(Slightly hazy review, took the course a bit over a year ago.)

Taking this class with Prof. Bowdre was a mixed bag. I'll start with the little drama that likely won't happen with you but was nonetheless annoying: when signing up, the class said it would be in person at the Melnitz Theatre, but upon showing up about half of the people there had received an email saying it would be entirely online. This seems to have been on the film department, since they hired Bowdre for an online job... enough students complained and we got a Zoomed Bowdre in the theatre (with terribly loud audio) and then screened movies afterwards.

Materials wise, I absolutely loved the textbook and readings in general (lots of interesting tidbits about how American cinema has come together and the important interplay of film with power dynamics, particularly class (wealth), race, and gender in this class -- but also with some focus on sexuality, disability, and others). The movies we watched were also very cool, beginning from some of the first films recorded (back when it was exciting enough to go to the theater just to watch a train leaving a station!) and progressing throughout the course all the way up to I want to say around 2015 as the last film we watched. Watching films in the Melnitz theatre is *phenomenal* since it's a super nice setup in there and for the older films on film itself, the UCLA archive has the original reels and we got to see those screened! The one movie with technicolor that we got to watch (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russel) was sooo vivid and cool to see on the screen.

However, Prof. Bowdre herself wasn't very exciting as a teacher. I have no doubt she's very good in her field and knows her stuff, since she chose an excellent selection of texts and movies... but the lectures themselves were just her summarizing the readings with powerpoint slides that had bullet point summaries of each major detail. Very skippable if you do the readings (which I would, of course, recommend anyways), but we had to watch the lecture before the movie would play.

Overall, would recommend for the films and the readings alone! My TA was also fantastic (Nicole), providing much more interesting discussions than the lectures themselves, although I don't know that she's still at UCLA.