Bored in your dorm room?  What better way to spend a couple of hours than to contemplate the melancholy of post-baccalaureate life?  These movies all serve as reminders to enjoy college while it lasts.  Life as a grad isn’t easy!

5. Kicking and Screaming (1995, Noah Baumbach) – Available on Netflix Instant! – A bleak vision of life after college, inspired by Baumbach’s own experience at Vassar.  Bleak, but also very funny, for us literati – J.P.

4. Carnal Knowledge (1971, Mike Nichols) – Available on Netflix Instant! – Not as widely beloved as Nichols’ breakthrough (see #1), this film–which charts the sex lives of Amherst roommates (played by Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson) from their college days to their 40s–was quite controversial upon its release.  Many younger filmmakers, including Wes Anderson and Jason Reitman, count it as a milestone – J.P.

3. The Last Days of Disco (1998, Whit Stillman) – Available at Butler (call no. DVD10735) and Barnard Library (DVD PN1997 .L3783 2009g) – Part three in Stillman’s “Doomed-Bourgeois-in-Love” trilogy takes place in Manhattan in the 80s and stars Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale as publishing house assistants who spend their nights at various discos.  It may be set in the past and deal with graduates of other elite colleges (including Harvard and Hampshire), but this is probably already a few Columbians’ most cherished movie – J.P.

2. Tiny Furniture (2010, Lena Dunham) – Available on Netflix Instant! - An impressively honest and self-deprecating comedy about the tribulations of moving back to the Tribeca family nest after years of exile at Oberlin.  Most impressive of all, Dunham made it at a mere 23 years old.  Look out for her HBO show “Girls” – J.P.

1. The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols) – Available on Netflix Instant! - Some reflections on the Madame Bovary of this sub-genre:

My tenth grade American Studies teacher told me I would love “The Catcher in the Rye” because I had a lot in common with Holden Caulfield. I’m pretty sure this is why I hated that novel. Caulfield had been reduced to a symbol of disaffected youth, and being compared to him felt reductive. I don’t think anyone likes to be told that, because of their age and station, they think in a certain way.

This is why it’s hard to explain my love for “The Graduate.” I want to explain how easy it is to relate to Benjamin Braddock without sounding like my teacher.

Let me start by saying that it’s easy to see yourself in Ben. He never explains what’s bothering him—the closest he comes is telling us: “I’m just sort of disturbed about things. In general.” His motivations are left vague enough that he’s something of a blank slate. You pour yourself into him—he puts you into a dialogue with your greatest insecurities.

Fortunately, the movie is more than melancholy existentialism—it’s also one of the best comedies ever made. Ben is subtly hysterical, saying things that aren’t terribly awkward but are never quite appropriate. He whimpers almost inaudibly in moments of tension. He vacillates between meekness and madness, and the results are hilarious. The adults are outrageous stereotypes (though most of us have met versions of them), and the set pieces are beautifully extravagant. The Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack is simple and spot on. It is an impeccably clean and quiet movie.

It’s sexy, too. Mrs. Robinson, a brazen, unsatisfied Los Angeles housewife, seduces the viewer as effectively as she seduces Ben. She is cool and witty. Her eyes are never wide, always sultry. Her daughter, Elaine, is precisely the opposite: refreshingly earnest, doe-eyed, sensitive. The dialogue and acting are excellent.
This combination of comedy and crisis makes watching “The Graduate” very cathartic. It’s at once brilliantly liberating and relentlessly pessimistic. Yet somehow, you walk away feeling okay “about things” – S.C.