How to View and Appreciate Great Movies
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Narrated by:
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Eric Williams
About this listen
What makes a movie “great”? Was it a particularly well-acted scene? The dramatic lighting? The emotion of the music? The tension that has built up? A powerful choice of words? The answer is, simply, yes.
Sit down with renowned professional filmmaker, author, and award-winning professor Eric R. Williams to unpack the elements of more than 250 “great” movies - some well-known, others less so - including Casablanca, Jaws, The Godfather, Star Wars, Rocky, Do The Right Thing, The Wizard of Oz, and more in order to gain insights and secrets that will change the way you view films. You’ll discover how from the moment you sit down, great filmmakers control every sensation the movie experience evokes: tremors or tears, goosebumps or giggles, and why it is that we invite them to do this. You’ll also uncover the tricks used to help us suspend our disbelief, let go of our cynicism, and buy into a story using sounds, scores, lighting, color, special effects, and more. You’ll discover how even these seemingly small details can greatly enhance or detract from the theme, atmosphere, and plot.
Professor Williams often refers to filmmaking as a magic show. And once you pull back the curtain to see the creative process from the filmmaker’s point of view, the magic show can never be the same again. But understanding the intent of each aspect of moviemaking - from lighting to language, color to characters, stars to scores - arms you with new set of creative and analytical tools with which to bring to the theater or to revisit your old favorites. These insights will strengthen your love and appreciation for what’s unfolding before your eyes.
Roger Ebert once said, “Every great film should seem new every time you see it” and that’s exactly what How to View and Appreciate Great Movies ensures.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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- By: David McGowan
- Narrated by: Bill Fike
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The very strange but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia. Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. But there was a dark side to that scene as well. Many didn't make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day.
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My first review. This book changed me.
- By Robert on 06-30-19
By: David McGowan
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The Godfather: A Film We Can't Refuse
- By: Paramount Pictures
- Narrated by: Rebecca Keegan
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Original Recording
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With exclusive insights from the legendary cast, including Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, and Talia Shire, and commentary from a diverse array of film experts and ardent aficionados, we dissect the film’s magnetic allure and its pervasive influence across our culture. Journey alongside Rebecca Keegan, acclaimed senior film editor at The Hollywood Reporter, as she explores the heart of this cinematic masterpiece through a new lens.
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Deep dive into The Godfather
- By C.F. on 08-28-24
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Song of the Northwoods
- By: Jessica Huang
- Narrated by: Michele Selene Ang, Quincy Dunn-Baker, Emma Kikue, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 48 mins
- Original Recording
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After a betrayal at work costs Song Kuan her job, she retreats to her friend Lucy’s idyllic family cabin on a lake in Minnesota to lick her wounds. She devotes herself to recording Ice Cold Cases, a true-crime podcast that she and Lucy cohost with the gleeful energy of obsessed fans—until an anonymous tip about a missing-person case disrupts their equilibrium. Then Lucy disappears, leaving Song alone in an unfriendly and unfamiliar town where locals don’t take kindly to strangers asking questions.
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Asians in MN! I loved it. The vivid sounds of Northern Minnesota totally took me there, and I was hooked into the mystery.
- By Sheila Morris on 04-26-22
By: Jessica Huang
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The Energy Curfew Music Hour
- By: Chris Thile, Claire Coffee, Punch Brothers
- Narrated by: Chris Thile, Punch Brothers
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
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It’s time to unplug with the Grammy-winning Punch Brothers, fronted by singer-mandolinist Chris Thile, as they bring you a multi-episode musical variety show with dazzling musical guests, like Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Jon Batiste, Norah Jones, James Taylor, and many more.
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Gifted musicians and storytellers right in their element and at the height of their powers
- By Megan G Kahl on 10-27-24
By: Chris Thile, and others
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Join three literary scholars and award-winning professors as they introduce you to dozens of short masterpieces that you can finish - and engage with - in a day or less. Perfect for people with busy lives who still want to discover-or rediscover-just how transformative an act of reading can be, these 36 lectures range from short stories of fewer than 10 pages to novellas and novels of around 200 pages. Despite their short length, these works are powerful examinations of the same subjects and themes that longer "great books" discuss.
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Stories not included, only discussed
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A comprehensive overview of the Qumran Scrolls
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One of my top 3 favorite courses!
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What listeners say about How to View and Appreciate Great Movies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anthony Sanchez
- 07-31-22
Very helpful, but…
There really are other movie experts to quote besides Roger Ebert. After a dozen of his “Finally I’d like to quote…” it got rather tiresome. That was especially true when the Ebert quote was sometimes not at all insightful. But that’s a very minor criticism. Overall, a worth while listen.
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- A. Yoshida
- 04-25-23
Great Introduction to Film Appreciation
There are 24 lectures covering different aspects of film appreciation (e.g., story structure, genre, theme, framing, sound, special effects, music, color, and point of view). There are some elements that the audience already intuitively understands the purpose, such as characters having their music (e.g., Star Wars) or color appearing in key moments (e.g., red in The Sixth Sense). If you're the type who appreciates Easter eggs and the significance of a character's name in a movie, this is a great introduction to film appreciation.
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- Jaq Greenspon
- 01-28-23
A good intro to the subject.
This was a well thought out series of lectures. The information presented is a nice base of knowledge on which to grow some deeper understanding of film criticism.
That said, this audio series of lectures is in desperate need of an editor. There were points where the speaker lost his place in the notes or made mistakes and the audio just kept going.
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- Daniel
- 07-17-24
Not the way I appreciate great movies
I feel as though this is a misleading title. While these lectures have a bunch of great information on film and the idiosyncrasies of story telling this is not needed to enjoy a great movie. There is too much dissection and analyzing of characters, thought process, story arc, and mise-en-scène mentioned that makes watching a great film more like work than enjoyment. Perhaps it’s just me but I just like to turn my brain off and go on whatever ride the film will take me on and not begin to over analyze everything about it.
Perhaps a Great Course for those with more intellectual tastes than mine.
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- Michael Tufaro
- 04-22-22
I need to watch more movies
I wish I could have known every movie he referenced, I guess I can’t quite refer to myself as a movie buff, until I see all these movies.
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2 people found this helpful
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- AM
- 08-20-23
The title is misleading
It's essentially an intro to film class, which I took in college years ago. Same films there with few additions. I really LOVED the section of Special Effects. I love film so I think it's neat to have a sort of pocket guide to the best films of all time. There is not a big difference between this version and other versions.
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- Greg Bensch
- 01-18-21
very informative
Really found it enjoyable.
Built my appreciation for the cinema.
The "No Country for Old Men" theory is brilliant.
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8 people found this helpful
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- William
- 08-13-22
A good introduction
This was one of Audible’s freebies and I took it. I’m not really a movie buff, but I’m glad that I listened to this course. It helped me understand movies a lot better and gave me a few titles that I’d like to find and see. And, this one does include a PDF with photos, charts, colors, etc., as well as a summary of the lectures.
Some of the topics are very similar to what you would get in a course teaching you to appreciate great literature. There is a lecture on the universal story types that almost all great stories and movies fall into. There is a discussion of genre, how the author/filmmaker uses and sometimes breaks audience expectations, the use of tension, how to let people get to know a character by choosing what details to reveal instead of just describing them, etc. Then there are lectures dealing with visual cues that are unique to movies, though some may still be common to other visual arts, such as how to frame a shot, camera angle, whether the camera is stationary or moves with the subject, etc. There are two chapters on special effects.
And, it’s all illustrated with tons of examples, most of which are movies that I’ve never seen, but I didn’t have to because the professor’s descriptions were so clear and the PDF was there to back it all up. Maybe it would have been better with some actual clips, but I’m not sure that, in most cases, they would have been any improvement over the still shots that he gave us. And, Professor Williams was engaging and interesting. There were some long pauses but it never got boring.
Yes, I have to say, I enjoyed it and for someone who almost never watches TV and has never really been one to go out and see movies, that’s probably a pretty good complement.
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