Thursday Thirteen #350

1. In 1976, I saw a movie called The Other Side of the Mountain. In one scene, the heroine, who had been paralyzed in a skiing accident, showed her boyfriend/fiancé that she could now retrieve a potato chip from a bowl. The boyfriend stood up, incredulous. "Aren't you going to walk again?" he asked. And when she did not answer, he fled, never to return. That scene has stuck with me all of these years.

2. My favorite scene in Dirty Dancing is the one where Baby is practicing her footwork on the bridge, and we get to watch her progress from being stilted and stiff to free and loose. It helps that she is dancing to the song Wipe Out.

3. In the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, my favorite scene is at the end, when the Italian salesman tells the heroine that she has all she had asked for, it just wasn't in the form she expected.

4. When the heroine in Flash Dance does her thing in front of all the judges, and one of the judges claps for her and looks enthused, I break out in a big grin every time.

5. I always cry when the mother deer dies in Disney's Bambi.

6. Forrest Gump always tears me up when his girl Jenny goes back to her old house and begins throwing rocks at it. Later Forrest Gump tells her, while she is cold in the grave, that he bought the property and had the house torn down.

7. One of my husband's favorite movies is The Replacements, starring Kenea Reeves. My favorite scene in the movie is when the whole ball team is in jail and they start singing and dancing to I Will Survive.

8. I always cry near the end of Return of the King when King Aragorn sees the Hobbits bowing to him. He bends down and says, "My friends, you bow to no one," and then he and everyone else bows before the Hobbits. Sheesh, makes me cry just to write it out!

9. In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the ring wraiths first appear and one of them sniffs at Frodo and his friends as they hide beneath a stump, I always jump and am surprised. I've seen the movie at least 10 times.

10. In The Two Towers (yes, I am a Tolkien fan, sorry), I always tear up when the elves march into the Keep, coming with their bows and arrows to help the men battle the orcs.

11. The movie Red Dawn, the one with Patrick Swayze, not the remake, made a big impression on me because I was young when I first saw it. The scene I best remember is the one where the boys watch from a distance as members of their families are executed. It was shocking at the time.

12. The movie Secretariat stays with me because of the tenacity of Penny, the horse owner, and her strong desire to win The Triple Crown. She believes in the horse and in her self. I admire that.

13. The movie SSSS was released in the early 1970s. When I stayed at my grandparents house, I would get up after they went to bed and watch it on the late show. The movie was about an evil scientist who turned a man into a king cobra snake. In the last scene as I remember it, the transformation is complete and the cobra's brother arrives in time to see the snake in a deadly fight with a mongoose.

Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here. I've been playing for a while and this is my 350th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday.