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How to View and Appreciate Great Movies
- Narrated by: Eric Williams
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
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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The Way I See It
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From age 11, in 1974, until she left the show, in 1981, Melissa Anderson literally grew up before the viewers of Little House on the Prairie. Melissa, as Mary, is remembered by many as the blind sister - and she was the only actor in the series to be nominated for an Emmy. In The Way I See It, she takes listeners onto the set and inside the world of the iconic series created by Michael Landon, who, Melissa discovered, was not perfect, as much as he tried to be. In this memoir she also shares her memories of working with guest stars like Todd Bridges, Mariette Hartley, Sean Penn, Patricia Neal, and Johnny Cash.
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self serving
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No one other than Warren Zanes, rocker and writer and friend, could author a book about Tom Petty that is as honest and evocative of Petty's music and the remarkable rock and roll history he and his band helped to write. Born in Gainesville, Florida, with more than a little hillbilly in his blood, Tom Petty was a Southern shit kicker, a kid without a whole lot of promise. Rock and roll made it otherwise.
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Tom Petty gets some bio love
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The Wild Heart of Stevie Nicks
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Grab your lace shawl and top hat and get ready to twirl—this is a full-throttle appreciation of the life and voice of Stevie Nicks from one of rock criticism’s most celebrated writers.
Best-selling author and Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield explores the music and artistry of the rock goddess who has kept generations of music lovers totally bewitched and spellbound, with such classic rock hits as "Rhiannon" and "Gypsy".
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A bad recap of Rolling Stone interviews
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audio from a presentation
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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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- 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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- 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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- 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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