The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum – 1980
I had expected my experience with The Bourne Identity would somewhat follow my experience with Jaws – where I had seen the movie first and was then pleasantly surprised at how good the novel was – but that is not what happened here at all. Unfortunately my first dance with spy fiction supremo, Robert Ludlum was not a particularly memorable one.
It took me a long time to finish The Bourne Identity, and that’s never a good sign. Where the movie is exciting and energetic, the book is mundane and plodding; and while the movie has a frenetic pace, the book wastes no time getting bogged down with the minutiae of Jason Bourne’s amnesia. Yes, this could be deemed as clever detail and important character background, but for the majority of the text it doesn’t even seem like these are the same protagonists.
But it’s more than likely my fault for comparing the two mediums anyway. Had the movie not come along, maybe I would have enjoyed the book more. But we’ll never know the answer to that, which is a shame. One thing I’m sure about: The Bourne Identity was such a rigid reading experience that it has put me off reading the two sequels that complete the trilogy – and I had bought them all specifically so that I could read them back to back.
Hollywood – I blame you.
Bewitched was at least one generation before my time, but I caught it in syndication in the late eighties, and I often enjoyed it over cereal before I went to school. It played around Elizabeth Montgomery’s earthbound witch, Samantha, who was married to her powerless and constantly befuddled husband, Darrin.
Until I was an adult I knew this movie as 
For a long time after I first saw Airplane! I thought that the auto pilot in an aircraft was genuinely represented by an inflatable captain. I mean, why would it not be? That makes perfect sense. Except… it really doesn’t. For some reason, in a movie that is as obviously stupid as this (and sometimes as stupidly obvious), it never crossed my mind that the blow-up pilot was simply the set-up for a fellatio joke later on. Then again, I was thirteen, so maybe I should be excused for my innocence!
As an adult I don’t make a habit of going around buying glossy books aimed at five year olds, but when I was twenty-nine I made an exception and bought The Adventures of Hannah. It’s a very brief and sweet story, laid out across 18 pages, and was written by an elderly lady who lived in Aberdeen.
Halloween is one of the first mainstream movies to embrace the slasher subgenre of horror, so that can never be taken away from the production. The infamous Michael Myers is a formidable, if sometimes silly, antagonist whose single-minded nature is the driving force behind the movie, and this is of course where Jamie Lee Curtis began to earn her moniker as the scream queen of horror. However, its assured place in history to one side, on its own merits, in 2017, the movie is… well, not particularly great.
-- Purveyor of Imagination -- 