Playing old school movie catch up

Arriving in my mailbox yesterday,courtesy of Netflix,was Pretty In Pink,one of the classic John Hughes/Molly Ringwald cinematic collaborations of the eighties. With Hughes' recent departure from this earth still lingering on the pop culture mindset of the moment,I thought it was time to finally check this out.

Yes,it's true-I haven't yet seen Pretty in Pink. By the time it came out in theaters,I was kind of over the whole teen romance flick phase and never bothered to watch it on TV or any sort of home video before.

Hell,it was only a couple of years ago that I saw "Say Anything",which helped me to see the "John Cusack holding up a boombox" bit as more than a joke. Plus,there are a good number of PiP references in Gilmore Girls to make this mandatory viewing,at least once:





There are a number of other gaps in my movie watching history,some of which I have patched up over the years but plenty are left untouched. A few of them I'm not too sure that I even want to.

For example,Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,a film that I was too young to see in theaters but has had various replays on television for a couple of decades now and yet I'm not feeling the need to check it out anytime soon.

I know it's a quality film and all of that,but what keeps me back from it is Robert Redford. He was a major heartthrob of the period,along with Warren Beatty,and as Shania Twain would say,he don't impress me much. Yes,he's an intelligent man,too but both he and Beatty just seem to be incredibly overrated to me. Perhaps it's a generational thing. All I know is that Butch and Sundance are not high items on my to-do list(also never saw The Sting,for the same reason):





One that I really do need to see and has been on my Netflix queue for awhile now is Marty,the story of a sad sack of a fellow looking for love and a way out of his mind numbing lonely bachelor routine. Ernest Borgnine gave one of the best performances of his career in this film and it won Best Picture at the Oscars that year,more than enough of an incentive for me to watch:





Jaws was a popular movie in my house,with my father and brother seeing it just about every time it came on TV when I was growing up. Yet,I never watched it in it's entirety. I've seen a scene or two but never sat down to see it and I was encouraged to,believe you me.

Maybe it's because I never was a good swimmer to begin with(the shallow end of pools public and private are old friends to me)or that I saw too many of those land shark skits on SNL but Jaws couldn't reel in me in. I even tried reading the book when I was a kid and was turned off by seeing a profanity on the first page(it was "damn"-up til then,swear words had not been a part of my reading experience). My tolerance for all kinds of language has expanded since then but still Jaws has not hooked me:



Well,my John Hughes quota will be elevated to a higher level after Pretty In Pink and while I may not have seen some of the great movies of our time,at least I can proudly proclaim that I'm not a Pippi virgin. Certain lapses in movie geek mania are hard to live down but then again,no time like the present to correct such a grievous error: