Coming soon to an artsy-fartsy blog near you
New feature will get underway next week.
necritics’ Wednesday Night at the Movies, hosted by Lance Mannion.
Wait a minute! That’s me!
Starting next Wednesday, June 11, and for the four Wednesdays after that I’ll be hosting an open thread right here at newcritics devoted to each one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture for 1967: The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle. I was going to leave that last one off my list, but our favorite film blogger the Siren insisted I include it. She swears it holds up a lot better than you’d think. We’ll see.
I chose these movies just because they’re the subject of Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution, so I heartily recommend reading the book as a great backgrounder for the discussions. No way, though, am I assinging it as homework. These threads are meant to be fun, as if we were all just talking about a movie we’d just seen together at a coffee shop after the show and definitely not as if we’d all just watched it in class.
My plan is to open the threads at 10 PM EDT each Wednesday and we’ll just start chatting away as if we’d all just finished watching the movie. Of course it won’t be necessary to actually watch the film just before. It won’t even be necessary for you to have watched the film recently—or at all—to join in. Clearly, though, I’m hoping folks will watch the movie (re-watch for a lot of us) in the week leading up to that Wednesday’s open thread.
So…here’s my tentative schedule for the threads:
June 11: The Graduate.
June 18: In the Heat of the Night.
June 25. Doctor Dolittle.
July 2. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
July 9. Bonnie and Clyde.
(Schedule revised from this morning based on suggestions by Ralph Hitchens and SF Mike. Saving Bonnie and Clyde for last, besides letting us end with a bang—sorry, couldn’t resist.—finishes us off with the movie that had the most influence on movies for the next ten years.)
Let me know what you think of the list and the schedule and if you already have some points in mind you’d like the discussions to touch on.
If this goes well I think it will become a permanent fixture at newcritics, although we’ll probably start rotating the hosting chores. The Siren may not remember or may wish to forget but she’s already volunteered to take on the next set of movies.
So, there you go. Add The Graduate to your Netflix queue or buy it from Amazon or download it from somewhere or run out to your local video store or public library ASAP. Please join in even if you can’t watch the movies beforehand.
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