watch the AFI Top 100 American movies

I don’t know if I’m any smarter now that I’ve finished this one off, but half of the movies that I hadn’t seen were really amazing and I’ve recommended a few of them to other people. The movies on this list are a lot like the movies that get nominated for awards every year: there are a lot of epics on there—way too many for my taste. I don’t know that this list makes you a better cineaste, since it leaves out all foreign films, but it was a good excuse to see a lot of movies that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen. The second page of it gets a little uneven. If you really wanted to learn more about film, I would cherry-pick this list and add in a lot of great foreign films…

I watched Wuthering Heights last night. Whew! I’m done!

I watched Bring Up Baby on Friday and I’m starting Wuthering Heights right now…

My walk this morning took me past the Empire State Building and a store selling souvenirs of the Empire State Building with Kong hanging off it.

King Kong was one of the easiest movies to watch of all the AFI ones I’ve chugged down lately. The 1933 version is just a really solid, well-done adventure story. The effects are dated now, but if you look past that, they’re well done, especially the fight between Kong and the T. Rex. The shots of the five story gate are pretty amazing, considering that we would never make a real set that big these days. I watched the new version a couple of weeks ago, and the changes are pretty striking. The new version builds out parts of the movie that are only perfunctory here, like the love story between Anne and Jack. The new version also creates the friendship between Anne and Kong out of thin air. When I watched the new version, I felt like it was way too long, but I don’t know that this shorter version is necessarily a better movie at two hours. We expect different things out of a story when it’s newly told and when it’s an old classic. I’d love to see a spliced-together version where someone grabbed the best scenes from the three versions and put them together…

I’ll write a review of King Kong [1933] later, but I am pleased to report that I’m down to two films! I’ve finished the first half-hour of Bringing Up Baby, but I think I might have trouble getting Wuthering Heights. I went to two stores last night and discovered that you can’t simply buy a copy of this movie because it’s out of print. I’m still not sure if/when my video store will have it, but I do know that I can get it through the library and TCM is going to show it sometime in May. I want to blast through these last few films today or tomorrow, but this may put a kink in my plans…

Three to go! I watched Schindler’s List last night. It’s a good movie all round—it had great cinematography, an amazing story and wonderful performances. There’s just something about most Spielberg movies that I don’t like, and I think it’s that I always feel a little manipulated afterwards. I think that’s why I waited so long to see this one [and why I didn’t see it in the first place]. This actually wasn’t so rough. I expected to really be jerked around, but I actually enjoyed watching it…

For some reason, I’ve left all black and white movies for the end of the list… King Kong is on my Tivo, and I rented Bringing Up Baby this morning and plan on seeing them either tonight or tomorrow. My video store didn’t have Wuthering Heights in their Olivier section, although they do have a copy somewhere. If I have to buy it, I will—it’d be a good way to pay back the library for their help. The end is in sight!

I started “Streetcar Named Desire” last night and finished it this morning. I’d read the play in college, but Tennesee Williams has such subtle dialogue that seeing it really fills in the cracks.

I have four to go! I’ve started King Kong on my Tivo and need to rent the other three…

I just finished watching “The Apartment”, which was a cute Billy Wilder movie. I might actually go see modern romantic comedies if they were that good. It had a great cast, a bunch of great screwball moments, an interesting-if-transparent plot and was just a well-made movie all round.

This goal is one of the ones I want to finish for the Spring Challenge and I’d specifically like to finish it before April 27th, which is when the hold ends on a non-AFI movie from the library. It may not work out that way, since I do have to rent four of them, but at least I have a goal that I’m kinda sorta shooting for…

Chunk’s been slacking, but I’ve been moving right along… Today I finished Birth of a Nation, which was just a hard movie to watch. Its politics are awful—the film was made in 1915, and is based on a book called “The Clansman”. It’s an epic that runs through the Civil War and into reconstruction by telling the story of two families in South Carolina and the retaking of the South by white people and the rise of the KKK. It’s an important piece of film history, blah, blah, blah… but now I completely understand why we never watched it in any of my film history classes. I watched part of it on the train while I was travelling out to a friend’s house, and I was embarrased and worried that someone who wasn’t a white cinephile would catch a glimpse of someone in blackface running after a scared white lady or a Klu Klux Klan horseman running off a “riot” of black men in uniform. There’s even a shot towards the end of it of the KKK disenfranchising black people going out to vote. I don’t think I can watch that movie and disconnect it from the actual story. I want to write “Lillian Gish was luminous!”, but I’m really just thoroughly grossed out. I’m so glad I was born after the Civil Rights era. I did worry about Iraq as I watched it, since they’re going to have to go through a similar period before everything evens out…

Friday night I watched “The Grapes of Wrath”, which was quite good. It was another John Ford movie and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than “The Searchers”. It had treacle-y moments, but I felt honest sympathy for the family. We’ve had good times ever since the Depression, and we forget that there was serious, widespread poverty here in the US. I hope I never see it’s like…

I watched “The Wild Bunch” last night, and I think it’s the first Western I’ve seen in a while that I kind of enjoyed. It was very violent, but I liked the characters and I really liked how Peckinpah edited and shot the movie. This one had a lot of action, and he often overlapped two people falling at once. After “The Jazz Singer” and “The Searchers”, it was refreshing to see something that was a little more modern. I’d like to see more Peckinpah movies once I’m done with this list. I should add a wishlist for his movies to my Tivo. I know that a director my boyfriend once interviewed said his favorite movie ever was “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”...

The library has a bunch of movies waiting for me—I tried to go by today, but they don’t open until 1pm on Fridays! [Budget cuts, not lazy librarians…] I’ll drop by tomorrow and trade out the movies I have for the movies I haven’t seen. King Kong (1933) is coming in a week or so, and I also noticed that my Tivo was going to pick up a bunch of Charlie Chaplin movies off of TCM.