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.