Memory Lane Friday - A Favorite Movie

Okay, I took a break from Memory Lane Friday last week due to the long weekend when Andrew, Livie, and I were at my parents' place.

But now I'm back for the favorite movie topic. This is another tough one to try and narrow down. So I'm going to talk about two in particular.

I'd have to say that my favorite movie growing up was International Velvet, the 1978 sequel to National Velvet (with Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet Brown). Surprise, surprise, an equestrian movie!

International Velvet, by the way, starred the great Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer, and Tatum O'Neal as young Sara Brown, Velvet Brown's niece.

How I desperately wanted to be Sara Brown from Cave Creek, AZ, riding on the Olympic Eventing team and winning the gold (but for the U.S., not for Britain, obviously)! One of my friends, Leslie, and I would watch International Velvet at my house the night before a horse show, without fail, and we'd go for pizza with her parents at the end of the day, after we wrapped up at the show. It was our tradition. We practically knew the lines by heart. If I watched it today, I'd probably still remember many of them!

Here's a clip of International Velvet. It's kind of a long one, but FYI: the part I always wanted to re-create starts around 4:10.

Of course, during the fictional movie Olympics when Sara is riding, she falls and hurts her shoulder (in the clip above, it's around 5:20). Back in May 1983 (I was 12.5 years old), I actually fell off my horse Chico as we were jumping, and I broke my right collar-bone.

Now I don't remember this part (due to concussion), but apparently I was repeating to my riding coach, Debbie, and my friend Leslie, "This is just like International Velvet! That was just like the bogey fence!" (They refer to the jump she fell at as a "bogey fence" at some point in the movie because other riders had problems with it, too.) Man-o-man, what the brain will think when it's in a jumble.

Then when I was in college, I remember seeing posters for The Cutting Edge (the original one from 1992) at the movie theater, but for some reason, I never got around to seeing it . . . 

. . . until spending some time at my parents' lake house, that is. My brothers had rented it from the local video store because there were thunderstorms rolling through and we couldn't do water sports out on the lake.

And we watched it and watched it . . . and watched it a million times, or so it seemed. But it was such a fun movie to watch! Every so often - ever since those few days that summer - I try to watch it, just because it IS fun. And Doug Dorsey (the hockey-player-turned- finger painter figure-skater) wears a Chicago Blackhawks jersey. Can't go wrong with THAT, right? They have been my favorite team for YEARS, and are now in the Stanley Cup Finals. Woo hoo!! Okay, but I'm off track now, aren't I? Hahaha!

Anyway, here's the trailer for The Cutting Edge:

Boy, that was fun reminiscing about favorite movies growing up. Of course, now I'm going to have to find International Velvet on DVD. My VHS copy got ruined long ago. And I have to see if I can get The Cutting Edge on my Netflix queue. I'll bet I'll still think they're fun to watch.

Click on the button for the rest of this week's Memory Lane Friday posts: