It’s been a while since I did this, but two DVDs have come out recently that I knew I had to get, so I went ahead and splurged a bit before heading off to work. My most recent additions to my movie library are….
Legend: the last of the ‘three ‘L”s’ of fantasy from my childhood (the other two being Labyrinth and Ladyhawke) that I needed to pick up. While it doesn’t seem to be for everyone (I think that, like Star Wars, you need to have grown up with it to be as obsessed about it as I am, and seeing it for the first time as an adult doesn’t work as well), it has always ranked as one of my favorite films. Tom Cruise before he got mega-superstar-cocky, the gorgeous Mia Sara, and my all-time favorite Tim Curry role as Darkness, together with the visual splendor that Ridley Scott is so well known for (assisted by what must be a record for “most amount of glitter used in a motion picture”). Too cool.
Real Genius: one of my all-time favorite comedies of all-time — quite possibly my single all-time favorite comedy, in fact. A script that seems to be almost entirely a series of one-liners, all strung together with just enough plot to make it work. I really don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie — and I’m always willing to watch it again. In the words of Chris Knight: “It’s a moral imperative.”
Incidentally, each of these movies has the distinction of having one of my first “movie star crushes” — Mia Sara in Legend, especially in the black dress given to her by Darkness, and Michelle Meyrink as Jordan in Real Genius. No real point to that fact — it just popped in my head.