Adventures in Cinema Studies: With Dr. Wiener and His Disrespectful Students

Episode four of "Adventures in Cinema Studies with Dr. Dudley Weiner" is out! This week, we pry open The Seventh Seal, an Ingmar Bergman movie whose alternate title could plausibly be One Crazy Summer. That's because it takes place in the summer amidst an outbreak of a disease (the Bubonic Plague) that makes everyone go crazy. Funnily enough, there is a 1986 John Cusack movie called One Crazy Summ...

Welcome to class three! First the bad news: Auditing student Tre did not drop the course. Then the worse news: Enrolled student Darren asked us to compare Black Narcissus to Black Panther Followed by a brief bit of good news: We wound up barely talking about Black Panther. Before returning to bad news: The students couldn't stop talking about Black Narcissus because they couldn't stop talking abou...

Welcome to class two! Some housekeeping notes: Auditing student Jefferson Pinkerton has dropped the course! His departure makes the course MUCH better. Unfortunately, this episode is MUCH worse than the last one. That's because Jeff's departure coincides with the arrival of a new auditing student, Xavier Dupree III, AKA "Tre." Professor and students soldier on by attempting to discuss the 1933 Mar...

In this complete joke of a university seminar, Dr. Wiener, Darren, and Jefferson explore A Man Escaped , the 1956 classic directed by Robert Bresson. Dr. Wiener reviews readings by Susan Sontag, Paul Schrader, Leo Murray, and Bresson himself. (Neither Darren nor Jefferson read any.) Note 1: Darren makes intrusive comparisons to the 1990 Jim Varney vehicle Ernest Goes to Jail while Jefferson insist...