1978

I remember as a small boy exiting a cinema in Aberdeen.

It was a few weeks before Christmas and we were visiting the big city for our annual present buying trip. Where I grew up, even more so back then, Aberdeen was the closest thing we had to bright lights & big city.

Aged 8, I wasn’t interested in what it took to make Christmas work, only that it did. My father would always take me and my sister out of my mother’s hair on these shopping trips and this invariably meant an afternoon spent in the cinema. The year was 1978 - a particularly good year for cinema. It was the year Mr Lucas introduced us to Darth Vader & Luke Skywalker and the year that John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John got it on, in a musical sense that is.

I exited the cinema that December day, one hand firmly gripping my fathers, the other clutching a plastic, already bent, light saber. I remember clearly the contrast between the universe of Mr Lucas`s, and now my, imagination and the cold, wet and windy Union Street we were trudging up to rendezvous with my mother.

It is my first memory of cinema escapism and if I could have articulated it back then, I would have probably said “that was a f**king great movie dad”. Instead I gripped my plastic Jedi sword and spent the remaining weeks until Christmas hoping the force would swoop down and deliver me from my normal existence into a lifetime of space adventure and 70s hairstyles.

Great movies do not come along that often.

The three decades which have passed since that day is littered, in my humble opinion, with cinematic disappointments. If I was to list them all here I would probably exceed the upload allowance per blog but suffice it to say, for every Pulp Fiction I would estimate there are 300+ Independence Days. My great movie list is a pretty short list.

You will understand how happy I was then when the other day I sat down to watch Moon. A low budget, Sci-fi movie which owes a lot to the early science fiction, films such as Silent Running or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a slow mover, with more fiction, than science. Sam Rockwell is excellent, the effects are appropriate, no more, the key twist is predictable but the ending still leaves you wondering.

In short it's a very good movie, one which I thoroughly enjoyed and one which appears on the face of it to be at odds with the current drivel coming out of that plastic town in California.
This leads me to conclude it will probably also be a financial failure.

Film makers make films that the majority want to watch. This is simply because the majority pay more than the minority and the only way to change this is to have a BBC for films. A great big pot which we all pay into and one which funds more interesting films.

A great big pot to make films and to satisfy a minority made up of one: me.