I’m no movie critic but love the medium. That’s why my wife and I yearn for a three-movie day. We squeezed in three on the Friday and Saturday before the Oscars. (Each received a top award: best actor, actress, and movie.) Thus my interest in “The greatest movie scenes ever shot,” touted on the eclectic kottke.org. Compiled by film makers and a critic, the list includes several films I’ve seen. The description of a French movie I had never heard of, Jules et Jim, intrigued me enough to order it from Netflix.
As I read the list and scene synopses, a film that should have made the cut flickered to life. But I admit my objectivity is compromised, considering my emotional attachment to The Graduate. Then again, how a movie makes one feel has to count for something, even with critics. Read More
On the radio, Garrison Keillor says writer Charles Webb turns sixty-nine today. Webb wrote The Graduate, the book on which the 1967 movie was based. News to me is Webb’s sequel, published in January.
A little research shows Home School is a sequel in name only. Not worth reading, not worth risking the original story losing its special status. Good stories end; finality keeps them very much alive.
My first encounter with The Graduate was the movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock and Katherine Ross as Elaine Robinson. I didn’t read the book until I had seen the movie five times — the first with guy friends, the last four alone — before graduating from high school in 1968.
I imagined myself as Benjamin after his affair with Elaine’s mother, Anne Bancroft’s iconic Mrs. Robinson. I loved his Alfa Romeo sports car, the way he drove it balls-to-the-wall, how good he looked unshaven and disheveled, how he questioned his advantaged life, how he did whatever it took against impossible odds to win Elaine’s heart from the superficial, pretty-boy college guy.
I wanted to be Benjamin the intellectually gifted outsider, the rebel whose persona exuded a secret charm that attracted girls like Elaine. At Winter Park High in Florida, such girls were my friends but beyond my romantic reach. Read More
