American Graffiti Watch Along
Added 2024-04-19 16:01:01 +0000 UTCAnother one checked off the AFI List! Man it feels good! TBH this is not one of my fave movies but I can appreciate it!
OBS gave me a hard time again (this time I think it really is Mercury Retrograde) so I apologize for some mic blips! It's not too bad thou! Thank God
Let me know your feels about this movie!!!
xx
ames
Comments
The Billy Crystal 🤣 I wish I loved the music more.. am I ded inside ? Cause pretty sure I was grooving to some of the songs I liked 🙈🙈🙈
Amalia Wolf
2024-04-23 00:56:25 +0000 UTCI love this comment Jeff!
Amalia Wolf
2024-04-23 00:55:47 +0000 UTCHey everyone! This is going to be long so please bear with me. During the 1970s there was a nostalgia for the Fifties. “Grease” was successful on Broadway and later became a popular movie. The doo-wop music from the 1950s became popular again on the radio and Wolfman Jack was leading that movement. There was a hit television show back then called “Sha Na Na” which was about these greasers from the Fifties. I’m sure a lot of the nostalgia was escapist fare from the Vietnam War and many people waxing nostalgically about the more innocent times of the Fifties. Anyways, this movie comes out and is a huge success. It launched the careers of many actors/actresses and the director, George Lucas. I think you can also see a bit of “Star Wars” in this movie. John Milner is a bit like Han Solo. Curt the idealistic dreamer is a bit like Luke Skywalker. Incidentally, Curt’s personality and attitude is very similar to me in real-life. His sense of humor. His romanticism. That’s so me. Except I prefer brunettes to blondes. (Sorry, blondes!) Not long after this movie was released came the television show “Happy Days” which was a single-camera show the first two seasons and had a laugh track. The initial tone of the show was more nostalgic and sweet like this movie. Lots of night shooting and drive-ins, etc. However, the show started to struggle in the ratings in its second season and came very close to being cancelled. Garry Marshall, the producer of the show, suggested they film the last episode of the season in front of a live studio audience. They did. It worked really well. And from that point on the show was filmed that way. Also, they changed the opening theme song from “Rock Around The Clock” to the “Happy Days” theme song. Ron Howard was also the star of “Happy Days”, but soon his popularity was eclipsed by Henry Winkler who played Arthur Fonzarelli aka “The Fonz” aka “Fonzie”. If you were a kid from the 1970s, you no doubt grew up with catch phrases like “Sit on it!” and how many of us guys mimicked Fonzie attempting to comb his hair in the mirror, then deciding, “Eh, it’s perfect the way it is. Ayyyyy!” 👍 To me, this movie is like “Dazed And Confused” but 20 years earlier. Both have relatively unknown casts at the time. Both have excellent soundtracks. And both had sequels although “More American Graffiti” (1979) was a huge disappointment IMHO. There’s also another movie which came out in 1980 called “The Hollywood Knights” which many people consider to be a ripoff of “American Graffiti” and perhaps, but I love “The Hollywood Knights” for as cheesetastic as it is. It’s a good one to watch on Halloween night because that’s when the movie takes place in 1965. If you grew up during the 1980s you will remember this movie was on HBO all of the time. It was like “Tombstone” and “The Fugitive” on TNT in the 1990s on weekends or “Goodfellas” on Bravo during the 2000s. I’m glad you got to watching this, Ames. Some movies are going to be hit-and-miss.
Jeff Mills
2024-04-21 23:26:13 +0000 UTCI'm with Noell on this one, in that it's long been a favorite (yes, probably the music), though I do not watch it as often as other favorites, I also believe it to be somewhat overrated, and it took me a handful of viewings to appreciate it as much as I do. As far as the epilogue is concerned, maybe Ames was actually spared. I wish it had never been put in. Anyone I have ever watched this with has looked over at me afterwards with a wtf look on their face, like we just watched this nice, nostalgic, uplifting, though bittersweet film, only to have the ending reveal that most of the characters we've followed went on to experience disappointing lives and deaths. I also have never been invested in Curt's story line. He is the only one that has an okay ending. He becomes a writer...so he can write about things that happen to other people (in my best Billy Crystal). Many of the writer/directors from the American New Wave, or New Hollywood, use a character (or two) to reflect themselves and their own feelings or life experiences. Most can be divided into two camps. The characters are either overly self-involved, allowing things to happen TO them, or they are more self-aware, understand how small they are in the big scheme of things, and spend the majority of the story processing, overcoming, and chasing the dream to make it happen. Curt (Lucas) falls into the former. He's really just blowing with the wind in this one, and since he hasn't made up his mind, I'm not overly invested in any choice he makes. I have little to root for. I love this movie in spite of those things, but I'm a sucker for nostalgia. The music chosen for this was meant to resonate with those who lived through the period. It Belonged to them, and it is meant to set the mood and carry the tone throughout. Music would evolve for another couple of decades before I would even be born, but it puts me into the same state of mind that the music of my generation does for us. We all remember those few transformative years, when every lyric and note of every song we heard was important, to a point that one of them comes on in the background, and we can see the face of someone we haven't thought about in years.
Shawn Goforth
2024-04-21 13:32:09 +0000 UTC
