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.
