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Write a critique of a recent film which, in your view, conforms to the structural parameters of the classic Hollywood model of narrative construction. As Richard Maltby (1995:6) once quoted “If Hollywood is not a place, it is also not a time.” We are forever going on about how Hollywood is not how it was. Remember the days when everything on screen was black and white and wonderful, remember the days when going ‘to the movies’ …

…father what he thought of the film ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ his exact words after an exasperated sigh were “pretty obvious stuff”, which for me describes Hollywood in a nutshell. Perhaps if Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had been made in Hollywood’s more glamorous, more genuine days, it would have been great, classic even. However like most films today that aspire to the conventions of the old Hollywood narrative it lacks the real ‘classical’ touch.