Separated at Birth: Lana Del Rey and Blanche Baker

With thanks to my brother Bill, who pointed out the striking similarity between my new "fave" artist (I was fashionably late to the party, but Lana del Rey's "Video Games" really is the most captivating video I have seen in ages, even if I don't necessarily use captivating to mean "good") and Molly Ringwald's muscle-relaxer-loving older sister, Ginny, from "Sixteen Candles." My brothers and I first fell in love with Blanche Baker in a little-scene 1979 movie called "French Postcards," which was in heavy rotation the year we got HBO. The film is best known as one of Debra Winger's first features -- right after the disastrous "Thank God It's Friday" -- and told the story of a group of American exchange students in Paris for a year. I haven't seen it in 30 years, but I remember it as being an incredibly good coming-of-age story that for years I included on my Favorite Films of All Time list, having been co-written by "American Graffiti" scripters Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who also directs. (The leads were David Marshall Grant, who would later play Joe Pitt in the original Broadway production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," and Miles Chapin, who had scattered credits up until 2001 and then vanished.) I just found it on Netflix -- anyone seen it lately? -- and it's now No. 1 in my queue! I'll let you know if it stands the test of time.