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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

As a UNC film major, we spent long hours over beer, burgers and coffee debating the celluloid of the days gone by. The great directors ... Wells, Hitchcock, Wertmuller and Truffaut. ... Pekinpah

The hours of film that have washed over me then and since are innumerable.

In Atlanta my frequent haunt was the Film Forum showing the likes of Man Friday, The Ruling Class, Harold and Maude and The King of Hearts which, oddly they always paired with Bambi Meets Godzilla as a short at the beginning

:smiles in remembrance:

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

If you haven’t yet

Take a look at The Offer

The remembrances of Al Ruddy, producer of the Godfather

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I'll DEFINITELY watch that. I read recently that Mario Puzo was self-taught (which I'll guess figures in the plot of The Offer). After he had made it big, he decided he ought to learn how real screenwriters operate, so he bought a book on the subject. When he opened it, the first bit of info advised aspiring screenwriters to watch the Godfather films and try to emulate Mario Puzo. Similarly, George Gershwin, also an auto-didact, once asked Maurice Ravel to teach him the fine points of composition. Ravel thought about and then said no. He told Gershwin that he would likely end up writing bad Ravel instead of great Gershwin--that he would lose his gift for spontaneity. Gershwin also asked Stravinsky to give him lessons. Stravinsky asked Gershwin how much he was earning per year. When he heard the astronomical sum, Stravinsky said, "Then it is I who should be asking you for lessons."

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Started watching The Offer. Fantastic.

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As a literature major, we did the same with Faulkner, Borges, Garcia Marquez, etc. In my 4th year, I was the third wheel with UVa's film series. The top guy went on to write the first Batman scripts. The second guy became an animator. I became an economist who praises and pillories films on Substack. I saw The King of Hearts while an undergrad. Wonder if that's where I first saw Bambi Meets Godzilla.

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

I worked off and in doing film production in NYC (MTV News with Martha Quinn and lots of fashion shows for RAI Tv … later , commercials and small films out of Richmond)

But my passion comes more from the watching than the doing.

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

Were most of the ballots unfolded?

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:)

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

Reminds of me "Used Innocence." Wow, what a brain destroying waste of 95 minutes. Also, it featured a character named Bambi!

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

saw it at nyu, as a cinema grad student. chantal akerman attended. she was in town fir the premiere of her commercial flop tgat starred wm hurt and j binoche, a couch in ny. the other grad students loved it. i hated it. compression is one of the hallmarks of movie story-telling, and the movie chosr not to ude it, instead making us suffer the tedium and boredom of the main chatacter. this was the artistic choice of the director, on the anti-bourgoise postmodernists love as it proved, in their minds, that the role of homemaker and mother and wife are degrading, dehumanuzing and anti-femininist. and thats why it won this poll, too: ideology over aesthetics. the star of the film, the beautiful delphine seyrig - buried in the cemetery montpatnasde, also starred in last year at marienbaf, a masterpiece of surrealism.

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Interesting. The author of the Sight and Sound announcement said that 20 years ago, film students were bored by Jeanne D and many would leave the room for a time to clear their minds. Today, she said, all the film students love it and sit straight through. I believe her, but I suspect that she and I draw very different conclusions from that fact. As Paul Schrader noted repeatedly, they suddenly doubled the size of the voting panel on the poll, and filled it with very different sorts of voters--activist types and not really the critics and such of past years. Hence, he argues, there is no continuity from 2012 to 2022. It's an entirely different poll.

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

postmodernists dominated nyu's cinema department back then. i suspect that was not as widespread then as it is now.

back then, david bordwell was too apolitical for most profs and students.

i studied with noel carroll who wss brilliant a puncturing the presuppositions underlying the pomo and zizekian and lacanian approaches and also those of the mulvey feminists and the baudry apparatus crowd.

but the students and most of the staff persisted in their ideological approaches - which are dominant in all fields of education at all levels.

sadly.

the woke education agenda is why akerman's film won.

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Well, I don't know most of those names or approaches--but I get the drift (and will look them up). And yes, the ideological approaches crept upward, but didn't really didn't metastasize until COVID time. I taught at five universities from 1999 till 2017, and that stuff never touched me. It was a quaint, confused problem in certain humanities departments, but not universal. Now, it is everywhere, all the time.

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Aug 6, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

not quaint and not confused.

it just took a few decades for the novices to take over. the shutdowns allowed more to see the effects of this "'long march' forward". as alan sokol proved a few decades ago - 1996, and others since, it is a problem far beyond humanities departments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

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This review of yours reminds me of why I rarely care to watch movies and often end up having contempt for the time I wasted at it. Kudos!

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Oddly enough, my wife and I were scrolling through the films available to us on TCM and came across this last night. Alerted to its #1 Sight and Sound ranking by your article, we started watching. Although impressed with Jeanne's potato boiling prowess at the beginning, we quickly decided to "cleanse our palates" by watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

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If you tell a child, "Don't put your finger in your ear," the finger will go straight into the ear the moment you turn around. So essentially, my article had the same effect on you. :)

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Exactly! But thanks to your article we only spent 10 minutes with our fingers in our ears

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Aug 7, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

Adam Arkin… great director

Casting superb

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