I suspect I’ll have this feeling if I ever actually watch an episode of Buffy.
I finally bought and started reading Dracula. I had always avoided it because I figured it would feel dated and old but it’s great! In fact it actually gave me a nightmare the other night which has never happened from reading a horror novel before. The nightmare was terrifying and thrilling at the same time. That was worth the price of the book right there. 
Watch
It’s a Wonderful Life. Mostly missed it by pure happenstance, then it became something like a point of pride. My wife finally set me down and made me watch it last year. Wow, I just bought the DVD last week.
Read
Catch 22. Finally saw a thread here on The Dope that made me pick up a copy.
I didn’t read a single Stephen King book until I was 26. I’ve now read at least twenty of them (I’m 33).
Almost all of my friends read him religiously. I think I was just turned off by the trendiness of him, and the horrible movies.
I did, and you will.
I first saw The Godfather fairly recently, and it absolutely lived up to its stellar reputation. Now I should see A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove and Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.
Yes, yes, yes and yes. 
Some years ago, I read “Tender is the Night.” I heard good things about an upcoming TV production & decided to read the book first. Several times, I stopped reading & wondered at the excellence of a passage. Then–“Doofus–that’s F Scott Fitzgerald. Why did I pick a Hemingway novel for that (high school) American Lit class?”
Similarly, a friend lent me “All the King’s Men.” Oh, so that’s The Great American Novel!
Although I’ve been reading murder mysteries since I was a teenager, I only found Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh a few years ago and wonder why the hell I didn’t read them before!
I only got around to reading James Galworthy’s Forsyte Saga and some of his other novels after the recent remake of the miniseries.
I had friends tell me that I really, really, really had to see Velvet Goldmine when it first came out, but I didn’t watch it until a couple of years ago–and was really, really, really sorry I took so long.
Same here. That’s why I’m not going to watch it. I loved Firefly, but right now I’m staring at about 45 discs or so of Babylon 5 in my Netflix queue, and I so don’t have time to get hooked on another awesome series. (B5 is, incidentally, my pick for ‘thing I don’t know why I waited so long to watch’.)
Reading -
When it was first published, I thought of picking up Christopher Moore’s frist book “Practical Demonkeeping” just for the name, but somehow never got around to it. Years later, I read a lot of reviews of his “Lamb” and thought I ought to read that, but forgot.
Last June, I finished all the books I had taken with me on vacation and stopped at the bookstore to pick up a couple things to read on the plane. Prominently displayed was Moore’s latest, “A Dirty Job”. I picked it up, read the first couple pages and put it right back down. It was great, but I couldn’t afford a new hardback. Having connected the mental dots I rushed over to the paperbacks and picked up “Lamb”. Luckily, the plane was delayed so I never even had to think about putting it down. Sadly, there are only a couple left unread, and I started one of them (The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove) yesterday.
I cheer myself with the thought that I’ll probably predecease Chris Moore, and so can look forward to much reading pleasure in the years to come.
Watching
Why oh why did it take me so long to finally see “All About Eve”? Recently added to “Ours” section of the home DVD Library (“Jane Eyre” and “Pride & Prejudice” are in the “Hers” side, “Troy” and “Crimson Tide” are on the “His” side. Nearly everything else in the “Ours”)
It’s called Under Orders, and it’s starring Sid Halley.
This post makes me a bit ashamed, 'cause I got this Modesty Blaise book for birthday gift years ago but never really read it. This makes me feel like reading it but now I have no idea where it is. :smack:
What Madeline Brent-book would you recommend?
Buffy.
I recently got a treadmill because I needed a nice convenient exercise method, so I set it up in front of a TV with a DVD player and got myself a Netflix subscription. Since all my friends rave about Buffy, I decided to give it a try.
I’m up to the 6th episode of season 1 now, and I’m already hooked.
I’ve also got Firefly in my queue, even though I’ve been actively avoiding it (some representatives of the more…um…dedicated…end of the fan base kind of turn me off). I’m hoping I’ll enjoy it but not get sucked into the Whedon Zombie contingent (no offense to Whedon fans–I just get squicked out by that level of obsession with anything).
A lot of the classics that are now considered cliche’ because their “key” scenes are now part of pop culture.
Psycho- Everyone knows it as the “shower stabbing scene with the screeching violins” movie but not a lot of people have never seen this movie from start to finish.
It’s really, really good.
Singin in the Rain- Has the cliche’ dancing in the rain number that everyone knows but the movie from start to finish is a funny satire of old Hollywood. Good stuff.
For me it was Shawshank Redemption* - I saw the trailers on TV before it hit the theatres and said “hmm…I like the old guy feeding the baby bird. I should see that.” I never did. Years later I caught it on TV, then rented it uncut. It was so much more than an old guy feeding a baby bird.
StG
Hmmm. That’s hard, because they are all so good. You really can’t miss with any of them as ar as I’m concerned. There are only 9 of them, anyway, dammit. I always hoped he’d write more. Probably my favorite is Stranger at Wildings, which is about a girl who ran away and joined a circus… Good stuff. The fabulous thing about Brent’s books is that the heroines are, to a woman, amazingly strong and competent. No damsels in distress there. Which is pretty unusual in historical romance or suspense -type books. A close second favorite is The Capricorn Stone about the daughter of a jewel-thief who becomes a music-hall performer after the death of her father. I also have a soft spot for the first (Tregaron’s Daughter) Brent novel, which was also the first I read. It is set partially in Venice and features an extremely sexy leading man.
The Modesty Blaise books are somewhat different in that Modesty is really almost a super-human character. She’s like Batman or somebody – she can do anything. Nothing wrong with that, and it still makes for a great read. But the Brent heroines are more human and (somewhat) more believable. I say ‘somewhat’ because they are still adventure novels (under the guise of ‘Gothic Romances’) and very dependant on coincidence, luck, and narrow escape. But, again, just so much fun!