Matt's Cinema Diary, July 93 - JURASSIC PARK!

Matt's Cinema Diary My memory is freaky. During a conversation with my girlfriend where she struggled to tell me every movie we had seen this year at the cinema alone, she challenged me to write down every film we had seen during the course of our near four year relationship. Rather boastingly, I smirked and let her know I could do one better than that. I could tell her every movie I had ever seen in the cinema for the past 15 years of my life, since my theatre going experience began in 1993. Every single one - and tell her where I saw it and what feeling I took from it. I even believed I could do it in chronological order, with the help of IMDB, not to cheat and sort out which films I saw next you understand but simply to accurately deduce what month of the year I saw them to surmise a date. So starts my cinema diary, a reflection of who I am and how I came to be (like Batman in Frank Miller's Batman: Year One). In this diary, you will hear the stories, the events and just generally what was happening in my life when I saw these movies. I aim it to be as personal as possible, I will probably venture into deep corners of my own warped psyche and relive painful and happy moments of my life and how I came to be the founder of a little site called Obsessed With Film. There might be some blood, there might be some tears, I might tell you things that I didn't even know I was feeling or that I actually remember at the time. Some entries might just be reviews of the film or even just little notes because that's all I can remember, but we shall see where we end up going. Only cinema releases obviously will be covered and this is why I always say you should see as many movies in the theatre as you can because they are more memorable to you and stay etched in your memory for the rest of your life.

Where it all began - JURASSIC PARK (1993)

Sunday 25th July 1993 - UCI Cinema Gateshead Metro Centre With my Mum, my Step Dad, Peter and (possibly) my sister. I often wonder if there exists a better film for me to call my first introduction to the cinema going experience. I do look back at IMDB, I wonder which films my parents might have taken me too had I or themselves shown an interest in visiting the theatre the year before. If they had taken me in 1992, it may very well have been Batman Returns as they knew I was a huge Batman fan - I had almost worn out my VHS copy of the original film and my Batmobile didn't stay in one piece for long with my constant and it has to be said, tad aggressive playing during my battle scenes between Batman, Robin and The Joker. With green blood, lots of murder, Gothic nightmarish set designs and a very un-childlike atmosphere maybe they did well not taking me to see that movie, though of course I did catch it on VHS almost as soon as it was released and it has since become a great personal pleasure of mine - go figure. I'm a big believer that you can't stop kids from doing something they have there heart set out to do. My girlfriend actually beat me to the theatre first (we are only two months shy of the same age) when she saw Beauty and the Beast the year or so before, a movie that again - could well have been my first trip to the theatre had my parents acted earlier. I do often wonder if I would have turned out differently, if that had been the film. Would I still be the Spielberg and overall film nut I am today? Probably.

Jurassic Park. It was my 7th birthday and I had shown an immense pleasure for watching movies at home on VHS, though I do regret slightly that they hadn't taken me earlier to see movies. 1993 was a particularly difficult year for myself and my parents you must understand. 1993 (or it may have been late 1992) was the year they had separated after a kind of "last chance" holiday to an outrageously sunny Barcelona and I now had to get used to living with my mum and a stranger, whilst my dad (who I still insisted I had to sleep in the same room with at least once a week) was living in MY house and all alone - it was horrible. I vividly remember how cold and confusing it all was. My mum picking me up from school and then holding my hand as we didn't go in the usual direction back home but instead towards a strangers house, a dark and unwelcoming place. I suffered from nightmares a lot, not just a night but during the day. The house we were renting (at 7 I couldn't come to terms what that meant, so I often made a mess and inadverently damaged and played with things I shouldn't have to the complete determent of my mother) had me sleep in a black walled room with a weird skeleton poster hanging over me. I hated it. I was ill almost straight away, I would stop eating, have horrible visions of nightmares during my sleep... I would dream the skeleton on the wall would murder me the moment I stopped starring at it. My mum was worried about me, I was as thin as a rake and as pale as a ghost - the doctors couldn't decipher what was wrong with me but I knew and she knew all along. I missed home and I didn't like the new house I was living in. There's no doubt this episode and the trouble between my mother and father stopped an early love with cinema going a few years earlier. I learnt early on that watching movies with my Mum and Dad was always going to be difficult. The first run on U.K. t.v. of Look Who's Talking Too ended in a coffee thrown incident to my Dad, whose face was slightly scolded and red for the next few days. I've always wondered but been to shy to ask what my Dad said but it was a remark right at the end of the sentimental happy ending that ticked my mother off, and he paid for it with a close encounter with some coffee. There were many rows in those days. And it's not my place to judge blame but the result was not too many days out with my Mum and Dad in the early 90's. So living with my mum and a total stranger, it was my first birthday not spent with my father. I was turning 7 and my mum took myself and Peter to see Jurassic Park, I believe without my younger sister (though I could be wrong)- a movie about living, breathing dinosaurs! What do I remember about my first cinema visit? The sweetly sickening smell of popcorn is quite vivid, the sticky and black carpet, the deep colours of red and blacks like something out of The Omen. The sheer size and scope of the big screen but more than that - the epic sound system, it would be the sound and the vibrations that would make me jump and terrify me. Even something as stupid as that pre UCI swirling logo that would go woosh.... woosh... WHOOSH... and then a great big giant WOOOOOSH, was way too loud for me. I use to dread that moment but I always knew the movie was coming next, so I could handle it. I'm actually astonished Youtube actually have it. You have to turn this up really LOUD to get the sense I got from the cinema as a young boy, there was just something about this noise that use to terrify me...

Though that was nothing compared to how fucking terrified I was through Spielberg's Jurassic Park. I've said this before but when your young it's the noise level and the size factor of the experience that gets you and not necessarily anything they show you on screen. I was literally in awe of JP all the way through, I was amazed at how real the dinosaurs looked and I think I was genuinely scared that one of them was going to come out of the screen, rip me to shreds and then eat me! There's a moment in the film I remember as clear as day when a character is on the toilet before being eaten by a dinosaur, I kinda felt like that throughout the film. But I understood it perfectly well, I got the joke. Even on my 7th birthday, I could feel a third wall was breaking between myself, the film and the director during the "toilet" scene.

Looking back on Spielberg's film, it's obvious that he became a victim of just how much freedom of budget and technology was now available to him. I'm a big believer in small resources meaning clever ingenuity and a hope and work ethic that can't be matched. Sometimes directors who put their life and soul into movies and fixing problems like the dodgy shark can seal the fate of a movie like Jaws but with a whole wealth of resources, a director will rush straight into showing (and let's give him his due they looked fantastic) dinosaurs without little patience. Jaws forced Spielberg to be patient, in Jurassic Park he had no such limits. Jurassic Park isn't like Jaws where we don't see the Shark for 2/3rd's of the movie. Spielberg shows them to us in all their glory early on and although they are an amazing site to behold, you don't ever quite get the suspense that you did in Spielberg's superior first summer blockbuster. I watched my recent birthday gift of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Blu-Ray and again, there isn't that sense of amazement, that wonder of optimistic hope for the future and a feeling of a coming together in Jurassic Park. Spielberg's Close Encounters builds itself on saying "This means something, this is important!". You only ever get that feeling from the first few meetings with the dinosaur, when archaeologist bone collectors Laura Dern and Sam Neill give all kinds of emotion that they probably never capable of giving. Spielberg might sell those monsters, but Neill and Dern's reactions took it to another level. Then it descends into a monster/horror movie which as a 7 year old I loved to pieces but much older and wiser now, having seen so many superior monster films... I kind of yearn for that Close Encounters feeling again during re-runs.

Of course though, the movie will always have a special place with me. The moment I fell in love with going to the movies, and I found Spielberg... whose cinema I obsessed over ever since. Over time, I eventually began to appreciate, understand and forgive the splitting up of my parents. I got over it. But I never got over this visit to the cinema and seeing a Steven Spielberg movie. NEXT TIME: SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (on re-release in 1993!)