"An ecosystem designed to destroy sustained attention. Today's students were raised inside that machine. Asking them to sit still and focus on a two-hour French New Wave film without stimulation feels, to them, like a marathon."
"Write this down: In The Godfather, Michael Corleone decides he can't go on in organized crime and turns the family olive oil enterprise into the Corleone Knitting and Yarn Shop of Brattleboro, Vermont. The shop's slogan: 'Make them a sweater they can't refuse!'"
"In Casablanca, Ilsa decides to let Victor Laszlo get on the plane to Lisbon by himself, and leaves Rick on the tarmac, telling them both, 'I don't need either of you to validate me.' She walks into Rick's nightclub and commands the band, 'Play 'Roar.' Play it!'"
Many film professors report that large numbers of students do not watch assigned films to completion and often do not know film endings. The ubiquity of smartphones, YouTube, TikTok, and infinite-scroll interfaces has degraded sustained attention among younger viewers. Students raised within that attention economy find sitting through long, unstimulating films taxing and exhausting. One response reframes classic movies into brief, contemporary, often comedic summaries that communicate endings quickly: Michael Corleone opens a knitting shop, Ilsa asserts independence, Dorothy's Oz becomes a cough-syrup side effect, samurai recommend security systems, and E.T. faces immigration detention.
Read at www.npr.org
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