Trust the good people of Criterion to come out with a quality edition of that luscious, lavish fantasy film that inspired so many great adventure directors: The Thief of Bagdad.

Based on Tales of the Arabian Nights, this was one of the movies that showed me as a kid that every once in a while, movie magic could match the fantastic pictures my imagination spun from reading great books of fantasy.

I'm not surprised that Coppola, Scorcese, Lucas and Spielberg all llist it as an influence. You'll see plenty of touches in Thief of Bagdad that will bring their movies to mind, not to mention Disney's Princess Jasmine.

With dazzling special effects for the day (some of which inevitably appear a touch cheesy now), and an exotic storyline filled with magic, Thief has been very hard to find on DVD. Not anymore. Can't wait to get my paws on it.

I'm not sure this works shrunk to the size limitation our blog format requires, but this is kind of cool, and it's popping up all over the place - an optical illusion that from one distance looks like Einstein and from another like Marilyn Monroe.

Really doesn't have much to do with classic movies, except it's a nifty way to show us how our brains are programmed to recopgnize faces -- especially famous faces like Marilyn's.

See it here full size. I'm not sure where it originated - none of the sites where I've seen it so far has offered a credit.