I recorded Real Genius, and am watching it now. I loved it when it came out. Michelle Meyrink was so freakin’ cute! Even at the time, I don’t know if I could have been in a relationship with her character, since she was so… scattered. But ‘Jordan’ was pretty and smart. I also liked her in Nice Girls Don’t Explode.
Val Kilmer? What a kid! He was so cool back in the '80s. I did see him in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), but the last thing before that that I remember seeing him in before that was Tombstone (1993). I’m really bummed about his throat cancer. Back in the '80s, I could only wish I was as cool as his characters.
Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning… Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you? Mitch: No… Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?
This movie gave me a vastly distorted image of what college was going to be like. Not once in four years of undergrad did ski down the dorm stairs or blow up a house with popcorn.
I know this was set in CalTech, but it reminded me quite a bit of my stay at MIT. Freezing the dorm for the party was much like the hack that took place in the bathroom near my room, the year before I got there. It was cold. One Sunday some people let some snow in, and decided to call a local TV station saying that they were at MIT and had created snow. The TV people called a professor, who groggily told them it was possible, so they ran the story.
So you went to the wrong college.
My favorite line was when Jordan asked Mitch why he didn’t take her to meet his parents.
“Are you ashamed of me>”
“No, of them.”
I should watch it again, but I might have to turn on my VCR to do it.
ETA: Another thing I liked was that to hack the board they had to go and get physical access to the system. No impossible logging into a weapon to do it. Very few movies of this type get it right.
I remember the scene where Chris is lounging in a chair suspended in midair by balloons, which they used for the promos but didn’t, for whatever reason, decide to actually include in the movie.
It’s still one of my all-time favorite movies. The characters are great, and the dialogue is solidly funny throughout. I manage to catch it on late-night cable TV a couple of times a year, and a few months ago, I finally got it on DVD, so I can watch it more often.
I, too, have a long-standing crush on Jordan: she’s pretty tightly-wound, but she’s adorable.
“So, if there’s anything I can do for you - or, more to the point, to you - just let me know.”
“Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?”
“Not right now.”
“A girl’s gotta have her standards.”
I’ll agree. I saw the movie in my second grad school, after spending my undergrad years at MIT, and it had a nostalgic feel about it. Nobody pulled a hack about filling part of a dorm with snow, but there WERE plenty of almost unbelievable hacks.
And when Val Kilmer’s ,character slices off a disc of frozen stuff to use as a coin in the vending machine, my immediate thought was “that wouldn’t work – the density’s all wrong.”
