The Worst Day of My Life…

The Phantom Menace (George Lucas), 1999

I guess you have to start any review of the new Star Wars movie with a little prologue explaining how excited you were to see it, how you had opening night tickets, how you queued for hours, how much Star Wars has meant to you, and so on… Well, yeah, I had opening night tickets, and yeah, I was excited, and yeah, I grew up with Star Wars and am amongst those who think that George Lucas wrought a great and marvellous thing back in 1977. I also, for the record, think The Empire Strikes Back is an even better film: one of the truly great works of fantasy cinema. But I don’t want to give the impression I went into the cinema sucked in by the hype and expecting a masterpiece. I don’t want my negative comments about the film written off as the sour grapes of someone who had waited sixteen years and could never have been pleased by Episode 1.

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Titanic: The Wash-Up

Titanic (James Cameron), 1997

Eight months after it opened, it’s a little disorientating to remind myself that I actually did very much enjoy James Cameron’s epic Titanic. That’s because, somewhere in that time period, the unrelenting crudfest that has surrounded this film has made me hate the film and everything about it. I hate Leonardo DiCaprio. I hate James Horner. And surely I can’t be alone in wishing that Celine Dion’s heart would just stop?

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Chungking Express, Happy Together, and Postmodern Space

This is the second of two essays originally written while an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, in April-May 1998 (the first being my essay on Autumn Moon, here). The two essays follow up some similar ideas. As I’ve said on the page for the Autumn Moon essay, these were the first times I’d really started to write on the subject of cities in film.

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Autumn Moon and Urban Bewilderment

An essay originally written while an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, in April-May 1998. While I’ve taken most of my undergraduate work offline over the years, I still have a sneaking fondness for this one as the first real thing I wrote that linked film and urban planning.

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1997: The Year He Made Contact

Contact (Robert Zemeckis), 1997

An afterword at the end of the late Carl Sagan’s novel Contact notes that it started as a film treatment written in the early 1980s. For several years it was a project for Australian director George Miller, but he jumped ship as the budget skyrocketed. Now, finally, Contact arrives courtesy of Robert Zemeckis and preceded by ecstatic reviews from the US critics.

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Being an Idiot is a Box of Oscars

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis), 1994

“Being an idiot is no box of chocolates.” – Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom

“Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get.” – Forrest Gump, by Robert Zemeckis

You know the plot: idiot grows up in Alabama and wanders through recent American history, witnessing astounding events and meeting great men (plus a few US Presidents). Academy Awards follow his every step.

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Day One

Cinephobia Banner 3

Congratulations: this is the first / oldest post on the page.

It’s sitting here as a placeholder for the date when this site’s predecessor, my old site Cinephobia, went online. A great deal of the material on this page is migrated across from Cinephobia, which is why  so many of the archive dates predate the launch of this site.

To find the “day one” post for sterow.com itself, click here.

Thanks for finding the very bottom of the page.

Screenshot of Cinephobia.com from 2010
The last incarnation of Cinephobia.com before I took it down in November 2010.
Screenshot of old website (Cinephobia.com)
My eyes! This is one of the oldest versions of Cinephobia.com I have – a version from March 2000. It had been online for nearly three years at this point.