I am now the proud (well, maybe not proud) owner of four new movies!
K-19 Widowmaker
Payback
and two classics
BIRTH OF A NATION
and
REEFER MADNESS!!!!!!!
I can't wait to crack the last one open.
Have you seen Birth of A Nation before? If not, you're in for a racist stereotype good time. Despite the fact the movie changed the way people saw the cinema as an entertainment medium, the film is extremely controversial and laden with white supremacy ideals. Griffith casts whites to black roles and creates an odd tension has transcended generations as the race issue is still prevalent today.
And Reefer Madness...what an excellent comedy...well, if you keep in mind that it wasn't intended to be a comedy but a warning as to the horrors of the weed.
Reefer Madness.... what an interesting film. Sadly, I was expecting more from it. Cut out the beginning and end and we have a cheesy crime drama. It falls into it's own category of bad. It was laughably naive. I found it interesting that everyone in it smoked both tobacco and pot like a chimmney.
I also found it amusing that pot is portrayed as an extreme stimulant, when in fact it is a depressant. And the laughter effect? That is another (completely legal) drug entirely, called salvia. With such incredible misinformation floating about, I'd be astonished if any parent who saw this film was able to recognize pot use in their kids.
I haven't seen The Birth of A Nation but I am aware of it's place in history, as a cinematic wonder and as a 12 reel advertisment for the KKK. I picked it up for it's historical value, not for it's portrayal of history.
There are a lot of different cuts/versions of Birth of a Nation out there, some longer than others. Longer is better.
Birth of A Nation, by David Wark Griffith, one of the co-founders of United Artists, along with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, was really a visionary masterpiece. Griffith was certainly extremely naive and a literary purist who was a product of his times -- eg. other directors had white actors portraying blacks, particularly if they had to touch other white actors in a given scene.
Remember that this film was made in 1915 -- hardly a banner year for racial understanding in America.
Griffith was genuinely upset and shocked by the outcry that his film produced at the time among the more intellectual liberal elite of Hollywood and New York. In reaction, he sank his personal fortune into his next picture, Intolerance (1916), which was about just that. It was a strident and sincere anti-racist film,, and bombed terribly at the box office. It is every bit as good as Birth (a masterpiece/true work of staggering genius), but not as well-known or popular.
Another Griffith anti-racism masterpiece is Broken Blossoms (1919), which portrays a love affair between a Gish sister and an older Chinese gentleman. You simply cannot imagine how scandalous and envelope-pushing this film was for the day -- a complet 180 degree turn from the perceived racism of Birth, but every bit as scandalous for the opposite point of view!!
Birth of a Nation can be viewed over and over again & is worth digging into as a film. Remember too that the Civil War was a scant 50 years ago when the picture was made. Many people who lived through it all were still very much alive. Many of them hailed aspects of it as absolutely accurate, and we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, many scenes are unsympathetic and quite shocking in their brutal depiction of Reconstruction-era South. But Griffith was trying to stay true to his source -- remember, it was a novel first -- and the opinions depicted were not necessarily his own.
peter johnson/denny crane