Comment by zdragnar

What seems to be missing for me at least is that I doubt I would have done well being assigned entire films on top of my regular course load worth of studies.

Paying attention to a film enough to emotionally connect with the content, take notes, synthesize an academic understanding of subtle things like the use of lighting, sound, camera work, etc while also doing the other several hours worth of homework from my other classes would be pretty daunting.

Much easier to get the clif notes from the Internet and fake it... though I had CS, math and Mandarin courses which were way way heavier on the homework side of things than most other classes I took, so maybe I'm overthinking it.