Real Genius: The Best Movie Ever Made.  (I know, I know, so it's not a very artsy flick, but I really like it, Okay?)

Real Genius starred Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret as Chris Knight and Mitch Hathaway. Chris is a senior year student at Pacific Tech, who is working on a special laser for Professor Jerry Hathaway (played by William Atherton, the same guy who played the annoying reporter guy in both Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 2). When Mitch, a young and exceptionally bright high school student is accepted to Pacific Tech to help Dr. Hathaway with his high tech Laser experiments, he meets Chris, who has gone slightly insane in a bid to perhaps preserve a larger sanity. Mitch is the prototypical naieve and trusting type. Chris is the jaded one. This of creates most of the humor in the movie. Chris' complete inability to take anything seriously saves the movie from an otherwise prototypical "Teens Save the World" type of plot. Of course, there is still the evil plot to be foiled. Dr. Hathaway is very versatile. He's both an egotistical mad scientist and a PBS-style public television personality on a show called Everything: "The colon... What does it look like? What does it do? I'm Doctor Jerry Hathaway with 'Everything'".

If the humor is so sophomoric and the plot is kind of predictable, then why am I so enamored of this movie?  Perhaps it's a a zen-like simplicity of the movie. Maybe it's the fact that you can hear one of my favourite bands (The Call) in the background in one scene. Maybe it's the mad-science stuff, I always liked that. Maybe it's some quotability factor in the movie. I mean, I can practically recite the whole thing. In this way, this movie is like The Princess Bride, and Spinal Tap.

Chris: Kent put his name on his licence plates!
Mitch: My mom used to do that to my underwear.
Chris: Your mom used to put licence plates on your underwear? How did you sit down?

Okay, okay, it's the girl. Jordan (played by Michelle Meyrink), becomes Mitch's love-interest in the movie. There is a kind of sad hopelessness in one scene, where Chris sees Jordan at an impromptu pool party set up in a lecture hall. She is, in true nerd style, carrying a Rebreather unit (like SCUBA but no air tanks) she invented herself. Everyone else is partying it up. They have this conversation:

Chris: Why aren't you.....
Jordan: Necking? I'm Not Gay!
Chris: No, Dancing.
Jordan: I think most guys are intimidated by me. I'm eighteen, I'm hyperkinetic, and possibly if I stopped to think about it I might be upset.

Basically, the movie summed up my longing for a mate nicely. Back in the days before I met my wife, that unendurable longing was the center of my thoughts almost all the time.  Today, it's no longer front and center, but I remember it well, and I think the memories of how that felt endear me still to the innocent romance between Mitch and Jordan.  It's not very deep, not like Joy Gresham and C. S. Lewis in my favourite romance film, Shadowlands, and yet there is something in Real Genius, pulpy though it is, that really clicked with me. Kerry-Lee and I think it might have something to do with how the media has programmed me to like a certain physical build and shy demeanor in women. Since I married a woman completely unlike Jordan, I suppose I can consider myself cured. But then again, maybe there is something else, more to do with how I feel about me, perhaps than about women in general. Anyways, I shall forever have a soft spot in my heart for this movie.

Here are some questions I'm hoping someone on the net can answer. I have found some stuff on the Web using the Internet Movie Database

Where is Michelle Meyrink now and has she appeared in any other films?

Where is Gabriel Jarret now? (Note that his name was mis-spelled in the movie credits as Gabe Jarrett.) Where have you seen him?

Val Kilmer? Well it's less of a mystery what happened to him. What I wonder is, does Val Kilmer remember this movie and did he enjoy making it?

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