8. The Birth of a Nation
If you love D.W. Griffith's 1915, 3-hour-plus silent epic about the U.S. post-Civil War South, you've got to be proud that you're seeing something the rest of us aren't. Yes, Griffith made the movies into a grand experience with complex story telling, and technical wizardry to match it. But classic may be a term better used for a movie that the internationally recognized hate group Ku Klux Klan doesn't use as propaganda in support of its race-hate manifesto. Few movies so unapologetically give credence to the archaic, unfounded theory of white superiority. And there's an even smaller amount of films like this one that are held in such high esteem. You'd have to be really in love with the making of a film to overlook its content. Do you respect Hitler because he was a charismatic leader? Yeah, I went there. I can forgive content given its filmic significance and influence. But The Birth Of A Nation is just too damned long to be sat through in this day and age to walk away from a proper viewing (without the distractions of the internet) and think, "My oh my, that was a fine film." You know you're pretentious if you walked away from this film at all. Did you know the average person burns 200 calories sleeping for 3 hours?