Each week last summer, we flipped the calendar back thirty years to spotlight a movie that was new and exciting back in...the Summer of '78. In the last installment, I made this vow: "Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!"

Well, we're still alive, but our venue is gasping its final breaths as we enter this last week in Screengrab history. But I'm a man of my word! I was looking forward to spending this summer re-evaluating the Summer of '89, which I spent driving across country with a friend, seeing America...and seeing a lot of movies. Anytime the weather turned against us, or we just couldn't bear the thought of spending another second cramped inside our tiny Subaru, we'd hit the multiplex in whatever town we happened to be in and spend the day sneaking from theater to theater, killing six to eight hours at a pop. So as it turned out, I saw an awful lot of movies in the summer of '89 (and a lot of awful movies). Obviously, I won't get the chance to fulfill my obligation here, but following this inaugural Screengrab installment of Summer of '89, you can catch new episodes every Monday at my blog, conveniently entitled Scott Von Doviak, at least until I can come up with something snappier.

As it happens, I did not see this week's movie upon its release in 1989, which gives me something in common with almost everyone else in America. I've seen it now, however, so let's kick this sucker off with...

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Readers, I have a little confession to make: up until last week, I’d never watched Tony Scott’s Top Gun from beginning to end. Yes, I’d seen parts of the film here and there on television, but I’d never actually sat down for the purpose of actually watching Top Gun in its entirety. However, I was familiar enough with the film by reputation and through hearing others talk about it that I was fairly sure I wasn’t missing much. Yet the film was so popular in its day that it was almost inevitable that I would be writing it up for a column sooner or later. So in writing this week’s column, I wouldn’t be simply reviewing Top Gun on its own merits, but viewing it through the prism of its pop-cultural impact- not normally the way to review a movie, but more or less the modus operandi here at Yesterday’s Hits. So get ready to take a ride on the highway to... the danger zone!

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The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989.

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