AFI Checklist Nearing Completion
So I figure not every post by me will be RUNNERS-related. As a blog, I thought it might be nice to also include some random daily bits. But I’m curious to hear what you all think. If you like the daily bits, please let me know. If you’d rather I just stick to RUNNERS news, feel free to chime in. Now onto the post…
Way back in 2000, I printed out a list of the AFI (American Film Institute) Top 100 Movies of all time (they updated the list in 2007, but I’m going off of the original version). Since then, I’ve slowly been working my way through the list and I’m currently about a dozen away from having watched all 100 movies .
My wife calls these “homework movies” and isn’t terribly interested in many of them, so while she’s out of town at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this week, I thought I’d try to plow through some of the remaining movies. Last night I watched “Birth of a Nation,” a 3-hour silent movie from 1915 about two families during the Civil War and Reconstruction period.
Wow. Talk about a time capsule, and not in a particularly good way. There’s something to be said about a movie where the Ku Klux Klan emerges as the heroic cavalry to save the white underdogs from oppression by the political and social powerhouse of the black populace. Weird. At times, I felt like I was watching some sci-fi movie about an alternate, mirror-universe Earth. I was almost expecting someone at the end to find a half-buried black Statue of Liberty sticking up out of the sand.
Anyway, I’m glad I watched it, but as far as silent movies go, I’ll probably stick with the Chaplin stuff.
Homework movies is such a great way to describe them. I can’t stand Gone with the Wind, and I think Citizen Kane is a bit over-rated, but I really love Casablanca.
I definitely find that some hold up really well and others, not so much. And I’m finding that I only really like movies with an actual “story” or “plot.” I really don’t care for “snapshot” movies that are just a series of seemingly random events that just show what life is like for a character without there being any actual structured plot to tell. For instance, I didn’t really like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, or MASH. These all just seemed like collections of random occurrences, none of which added or subtracted anything important from any overall story, and then the movie ended. Not my cup of tea.
But then there are movies like High Noon, Stagecoach, To Kill a Mockingbird, African Queen, West Side Story, etc, and those I actually enjoyed quite a bit.
I found Touch of Evil to be far more engaging than Citizen Kane. I’ve always thought that it capitalized on Welles’ age and experience in a way Kane could not — because he was, like, 13 when he made it. Touch of Evil feels like a beaten, hopeless man’s view of the world, which isn’t so much a different intention than Kane, but Welles had actually experienced that feeling by the time he started Touch of Evil, which, I think, makes all the difference.
“Birth of a Nation” is definitely a chore to watch. I saw in a film class in college. DW Griffith is lauded with being the first person to turn the camera during a shot. That’s the historical value of the movie.