Capitalism - Feudalism
without the Kings
Tax the Rich
Movie Monday
This may be the first Monday when I have no "new" movie to review. In fact, scrolling through my many, many Verizon movie choices I shudder more and more frequently at the dross they offer.
I've mentioned this before, but do try:
These are archival, public domain feature films from around the world. A lot of them are bad mysteries from the late 1930s and 1940s but even they are interesting just to see how people lived, what their interior and exterior world looked like before CGIs arrived to warp reality.
Right now, Intolerance by D. W. Griffith from 1916 is up. As a commenter said: wow i downloaded this and sat and watched it and was gobsmaked,this film
is as valid today as it was nearly 100 yrs ago or 3,000yrs ago. If you're not a movie buff, you may not know that Griffith could honestly (with no hype) be titled the "father of the feature film." Sometimes branded as a racist today, he operated in the world as it was then and he never was striving for the appellation as "the father of civil rights." But if you are going to learn the history of anything you must study it as it is, not as you wish it to be.
These archives also have some pretty good movies: Shadow of a Doubt and And Then There Were None; and some mediocre mysteries I love, Charlie Chan. (And please don't go into the racism in them; it's endemic.)
A lot of the movies come with ratings and comments so you get to know if the technical features of the film are poor (lighting, sound, etc.) You also get to know if that movie is a turkey (Manos: The Hand of Fate) but even turkeys can be enjoyable time wasters. I like this site because I shrink its screen, watch the movie, cruise another site and knit.
Before I slip away, I feel that I should mention Aurora, CO and the massacre at its move theater. People like Bill Moyers have spoken more eloquently than I could ever on our gun controlled society:
I hope all the families involved are able to someday move back into the world with the horrendous psychic scars they'll carry forever. We, in the technologically advanced West, often forget: Shit happens. It's random, sudden and deadly. Whether by man or nature, ever so often, the world is thrown out of its natural orbit and we rediscover our fragility as a species and the tenuous hold we have on happiness.
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