I remember wanting to wear every other outfit in Excalibur. Especially Gwen's chain-mail wedding veil and the cloak that covers her AND THE HORSE SHE RIDES OUT ON.

Mists of Avalon gave me a real grounding in mysteries SIMILAR to Catholic ritual, and generally made me feel plugged in to ordinary magic. The character of Morgaine is wonderfully three dimensional and sympathetic.
She accepts, at the end, that the Goddess will change names and attributes; that the Goddess does not need her.

I loved 'Excalibur' from the first time I saw it, in a very teenage-boy sort of way. On repeated viewing, I appreciated the pagan aspects more - the intterconnectedness of all things, symbolized by "The Dragon", and the magnificenet coming of spring once Arthur drinks from the not-Christian-at-all Holy Grail.

'Mists of Avalon' I liked a lot and it was a great insight into a pagan worldview that I'd never experienced before, but at the same time there were parts that just annoyed me. I was pretty turned off by the portrayal of Arthur as a pussy-whipped weaking whose only real virtue was that people liked him on the surface level, and pretty much all the men excpet maybe the first Merlin were jerks and often secret misogynists.

I think fans of MoA should check out Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" for a very interesting counterpoint. He describes the early Celtic Church of Ireland and Britain as a version of Christianity that was able to meld with native pagan beliefs and coexist for centuries, until reunified with the more intolerant Roman Church well into the Middle Ages, long after Arthur.