Steve Laughlin's Board Pick

Hey, I'm Steve Laughlin. I do volunteer work for the Milwaukee Film Festival as a board member. I had the honor of chairing the board when we first started planning to make the Oriental Theater our permanent home. My day job is a founder and owner of Laughlin Constable, an advertising and PR agency located in Milwaukee and Chicago. I retired from day-to-day responsibilities a few years ago. Got bored. Wrote and directed a screenplay. The film, Deep Woods, was produced by Jefrey Kurz, who had a long career producing films in Hollywood and currently teaches film at UWM. To our great delight, our film premiered with two screenings during the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival.

 

I chose "The Graduate" for this screening for several selfish reasons, but ones I think I have in common with the audiences that give it an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The most important is, for nearly 60 years, people who see it tend to love it.  The film premiered in 1967. It's a coming-of-age movie from when I was coming of age. It stars Dustin Hoffman who came of age professionally with his breakout performance in this film. His character, a freshly minted college graduate, has an affair with an older woman, wonderfully played Anne Bancroft, who is both seductive and shrewish in turn. Then with great comedic irony, our graduate gets introduced to her daughter by her unknowingly cuckolded husband. They go on a date. They click. Now, he wants everything to do with both daughter and mother. The mother does everything to keep them apart. And the daughter, played by the incredible Katherine Ross, who learns of his affair with her mother, wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Considered the best comedy of its era, The Graduate makes fun of our human foibles. It lampoons the white, entitled diaspora of American suburbia. It works without the jokey one-liners so prevalent in today's romcoms and bromance action pictures. Mike Nichols' incredible direction will have you reacting to the absurd silliness with introspection. You'll ask yourself, "Can I root for young man who beds a married woman, two-times her daughter, tries to break up her impending marriage and feel wonderful at how it all works out?" Yes. Yes. Yes. And absolutely. Yet if you do find yourself among the 17% of the audiences who choses to throw a rotten tomato, there's kicky consolation in the joyous musical score by Paul Simon and soaring harmonies of Art Garfunkel.

 

Get Tickets To Steve's Pick Here

 

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