Oooh, Look! A Bunny!

So I'm sure everyone has seen those t-shirts that read "I'm not ADD its just that...Oh look! A bunny!" Well, I need one of those...for everyday of the week.

This post was supposed to be about D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. And I promise I'll get there soon enough. However, I wanted to write a few words about a couple of movies that I've watched since the last post.

The first movie, "Idiocracy", is a nice little lagniappe. It was written and directed by Mike Judge of "Office Space" and "Beavis and Butthead" fame. I recently re-watched this movie because my fiance didn't think that it could possibly be a good movie despite my claims to the contrary.

Score 1 for me! This movie is hilarious. Private Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is frozen as part of a government program. He is only supposed to be frozen for a year. However, the top secret program is forgotten about in the wake of a scandal and Bauers wakes up not one, but 500 years later.

He discovers that the world has become a significantly dumber place. The movie is sharp social commentary masked as low-brow humor. The narrator notes in voice over that the survival of the fittest, doesn't apply to humans. Evolution favors those who reproduce the most.

Which is true, actually. Any casual observation of daytime talk shows could easily lead you to that conclusion. Smart people have a kid, maybe two. Then there's the people on Maury fighting about who is and is not "the father". These scuzzy men denying their children usually already have four or five other kids they won't support by four or five other women they refer to in very derogatory language.

As for the women, how is it that they can have so many partners that five different men could be possible 'baby's daddies"? I haven't met four or five men in my entire life that I would want to have children with, much less four or five in a few weeks!

Other valid points: The entertainment industry will soon consist only of fart jokes
And advertisers are taking over the world.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

The other movie, and I'll be brief here because it is a British film,is called Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

Based on the novel of the same name and directed by Karel Reisz, this film stars Albert Finney and Norman Rossington(Rossington played Norm in A Hard Day's Night) as two English factory workers who are dissatisfied with their working class lives. It starts with the famous line, "Don't let the bastards grind you down." Right on, man!

It is really a great example of the film type associated with British New Wave, kitchen sink realism, and the Angry Young Men movement.

I watched it in order to write a paper about it and may come back to it later. It really is one of the films that YOU just HAVE to see.

The Stupendous Very First Post

This is it. The stupendous very first post. I think this is the appropriate place to layout what I believe this blog will be about.

1. The Film Project
2. My random political rants that everyone else I know is sick of hearing.
3. Random thoughts. I'm a little OCD and a little ADD. Oh, look! A bunny!

So hopefully the political rants and bunny chases will be kept to a minimum. But I make no promises. The main goal of this blog is this. I will watch films and write about them.

It occurred to me while I was in film school that there is no real 'film canon'. Not, at least, in the way that there is a literary canon. OED defines this idea as such:

A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study. Also such a body of literature in a particular language, from a particular culture or time period, etc.

Well, the real problem isn't that there is no canon of American cinema but that everyone intuits that there is and believes that the crappy movies that they like are in it. Also, these people, for what ever reason, freak out when they come across an unsuspecting film major who has never seen what they think is a master piece. Then they want to make said film major watch said crappy movie.

Now not all of the movies that I was pestered for never having seen were crappy. In fact, I hear Star Wars is quite good. And while I know that I saw it (meaning the first one) when I was very young, I don't quite remember it.

So I decided that I would find try to find and watch THE movies. You know THE movies that YOU just HAVE to see. In short, I am going to launch an attempt to discover the American cinematic canon.

To start, I compiled a list of every film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Then I discovered the American Film Institutes's 100 years...100 Movies list.

I combined the two, listed them in chronological order and marked the ones that were AFI, the ones that were Oscar and the ones that were both.

I did all this about 3 years ago. Just couldn't bring myself to get good and started on this undertaking. Until a couple of weeks ago when my fiance introduced me to James Lileks site.

This guy received a 100 Mysteries box set as a gift and decided to watch and blog about them all. He offered the rationale that if he did not have to blog about them, he would not watch them.

I suppose you can see where this is going now, right. So anyways. I will be posting about D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" next. God help us all.