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Movies of Our Youth (The Hermit)

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

The oddities of my childhood are perfectly personified by the movies I loved as a five-year-old: Nine Months, Lion in Winter, and Big Rock Candy Mountain. As a child, I was oddly obsessed with pregnancy, as well as Hugh Grant.  Thus, Nine Months was a perfect choice. Lion in Winter, which I could recite lines from at five, stars Catherine Hepburn as the vindictive wife of King Henry, Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the movie, she commissions her sons to murder their father, and I have to wonder why I thought that story was so delightful. The least “adult” of my favorite movies is Big Rock Candy Mountain (no hyphens or commas), and I can’t quite remember much of it. I think there was something along the lines of a Wonka’s Chocolate Factory vibe to the land of Big Rock Candy Mountain, where tea cups were candy that grew on trees and such, but my most prominent memory is of a dirty rabbit being sung “For He’s a Jolly-Good Fellow” by his animal friends, and then the memories cease…perhaps this eclectic assortment of favorites is also indicative of my weirdness today.