Question your assumptions: E.T.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial has been on the business end of both extremely positive and extremely negative assumptions on my part.

Once again we will use the film's placement on my Flickchart to discuss the respect I have accorded it among all the films I've seen. But first, a little background.

E.T. has held a spot in my top 100 for some time now, but it may be the top 100 resident I've gone the longest without seeing. I believe I've seen it twice -- I can't fathom that I've only seen this landmark movie once -- but I do have a very distinct memory of a frustrated attempt at a second theatrical viewing. We were on a family trip in the summer of 1982 -- I think it was down to see some friends who had moved to Tennessee -- and we needed to kill some time one afternoon. We decided to go for a second viewing of E.T., but the screening was canceled when we were the only ones to purchase tickets. I guess it was a better bet to refund our money than to pay the projectionist's salary for two hours.

Have I seen it since then? Um, I think so?

So E.T. must have made quite an impression on me to reside in my top 100, having not seen it in 25-30 years at the very least ... right?

Actually, it didn't really. I was never as big a fan of E.T. as everyone else. I'd probably say that I loved it, but not in such a way that I've, like, ever sought it out to watch again.

So, top 100? Really?

Once I got it in my mind that E.T. was not a worthy entrant in my top 100, I started consistently driving it downward, via a combination of films jumping above it by beating other films, and by films beating it directly. It was ranked 83rd back in October (don't ask me how I know this), but now it has been driven down to 99, nearly cleared out of that hallowed ground altogether.

So now that it's almost banished from the rarified air of my top 100, I'm wondering if I've replaced an unjust bias in favor of E.T. with an unjust bias against it. Sounds like an ideal candidate for a re-watch, eh?

It got off to a bit of a rocky start, I'm afraid. I had entirely forgotten -- and was a bit taken aback by -- the fact that the movie starts on E.T. himself, not on Elliott and the other human characters. In fact, it's only after about ten minutes of the stranded alien running around the forest, being chased by a bunch of flashlights, that we even get to Elliott and his family. We should start on the character whose story it is, and I kind of think that's Elliott. Even if the movie is named after E.T., we can't really adopt his perspective, can we? The point, of course, is that the alien has an empathic relationship with humans, so we as viewers should be able to "see through his eyes" in that respect. But this seems problematic especially since the character himself was not shown during the advertising campaign for this movie, as though his appearance was being saved as a "big reveal." That the movie starts on him, and we get glimpses (though not good glimpses) of what he looks like from the fist minute of the film, seemed to make a mockery of that approach.

This carried over in the fact that there didn't seem to be any of the type of "declamatory sentences" you'd expect to set up Elliott and his family, once they do appear. If their appearance is going to be delayed for ten minutes, we need to start learning key character traits about them right away. But Elliott is a pretty indistinct protagonist from the start, taking shape more thanks to the performance of Henry Thomas than to anything in the script. In fact, from this viewing, I would argue that the film is as effective as it is precisely because the actors -- particularly the younger actors like Thomas and Drew Barrymore -- so fully bring their characters to life. Their characters do not exist on the page -- they only exist in the performances. And though the actors are there to save the characters, I still never felt 100% bonded to those characters because of the sort of shocking lack of back story for them.

Then there was the appearance of E.T. I realized with a bit of a sinking sensation that although I could not pinpoint the last time I had watched E.T., I know I did not see this version of the movie, because this was the one re-released for the 20th anniversary in 2002. That means it contained not only the infamous changing of the agents' guns to walkie talkies, but also some digital re-renderings of the alien himself. Although I'm sure Steven Spielberg would have liked us to perceive those re-renderings seamlessly, he does himself no favors by including a rather obvious digital enhancement in our very first viewing of E.T., when he is uncovered in that cornfield. I knew right away that this was not the same animatronic puppet I had seen in 1982, and I didn't like what I saw. And though I later discovered that Spielberg's digital changes were fewer than I thought -- I thought almost every close-up of E.T. had been altered, but this was not the case -- by this point I had developed an unshakable bias against the changes that definitely poisoned the rest of my viewing. I perceived digital fixes even when they weren't actually there.

We also noted some of the funny ways the film is clearly the product of another era. For one, I don't think there would ever be a joke about E.T. drinking beer and Elliott acting like he was drunk at school if this movie were made today. And my wife noted something that I did not pick up on -- that Elliott's mother leaves him home sick by himself, and on a second occasion entrusts his even younger sister to watch after herself. Ah, the 1980s.

Another funny realization: Although the fact that E.T. loves Reese's Pieces is one of his most well-known traits, the candy is never actually mentioned by name in the movie. That's funny, especially since there are actual product placements for both Coke and Coors.

These problems with the movie did not prevent me from putting myself back in the shoes of the eight-year-old me who saw this movie in 1982 -- on occasion, anyway. It wasn't a detriment to me understanding why the film is so beloved. But it did make me realize that it is not beloved by me -- nor should my Flickchart ranking reflect that it is.

Although I still recognize that the bikes levitating into the sky is a magical moment in cinema history, you can't see it again for the first time, just the same way you can't see the brontosauruses in Spielberg's Jurassic Park again for the first time. However, I'd be lying if I said I went through Sunday's viewing entirely goosebump-free.

I'm starting to wonder if carrying a film like E.T. in your heart is inextricably bound to all those repeat viewings at an impressionable age. Are movies like WarGames, Time Bandits and The Goonies really better than E.T., or do I just think of them as such because I wore out those VHS tapes, but went a quarter century between viewings of E.T.?

I suppose it's useless to determine the validity of cherishing the childhood films we cherish -- you can never examine them in a way that's removed from the influences of your own personal history. It's easier just to recognize that E.T. missed being a personal favorite of mine, and now likely never will be.

Now the question is whether I forcibly rank the movie even further down my chart, or just let nature take its course. I suppose I'll just let it sit where it is for now. E.T. likely deserves at least that much.

Question your assumptions: Toy Story 2

So the first two times I've written posts under this banner, I've considered movies one might think of as sacred cows -- classics whose value is almost unquestioned. I revisited The Graduate and Rosemary's Baby the first two times I questioned my assumptions, four months apart from each other. Randomly, another four months later, I'm doing the series again.

This time, I'm doing things a bit differently by focusing on something much more recent, though still from last century. As with the other two, though, there are a set of clear assumptions I am grappling with, and it's still been long enough since I've seen it that I knew a new viewing would answer some of my questions.

I hadn't seen Toy Story 2 in something like 15 years. My #2 movie of 1999, it was one of those I saw in the theater and then saw on video almost as soon as it was available. I may have even seen it twice on video, possibly as recently as 2001 or 2002. Since then, though, nothing. On the contrary, I'm quite familiar with Toy Story, having received it on BluRay as a gift. That means its total viewings outnumber Toy Story 2 something like 8-2.

In those 13 to 15 years, I've gone from being uncertain if I could distinguish a meaningful difference in the quality of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, both five-star movies, to pretty clearly preferring Toy Story. The best example of that is my Flickchart rankings, which have Toy Story all the way up at #6 overall, and Toy Story 2 as "only" 118th. Further stimulating this consideration of Toy Story 2 was having caught part of Toy Story 3 last weekend when our family was away for the weekend with three other families. The kids were all watching Toy Story 3, and I got to sit in on the emotional ending. It was all I could do not to bust out crying, something that would have been hard to explain to a bunch of five- and ten-year-olds. I started to wonder if Toy Story 3 weren't better than I thought it was -- perhaps even challenging the quality of Toy Story 2.

(Favorite moment from the viewing, though: When the characters survive their close scrape with the incinerator at the end, my son looked up at me with a look of earnest glee and said "They made it!" The others sitting with him, all older, were nonplussed -- or at least were not similarly vocal. I will treasure the time that my son responds to happy endings totally without cynicism or skepticism.)

So when a BluRay of Toy Story 2 popped up at the library last week on a visit with my sons, I gobbled it up. I thought my older son would be especially ripe for a viewing, having just so enjoyed the next chapter in the saga. (And not really getting that he missed a part in the middle.)

I didn't know if I'd actually get to watch it with him, but the opportunity arose on Sunday morning, when he started the day by vomiting on the carpet. Now that he was officially sick, all kinds of previously inexcusable activities were now on the table -- like him getting to watch TV for most of the day, and me getting to plop down with him for the length of a whole movie. (The fact that he threw up twice more during the day removed any question of whether he was truly sick.)

Toy Story 2 is still a great movie, but there are in fact certain things that bothered me during this view, ranging from the minor to the major. I'll list them in no particular order:

1) The writing is not as casually sharp as it is in the first movie. One of the things that makes Toy Story such a pleasure is that its dialogue is almost exhaustingly clever. You don't truly become exhausted by it, of course, but it's densely packed with double entendres and other witty turns of phrase, without ever once feeling overwritten. Toy Story 2 does not feel overwritten either, but a lot of the incidental cleverness is lost, I noticed.

2) The villain -- Al of Al's Toy Barn, voiced by Wayne Knight -- would never fall asleep with an entirely full bowl of cheesy poofs on his chest. They make him out to be so repulsive and corpulent that he would have had to down at least half that thing, especially to get that quantity of artificial cheese topping on his fingers. It's a smart set piece that Woody needs to walk through the fallen snacks like a minefield in his attempt to keep Al from awakening, but I got stuck on the notion of just how many cheesy poofs escaped a fate in Al's stomach. (Remember, I didn't say all my complaints with Toy Story 2 were major ones.)

3) The exact rarity and value of Woody and his pals as toys seemed exaggerated. I'm no rare toy aficionado, but I have to assume that a museum in Japan would have other ways of acquiring a Woody's Roundup Gang without relying on an American toy store owner finally getting his hands on a Woody to complete the set. Also, was this deal perpetually in place, pending the finding of the Woody, so that Al only has to call up the Japanese once he's finally succeeded in his mission? Which happens without any premeditation, during a random Saturday morning yard sale? And even if this Japanese museum is as obsessed with this acquisition as they appear to be, how much could they possibly be paying Al? A couple grand at most? Surely not enough for Al to fly the toys to Japan himself, as if this cost would immediately become a drop in the bucket of the wealth that would soon be his. But perhaps the strangest moment in this transaction involves Al thinking he's gotten the upper hand and requesting that they "add a zero" to the end of what they plan to pay him. So suddenly he thinks the rare toys may be able to sell for ten times an amount he already thought was going to change his standard of living?

4) The toys are capable of too much in this movie. The adventure in Toy Story had the benefit of being life-sized, or perhaps I should say toy-sized -- going outside the house into the neighbor's yard and down to the local pizza restaurant was astounding enough. Needing to up the ante for the sequel, though, the writers had the toys not only get down to the local toy store (that's fine, I buy that an Etch-a-Sketch map copied from an ad on TV could help them accomplish this), but they also drive a car to the airport. Even allowing for the possibility that a team of intelligent toys could manipulate the controls of a car in the exact unison necessary to pilot the thing, how could they then steer it down busy streets and all the way to an airport, following another car quickly disappearing on the horizon? Even stranger may be the explanation about how they got back to Andy's house, which occurs entirely off-screen and is explained only be showing one of those luggage trains parked in the yard across the street. The return from the airport alone, after the primary conflict has been resolved, should have been a harrowing adventure that got all of them killed.

I'll stop at four complaints because look, this is still a Toy Story movie and it's still wonderful. I just might knock my five-star rating down to 4.75 stars ... and my #118 ranking on Flickchart down to 150-175.

How does it stack up with Toy Story 3? I guess I'll need a proper second viewing of that to say for sure.

Join me again next time -- maybe four months from now, maybe sooner -- for another exciting episode of Question Your Assumptions.

Question your assumptions: Rosemary's Baby

Back in June, I held The Graduate under a microscope to see if I really loved it as much as I thought I did, and consequently decided to start a recurring series called Question Your Assumptions. And as I do with many of my spontaneously created new series -- I Finally Saw, I Never Meant to See, etc. -- I then pretty much dropped it.

So when I went to watch something while carving our jack-o-lantern on Wednesday night, and chose Rosemary's Baby from a Halloween-themed batch I'd picked up at the library, I realized it made a logical next addition to the previously foundering series. (I had planned to watch the original version of Carrie, which I have never seen, but decided to save it for Halloween night in case my wife wants to watch it. She has told me she wants our Halloween viewing to be something she hasn't seen before, so I knew Rosemary's Baby was a safe choice for pumpkin-carving night.)

It makes an especially appropriate pairing with The Graduate, as both films are from 1968, and both films are currently ranked between #100 and #200 (out of more than 4,000) on my Flickchart (The Graduate is #116, Rosemary's Baby is #188).

But my real interest in writing about this is that I have always considered Rosemary's Baby to be in direct conflict with The Exorcist in terms of disturbing, confronting horror classics from the late 1960s/early 1970s. If, according to me, everyone is either a Rosemary's Baby person or an Exorcist person, I have always found myself in the latter camp -- as evidenced by The Exorcist's lofty Flickchart ranking of #58.

However, that stance has been challenged by a couple things I have been mulling over: 1) the fact that I've only seen Rosemary's Baby once, and it was back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and 2) a critic or two I respect who have taken jabs at the quality of The Exorcist.

I suppose a third viewing of The Exorcist (which would also be my first in that same 15-year time period) would really be the best way to get at the topic, but since I've at least got the new Baby viewing, let's work with that.

The movie started in a particularly spooky way, with that iconic "la la la la la" lullaby over a completely black screen. It went on for so long that I thought Roman Polanski had decided to begin with an anachronistic overture, something that probably hadn't quite dropped from the cinematic landscape by 1968 (but would certainly only be consigned to costume epics at this point). When the dialogue started and there was still no picture, I realized there was something wrong with the screen. Clicking back to the start of the chapter sorted it out.

Still, the accidental beginning of my viewing experience has a real relationship to Polanski's approach to the material. I think one of the reasons I wasn't as wowed by Rosemary's, especially compared to The Exorcist, when I was younger and less discriminating was that I still measured the effectiveness of a horror movie by how grotesque it was. While The Exorcist is all about the viscera and horror that gets shown, Rosemary's Baby is all about what you can't actually see. While evil punches you directly in the face in The Exorcist, it seems to lurk just outside the frame in Polanski's film.

Of course, the best way to talk about the effectiveness of an approach is to talk about the times it is violated. After a sinister but rather banal opening 20 minutes ("banal" is a word I apply in the best way possible to certain passages of Rosemary's Baby), you are really jolted by the image of Rosemary's simpatico neighbor Terry splattered on the sidewalk. There's something so discomfiting about the gore of her smashed head. It exists to remind you that although you feel sort of safe in this movie, you most certainly are not.

And I am still probably most affected by the movie's other really graphic scene -- its Exorcist scene -- which is the dream rape of Rosemary by the devil. I should put "dream" in quotation marks, because Polanski constructs the scene as though it could only be a dream, with clearly fantastical elements intermingling with elements we only wish were fantastical. There's a moment of horror near the end when Rosemary recognizes definitively that it is not a dream -- and that her brainwashed husband actually lurks among the participants.

Let's talk about some performances, specifically, Ruth Gordon's. This wouldn't have been a reference available to audiences at the time, but from Harold & Maude I think of Gordon as this beloved old coot -- and not just playing the role of a beloved old coot, as she does here. There is almost nothing overtly disturbing about Minnie Castevet, but a second viewing of the movie -- after you already know what will happen -- really allows a viewer to appreciate this very mild sinister undercurrent to her performance. She urges one course of action a bit too enthusiastically, while disguising it behind a blase sheen, or she reacts a little too strongly to particular pieces of news. She is the very definition of the banality of evil.

Now, let's talk about what's not seen.

I love the choice not to reveal the face of Ralph Bellamy's malevolent Dr. Sapirstein during the one moment when anyone acknowledges they may actually have something to hide from Rosemary. It's after the one living person she thought she could turn to -- Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin!!) -- turns her in to Sapirstein. (Whether he was always part of a conspiracy, or scared into compelling with the witches, is not immediately clear, and I don't know if I want to know.) Sapirstein walks up to her as she's seated and threatens to institutionalize her if she continues this talk of witches. Horrifyingly, his face cannot be seen ... so we can imagine it to be anything we want it to be. His hulking figure standing over her is also a symbol of the world crushing her last hopes to evade an increasingly preordained outcome.

But the most chilling moment of not seeing what another movie might show us is the decision not to reveal what this spawn of Satan actually looks like. "What have you done to him? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIS EYES?" (I'm getting chills now just typing it out.) We never know, because we are never shown. All we hear are the cries coming from that pitch-black bassinet, so much like a baby yet somehow ... not.

Although my high ranking of Rosemary's Baby was mostly reinforced by this viewing, the second viewing did serve to remind me that The Exorcist is still my choice in this duel. Although I'm sure that the "don't show-don't tell" approach of Polanski's film impresses me more than it once did -- as evidenced by my embrace of a recent minimalist horror film like Berberian Sound Studio -- there's something about the specific brand of visceral horror seen in a movie like The Exorcist (and in Poltergeist, my favorite horror movie) that affects me more deeply.

Hey, I'm just a sucker for levitating bodies, rotating heads, shocking vulgarity and green spewing vomit.

What's a man to do?

Question your assumptions: The Graduate

It has occurred to me recently that there may classic movies I am "giving a pass."

In other words, I saw them once, a long time ago, and have since been according them a respect in my personal film rankings that is more akin to their general sense of widespread acclaim, than the specific love I may feel for them myself.

Evidence of this abounds, and it can be found at work in my Flickchart rankings. I have used the movie-dueling site to work toward a definitive ranking of all the movies I've ever seen, from first to worst. And while I know an exact ranking of these titles is an impossible task, in no small part because my feelings toward most movies are in a permanent state of flux, I do strive to make the rankings as precise as I can with the means at my disposal. In other words, I try to make them "feel right."

Inherent in the task of ranking movies you haven't seen in a while is that you have to assign them a certain value relative to the titles about which you can speak more authoritatively, either because you've seen them more often or because you've seen them more recently. In these valuations, some movies inevitably sink lower than they should; others artificially rise.

More often than not, the ones that artificially rise the most are the ones about which I felt positively, but about which I know others went gaga. These are usually what are considered the classics -- classics I might have liked a lot or even loved, but have seen only that single time, many years ago. I am likely to elevate these classics to where they're doing battle with some of my tested all-time favorites, the ones I've seen a half-dozen or more times. I think, "I know these movies are great, so I have arbitrarily decided to assign x amount of greatness to them."

So I think it's valuable, from time to time, to go through and revisit these movies to get a better sense for what you're really dealing with. And so it is that I bring you a new periodic series called Question Your Assumptions, where I take whatever opportunities I have to re-watch highly regarded movies that I may be artificially inflating to greater heights than they really deserve. I mean, I know I liked these movies quite a bit -- but should I really be ranking them among my favorites?

I may only be formally introducing this series with a banner now, but rewatching these movies is something I've been informally doing for a couple years now. Just off the top of my head, I think of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Annie Hall and Chinatown as movies I have subjected to this questioning of assumptions, all within the past three or four years. In the case of Butch Cassidy, my affection was greater than I remembered. Chinatown, less. And Annie Hall about the same. In any case, it's worth knowing. And it's worth pointing out that these movies are all within my top 150 on Flickchart, so we're really talking gradations of greatness here.

And so it was that on Wednesday night, when my wife was out at a meeting and I had no idea what to watch, I reminded myself that Mike Nichols' The Graduate was streaming on Netflix, and had been for some time. The Graduate was a perfect candidate for this nascent series -- it's currently sitting at #111 on my Flickchart, and I've only seen it the one time, probably sometime in the mid-1990s.

Well, I must say, this is much more an odd duck of a movie than I'd remembered.

I'm not going to do anything like a thorough analysis of the film -- that's too high of a standard for me to live up to in the limited time I'm allotting myself to write these posts. More than anything, what I'll probably accomplish is to mention some things that struck me on a second viewing, particularly the things that ultimately impacted whether I'm ranking these movies too high, or in some cases, not high enough.

Why is The Graduate so odd? Well, I suppose you'd be surprised if I didn't tell you.

I had forgotten that Benjamin Braddock's love interest, Elaine Robinson, does not even come into the movie until it is more than half over. According to the traditional structure of any kind of romance, either comedy or drama, you would meet the protagonist's primary love interest early on in the movie. Whether or not it was revealed that this character was his (or her) love interest at the time is not important, because all you're trying to do is start building audience sympathy for this person. We need to be rooting for them early, even if we're not consciously aware of it.

What Nichols and Dustin Hoffman -- and, it should be said, Katherine Ross -- do so effectively here is to get us to love Elaine Robinson in just one scene. And it was a scene I had forgotten entirely. Eager to fulfill only the most minimal requirements of his date with Elaine, a date he was coerced into and one that flew in the face of his lover's explicitly stated desires, Benjamin takes Elaine to a strip club. He's sure that by behaving curtly toward her and humiliating her with his choice of venue, he will queer any feelings Elaine might have toward him and nip in the bud any possible discussion of a second date.

What Benjamin doesn't realize is how he will react to the human toll of this humiliation. As a go-go dancer with tassles on her nipples lowers these extensions closer and closer to Elaine's head, and Elaine looks at him with a sense of deep sorrow and shame over the way he's chosen to insult her, Benjamin loses all his former resolve. He meant to crush Elaine, in a way, but he didn't anticipate what it would feel like. "Do you dislike me for some reason Benjamin?" The question is so sad and plaintive that when Elaine flees the seedy joint, crying, he can think of no better way to prove that he's not that guy than to engage her in a deep and loving kiss. It's as though he's recognized all the out-sized cruelty of Elaine's mother in that one moment of humiliation to which he's an unwitting party. Impulsively, recklessly, he casts aside Mrs. Robinson's foreboding words and gives himself into the passion of the moment. From that time onward, we want these two to be together. (Incidentally, I couldn't help but think of Taxi Driver -- still just a twinkle in Martin Scorsese's eye at this time -- and Travis Bickle's oblivious attempt to take Cybill Shepherd on a date to a porn theater.)

The script of The Graduate is so economical in these scenes of establishing the budding romance between Benjamin and Elaine that it's the very next day that Mrs. Robinson forces Benjamin into admitting to Elaine that he slept with her mother -- and yet we feel the loss of their relationship as something tragic and epic. So firmly has the inevitability of their connection been established that it takes only a single date to get us to that point.

Thus continues a series of erratic decisions by Benjamin that probably began when he first called Mrs. Robinson from that hotel, and only get more erratic from here on out. Benjamin vows to marry Elaine, even though she officially doesn't ever want to speak to him again. Benjamin moves to Berkeley to effectively, albeit politely, stalk her. The stalking actually works, sort of, and Elaine starts to entertain the notion of marrying him. Until her father intervenes, nearly coming to blows with the man and seeming to finally put a permanent end to any possibility of Benjamin and Elaine. In almost the very next scene, Elaine is not only officially engaged to this other guy (Carl), but actually at the church ready to marry him. If there isn't something surreal about these sequence of events, I don't think I understand the definition of surreal.

From here, Benjamin begins a mad hunt at high speeds to find that church and prevent Elaine from marrying her rich Aryan dufus. There's real blood and passion and craziness in this man, and his chase memorably culminates in the scene at the church, banging that window, screaming that name, and -- against all odds -- actually whisking the bride away from the altar onto the back of a bus leaving town. Followed by that memorable closing shot, where the two compulsive young lovers have made their ecstatic choice, and then are quickly overcome with the sense of spiritual disappointment and ennui that comes with all the questions that lie ahead of them. The thrill of their hunt is almost immediately replaced with the anticlimax of achieving their goal.

Like I said, an odd duck of a movie indeed.

And also an incredibly funny one, especially in the first half, when Benjamin trips all over himself first avoiding Mrs. Robinson, and then ultimately giving in to her, but in a fashion made klutzy by his overwhelming sense of guilt and wrongdoing. Hoffman plays these scenes perfectly. Especially funny are his dalliances with the hotel clerk played by Buck Henry, who also wrote the movie.

(As another parenthetical aside as it relates to another classic movie -- are those flashes of Anne Bancroft's skin, where we are meant to get an idea of her nudity without actually seeing it, a direct homage to Pyscho?)

Clearly this is a seminal film full of quotable lines, iconic moments and memorable performances. It ushered in a new era of Hollywood and was one of the earliest of a type of awkward comedy that has blossomed in the years since. Hoffman also became kind of a template for stammering, stuttering nebbishes who would particularly take off in the films of Woody Allen.

But is it my seminal film full of quotable lines, iconic moments and memorable performances?

Yeah. Yeah I think it is.

I don't know that I like it more than I did the first time, but I think I appreciate it more as an extremely unconventional film that must have blown the minds of the people who saw it at the time. At the same time I find it scruffy and shaggy and imperfect in many ways.

I suppose if it had been a bit more "perfect" in the traditional ways one might think of a movie being perfect, it wouldn't have made a name for itself. It wouldn't be The Graduate.