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 Summer, which is also about a crazy summer, but that's where the parallels between the two films end. Unfortunately, fourth-year honours student Darren Arciszewski insisted we compare them. Fortunately, he didn't have much to say about One Crazy Summer.Regarding The Seventh Seal, auditing student Xavier III ("Tre") admitted that he's partial to Jöns the squire whereas Darren had sympathy for Antonius the knight. If you haven't seen the movie, don't let that deter you from listening in. Neither Darren nor Tre seemed to have paid much attention to the film, but thanks to summarizing skills of Dr. Weiner, the students grew to understand that the film has nothing to do with semi-aquatic mammals. Prayers up.

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 Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup, #211 on the Sight and Sound list of the best films of all time.Making things difficult is Darren's insistence on comparing Duck Soup to the 2004 film White Chicks starring Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans.Professor Wiener does his best to stimulate a discussion about readings by Plato, Bakhtin, Rabelais, Musgrave, and Gehring. This discussion makes up about one percent of the episode's runtime.