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I just want to thank everybody for watching this movie. I think it's an interesting film that was a bit ahead of its time. At least we can all agree the music is great! Also, I found out on the weekend Neil Young wrote, directed and starred in a similar odd movie in the earlier 80s called Human Highway that stars and has music by, personal favourites, DEVO. Am I going to watch this tonight? Yes!

Amy's hostility to the character of Benjamin seems odd, especially in the way she bends over backwards justifying Mrs. Robinson. To me it's a lot less creepy for a twenty-year old to sleep with an older married woman and pursue that woman's daughter than it is for the middle aged woman to bed down her husband's best friend's son, in order to train him be her sex idiot, with no interest or concern for his well being. Almost all the emotional drama which unfolds is pretty much due to Mrs. Robinson's weird behavior. That said I agree with Amy's ambivalence about this movie; agree with her that Hoffmann was miscast in the role, but not because he isn't sexy enough to interest a woman such as Mrs Robinson--Amy's generalizations about the tastes of women will strike just about every listener as wrong because their life experience, the girls and women they've known tell them she's wrong--but for aesthetic reasons. In casting Hoffmann director Mike Nichols deliberately sentimentalizes the character and the situations. If the part had been played by the Robert Redford of The Candidate and especially Downhill Racer, he'd be a masculinely assured type on an equal footing with Mrs. Robinson. Under Redford's handsome toothy charm we'd sense an arrogance and self-serving entitlement which would give us an objective ironic view of his malaise and rebellion--we'd see that there was something destructive and blundering, as well as attractive, in Benjamin's behavior, and the effect would be bracing and, well, dramatic. Nichols, in casting Hoffmann, uses his comedy expertise to manipulate the audience, knowing that if the character is made a cuddly, lovable underdog an audience will root for him in these situations no matter how crazy they are: Nichols understands everybody identifies with a schmuck. Further the film sentimentalizes the Elaine character. Has anyone ever really known a girl so offended and put off by stripping, porn or graphic expressions of male lust that she cried over them?--used to signal to the audience and Benjamin what a poetic girlishly pure love object she is. Seen this trick a lot in movies but off screen I've never come across such a girl--a little grossed out, ironically amused, curious, raunchily fascinated, yes, but crying, no way. Plus the film falls back on some pretty hoary melodramatic rhetoric, such as having Elaine's husband be a jerk so we won't care that she leaves him at the alter after marrying him! A hardly artistic touch. All the stuff Nichols did to the material, which is what made it so very successful with audiences, plays very oddly against what I expect was Buck Henry's and maybe novelist Charles Webb's attempt to mate racy subject matter with a kicky satire on suburbia and mass culture in the manner of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita. Benjamin could almost be a weird combination of outsider Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze. And there is a distinct family resemblance between Anne Bancroft's marvelous Mrs. Robinson and Shelly Winters' terrific Charlotte Haze. In Lolita, after an evening out, Charlotte brings Humbert home, pours some pink champagne, puts on campy cha-cha music and plays at being sophisticated as a means of fascinating a decidedly awkward and off-put Humbert. In The Graduate, Mrs Robinson brings Benjamin home, puts on some cheesy cocktail music, pours herself a drink and vamps world weariness to tempt the non-plussed young man into bed. Shelley Winters, underscoring what a predator Charlotte is, wears an aggressive, clingy leopard print dress, looking forward to all the animal print clothing Mrs. Robinson sports throughout The Graduate, yelling at the audience: "Careful, she's a man eater!"--something neither Paul nor Amy brought up by the way. I think it mostly succeeds because of Anne Bancroft's wit and the sudden veneer of Rom-Comness being shorn off right at the end, though it doesn't really go with the way Nichols has done the rest of the movie, setting us up for all the great ironic post genre films of the 1970s that Amy doesn't like all that much,

This sounds very interesting and I've never heard of it. Not sure how well Neil Young and Devo go together but this came out the same year Trans did which is the most Devo-ish album of Neil Young's career. So, this could work.

Did they also build a time machine and get a young Ron Howard to act in it?

It sure looks like it, and maybe Jean Smart to his right? If either is true I am watching that shit.

Sally sells seashells by the seashore, but Beverly barters her body...that whore.

How many berries could Chuck Berry bury if Chuck Berry could bury berries?

Shallow Grave is a great one. Probably my favorite Danny Boyle movie.

Well, for sure Paul has seen it, since he appeared on season 2 of Worst Idea of All Time. I would love so much to hear June's and Jason's thoughts on this movie. It boggles the mind how on it earth it did get made.