a week, while the boss treats them like a robot and takes credit for all of their work?  But at least I had a permanent partner, Lane, a massive science fiction/fantasy fan who insisted that we go to every movie that was even tangentially related to science fiction.  I saw 17 movies in the theater that year!

January; Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, about time traveling stoner dudes, because I had a friend who claimed to have hooked up with Keanu Reeves.  There's a homophobic slur, but so what?  The guys apologized for it later.


February:
Dream a Little Dream, because it starred the two Coreys (Haim and Feldman), who always appeared together.  We assumed that they wer a gay couple, and didn't know about the child-sex-ring stuff.  Feldman, the star, finds himself in a dream state, which he manipulates to Get The Girl.  But at least Haim is obviously in love with him.

March: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, because the Cute Young Thing, my ex-boyfriend's Fred's partner, claimed to have read the original tall tales as a German major at Harvard (turns out they were originally published in English in 1785).  I had no idea what was going on, except that the Baron has sex with every woman in sight, including the Queen of the Moon.


April:
Loverboy, because who wouldn't want to see Patrick Dempsey in anything? I'd pay to watch him read silently, to himself, for 90 minutes.  Or, in this case, play a pizza delivery boy who delivers more than pizza to lonely houswives.  One of the women is named Alex, causing Patrick's parents to conclude that he is gay.  Surprisingly, they're fine with it.

 May: Miracle Mile, because the Miracle Mile is in Los Angeles, and Tangerine Dream, Lane's favorite group, is on the sound track.  Who knew that it was about a guy (Anthony Edwards) and his lady friend dealing with the end of the world?  I hate movies where everyone dies!

June: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, because...well, it's Star Trek, and I was dating Lane, so did I have a choice?  This one is about finding God in the center of the galaxy.  Except -- spoiler alert -- the being in there is not actually God.

June: Batman, the Tim Burton version with Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, and no Robin.  Lane and I brought a friend who had never heard of Batman, in comics or on tv.  How is that possible?  He thought it made no sense, but I liked the noir elements.


June:
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, because it was science fiction, sort of.  Completely heteronormative, but I found Rick Moranis (the husband who accidentally shrinks his kids) cute, and Thomas Wilson Brown (the boy next door who is in the wrong place at the wrong time) had a sort of teen idol dreaminess.

July: Weekend at Bernie's.  Two salary men (Jonathan Silverman, Andrew McCarthy) are stuck babysitting their boss's corpse.  Silly.  But they're both entirely cute, and they have a strong gay-subtext bond in spite of The Girl.  

August.  Shirley Valentine.  I can't remember why.  It's about a middle-aged housewife from Liverpool who goes on a Greek holiday and falls in love with a rather unattractive guy.  

August: The Abyss, because it was science fiction.  When an unidentified object sinks a submarine, drillers on an oil platform rush to the rescue, including foreman Bud (Ed Harris) and the ex-wife who dumped him just so they could get back together again.  Yawn.


September:
Erik the Viking. I argued that anything directed by Terry Jones would be an impenetrable mess, but Lane insisted: Vikings, winged helmets, dragon ships, all that he-man stuff.  Erik (Tim Robbins) goes to the land of Hy-Brasil, where he, of course, Falls in Love.  

October: Look Who's Talking, probably because it starred John Travolta (still cute) and Kirstie Allie, the second "you're arrogant! (that is, sexy)" foil to Ted Danson on the must-watch sitcom Cheers (1982-93).  They play the single mom of a baby who doesn't actually talk to humans, and the taxi driver who falls in love with her.

November: Back to the Future, Part 2, because I knew Michael J. Fox (Marty McFly, the small-town teenager who travels to the future in a souped-up Delorean).  Here he travels to 2015 to help his future self and lookalike son and prevent a time paradox.  Of course he has a girlfriend/wife.  

November: Valmont, yet another adaption of Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 18th century epistolary novel about aristocrats who have fun destroying people's lives.  They keep churning them out, and we keep going, hoping for gay references.  

December: The War of the Roses.  It was advertised as hilarious comedy starring Danny DeVito, but it's actually a very dark drama starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as spouses who destroy each other (resulting in their deaths).  Just what you want to see the week before Christmas!

3 comments:

  1. "The Abyss" does have hot Michael Biehn as some crazy marine

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  2. Bill and Ted, as a kid I didn't get the "thinking of a number" joke. (It's 69. Because you knew it was that or 420.) A reminder that Keanu Reeves was everywhere. The movies even had tie-in cartoons and comics, which means a treatise about how their future came to be when that was never planned.

    I mean, I thought the whole point of Baron Munchausen was that all his stories were lies. And all his women would thus be a guy named George Glass. (Sure, Jan.)

    A lot of the Batman movies are based on Frank Miller. Except somehow worse? At least originally, Miller Bats didn't kill. And the iconic Jason Todd memorial begins here, and Batman is genuinely mournful about the two Robins. Hey, let's see how many of these human qualities are gone in The Dark Knight Strikes Again! Or in the movies.

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    Replies
    1. To elaborate: It's now apparent that Frank Miller is a virulent homophobe. (DKII has the Goddamn Batman fighting Robin, who turned evil because Batman wouldn't sleep with him. Fan interpretation is that the Goddamn Batman is cognitive distorting like a mofo and Robin is just protecting the latest Robin, Carrie Kelley.)

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