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Rating:  -
I have to admit that I didn't like this film the first time I watched it as I didn't really appreciate the documentary style layout and it seemed a little slow to develop. Now that I've seen it again after a few years, I've actually come to like this a lot as I realise that this is a very unique film with a very good storyline and good acting as well as it describes the lives of High School graduates/dropouts and their very real sense of loss having to leave the safe/secure comfort zone of school to face the real world with all its uncertainty and callousness.
One character actually manages to take the leap albeit with great reluctance and after great difficulty soul-searching while another doesn't quite make it at least yet. I can actually see myself returning to this film again in the future as I get the feeling as with any classic that I'll pick up something again which I didn't at the previous viewing to make me enjoy this even more; this is the sign of a classic film.
This film is also responsible for launching a whole new genre of nostalgia themed spinoffs like "Happy Days" which ran many many seasons but unlike "M*A*S*H" which was poor compared with the tv series that it launched, "American Graffitti" holds its own as a great film in its own right and is in no way overshadowed by the tv series. This film is also responsible or at least very influential for "Grease" and the "Sha-na-na" tv series that along with "Happy Days" was very popular on tv here in Singapore when I was growing up. For an 80's version of this type of film check out "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" which is also similarly themed.
Too bad the DVD quality isn't as good as the film though as the picture quality has imperfections like white spots on many of the frames and barely rises above VHS quality and the sound quality although THX mastered does not come in DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Options but if you have a Pro Logic setup, you do get to approximate a proper surround sound environment to do some justice to your home theatre setup.
A redeeming factor is the Special Features section which has about an 80 minute making of documentary which I found very entertaining. With the advent of Blu-ray, here's hoping George Lucas will supervise a proper picture and sound quality remastering job that will improve upon what's on this particular dvd version which is just average given what's currently out there.
Great film but wait for a better restored picture and sound quality version to surface either in the standard or Blu-ray format.
Rating:  -
My favorite movie of all time - after Titanic.
I grew up in the 60's, and relate to this wonderful movie. I love everyone in it, and sometimes play it just to have the music playing while I'm doing housework. Great plot, great acting, and love Modesto for the small town set.
Great, great movie!!
Rating: -
American Graffitti, released in 1974, takes place near Modesto California where George Lucas (the films director and co-writer) spent his high school years. One of Lucas's stated purposes in making this film was to document the practice of "cruising." For those of us that didn't grow up in that era cruising basically consists of driving around town all night looking for something to do. A practice unthinkable for most of us now thanks to gas prices. The whole town seems to revolve around doing everything in a car. The drive in movies, the diner that you eat in your car at (Sonic is the modern equivalent), and the secluded outdoor area where everyone goes to "park." One of the films funniest plots revolves around Terry (Charles Martin Smith) who is usually carless being lent a car by a friend and jumping into a world that he is wholly unprepared for.
The entire film takes place in the space of one night, the night before Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve (Ron Howard) are supposed to leave for college. The movie takes pains to show us what a solitary figure Curt is. He is shown at the school dance walking in a dark hall by himself, he is sitting alone on a car watching storefront television, he is the only main character to sit in the back seat of a car (usually by himself). Curt has relationships and interactions but they are very brief in nature. Throughout the course of the film the characters are defined by their relationships. Steve is trying to figure out what to do with his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) who cannot come to college because she is still a junior in high school. John Milner (Paul Lemat) is the local hot rod legend that accidently picks up Carol (Mackenzie Philips) a girl perhaps 13 or 14 years old. Terry in the course of his only night with a car picks up Debbie (Candy Clark in an Oscar nominated role) who is the cause of most of the "fun" that Terry has to endure.
All of these relationships have their touching moments but none like the unlikely pair of John and Carol. At first very antagonist John reveals himself to be full of empathy and seems to understand that no matter what she says Carol worships the ground he walks on. He condescends to be worshiped and in one moment after she angrily leaves his car, he drives around looking for her worried and arrives to rescue her from a car full of hecklers.
Since everyone is in their cars the whole night and they all have their windows down and their radios blaring, classic rock seems to pulse in every scene. There are several instances of superior sound design one in which a character runs through the streets and "Barbara Ann" flies out cars as they go by, simultaneously sounding exactly as it would in real life but also acting as a comment on the excitement the character is feeling. The music really is the heartbeat of the film and gives the whole story a rhythm. This omnipresence of the radio broadcast lends an almost God like status to the local disc jockey Wolfman Jack. The Wolfman represents everything that teenager's value. He makes prank calls, stays up all night, blasts rock and roll and has worked his way into adolescent mythology as an outlaw who broadcasts variously from Mexico and a plane that flies constantly around the country. In the course of the story the Wolfman will be unveiled as a normal person in a scene that is often compared to the famous "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" scene in the Wizard of Oz.
American Graffitti on the surface is just a teen comedy but the portrayl of adolescence is so blindingly accurate that it touches a cord with many people that see it over the years despite not sharing some of the cultural trappings. For me it inspires a personal longing for days gone by. The ending is bittersweet and the epilogue brings home the feeling that we all have when we learn that friends are mortal and that all things come to an end.
An excellent film and George Lucas's best outing as a director.
Rating: -
What a glorious, nostalgic, and ultimately melancholy movie this is. It ranks in my top five, maybe top three films of all time. I saw this meditation on early '60s California again the other night on the big screen, and realized from the other men in the audience, and from my wife's ho-hum reaction, that American Graffiti appeals mostly to and is about men.
The hot rod cars are the first tip-off of course, and "cruising the strip" as street rodder Milner calls it (we used to call it "cruising Broadway") while answering drag challenges and scoping out girls are the main night activities. It's a heady and uncertain time, this one night the movie concentrates on. Curt and Steve (Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard)are due to leave town for college the next morning, and Curt's getting cold feet. You can't help but feel the exciting tug of the unknown in one direction and yet understand the comfort of the routine and the familiar in wanting to stay home. Anyone who left home for the big world as a teenager will understand very well what's going on in these guys' minds.
John Milner is supposedly content to remain hot rod king of the hill, but he seems defensive about Curt moving on. Curt gets into and out of trouble with the local toughs the "Pharaohs," while the characters of the outstanding ensemble cast go through their own little triumphs and failures in the night. In a piece of inspired casting Wolfman Jack is a running background theme throughout the movie, except for the part when he takes center stage when Curt asks him to broadcast a message for a beautiful woman (Suzanne Somers) who's been cruising around town.
What guy doesn't have some bittersweet memory of some gorgeous gal he couldn't or wouldn't approach? George Lucas captures the sentiment precisely, especially at the end after sunrise when Curt on the plane sees her one last time, driving way below him in her white T-Bird.
It all works. The great '50s music, Toad's (Charles Martin Smith) fumbling escapades with Debbie (Candy Clark), the showdown that caps the escalating encounters between Milner and the new hot rodder in town, Bob Falfa (Harrison Ford), the warm California night, the splits and reconciliations, Carol's (Mackenzie Phillips) funny and argumentative night riding with Milner, the end and beginning of an era individually and collectively.
Why did Lucas title the movie "American Graffiti"? Perhaps because graffiti is transitory. Being impermanent, one has to record it to save it. Perhaps he meant to say that graffiti is the writing on the wall, that the culture he so deeply portrays in this movie is in just a couple of years going to vanish, replaced by a hippie culture so radically different as to seem utterly alien. In 1962 the Korean war was a remote memory, and the Vietnam mess only the size of a man's fist on the horizon. The teenagers in this movie are coming of age in a fairly carefree era, one on the cusp of revolution in society and morals, an era that will end suddenly and pretty much completely in a brief time.
After seeing all that happened in the movie that one night, you might get an ache in the gut of differing emotions seeing the fates of several of the characters posted on the foreground of Curt's plane flying high. Rolling the credits with the Beach Boys's "All Summer Long" was perfect. I can't think of the song now without that mix of nostalgia, melancholy, and humor this movie inspires.
Where was I in '62? In the upper Midwest, a little boy. But it would've been fun to be in California on a soft summer's night, the entire future ahead of me.
Rating:  -
The movie is of course a classic and always fun to watch. What I was disapointed with was this recording. For this being remastered, the sound was awful. I was constantly turning it up and straining to hear. It was reallly awful.
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