5 Off My Head - RIP Garry Marshall

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His movies may've become synonymous with dreckitude over the past several years, but coming of age in the 1980s I don't think you can help having a soft spot for Garry Marshall. I was a little young for his TV - although I definitely have fond memories of watching Laverne & Shirley with my Mom - but I was just the right kinda-don't-know-better age for his mainstream flicks, and he made me laugh and he made me cry and he made me do all the things the movies should make a person do.

Here are five of the first things I thought of thinking of him.

1 -- It kind of starts, middles, and ends with Pretty Woman, to be honest. I've written these words so many times that they've become less defensive (we all know the flick's got its issues) than they have become a mantra - I have seen this movie more times than Mary schtupped Joseph. I could probably recite it back to front, if pressed, and there's not a week, hell there's maybe even not a day, where I don't recite a line from it, or contemplate the fate of poor Skinny Marie the dead crackhead hooker in the dumpster, or think about Richard Gere mounting me on a piano in the public dining hall of the Beverly Wilshire.

2 -- Speaking of hotness though Garry funneled a good bit of the masculine sort into the world. Besides Richard Gere (that's a big besides!) there's Garrett Hedlund in Georgia Rule, while Matt Dillon with his pink polo shirts in The Flamingo Kid and Kurt Russell's brawny man act in Overboard were both childhood favorites... 

... and then I mean anybody who could shoot Paul Mercurio's great big butt the way he shot Paul Mercurio's great big butt in Exit to Eden, well, this ends up being a bullet-point in your obituary as written by me. 

Thank you, sir! Important stuff!

3 -- He was in Soapdish! Soapdish is right up there alongside Pretty Woman in the list of Movies I Have Seen More Times Than I Have Told My Mother I Love Her, and I probably quote it as often as I do that other film. And he's very funny in it too.

"I would like to voice my strong concern about this show's spiraling decline in ratings. David, ever since you took us to the Caribbean, it's been Jamaica homeless people sucking soup, and a big wave outside that cost a hundred thousand dollars. That's depressing and it's expensive, two words I hate. You know the words I like? I like the word "peppy" and the word "cheap". Peppy and cheap."

4 -- I've never seen the Princess Diaries movies, but without the Princess Diaries movies Anne Hathaway wouldn't have had any goody image to rebel against and we maybe never would've gotten...

... her acting in that wig in Brokeback Mountain, and I shudder in terror thinking of a world without that. So thanks for indirectly bringing me wig goodness, Garry. The world needs Wig Goodness!

5 -- Beaches, Beaches, Beaches. How many tears in my life have I shed watching Beaches? I have shed rivers, lakes, oceans of tears for the tale of two girls who become two ladies who become one lady and oh my god I am going to cry and cry and cry again right now. Here, lets get everything ready and have a good cry together...
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