The Graduates

16/300
The Graduates
Dir. Ryan Gielen

Awesome news was announced sometime last week that Hulu Plus was about to begin uploads of the ENTIRE Criterion Collection for it's member's viewing pleasure.  As I, myself am already a very happy Hulu Plus member and having this project just taken flight, I was very excited to see what was coming to my PS3.   So, on my first full free afternoon, I started shuffling through, and somehow ended up clicking into something not part of the collection.

With this in mind, The Graduates is not to be confused with The Graduate, the classic with a young Dustin Hoffman.   This is an independent feature that was released in 2008, but seems to have been created without being tainted by high school comedies of the moment like Superbad that were much more hollywood and polished.  There is just something strangely watchable about this honest little movie.

Now, don't get me wrong, this movie has some pretty big faults.  The audio was not good.  The soundtrack was decent, but the dialogue at times seemed to have been muffled and just not captured well whatsoever.  There were some jump cuts that seemed unnecessary.  There were quite a few very cheap jokes along the way as well.  But over-all, it almost seemed like from the beginning that the movie was being made by someone about the same age as the people in the movie, but by the end, it just feels so much more beyond that vantage point in life that you know you are being manipulated.  Maybe this is why it worked so well for me.

I think I would definitely need a second watch to really figure it out, but I'm not sure I'll ever sit back down for a second view.  Just an okay movie.  Nothing to write home about.

Run time 97 min +1786 = 1883 minutes invested.