Acclaimed movies you're intimidated to watch

I don't regret watching this, but I also don't think you are going to miss anything about the history of cinema if you skip it. It's obviously important. But outside of some of the battle scenes, I think you can learn everything you need of its value from all the things that have already been written extensively about it. It's not a classic I hold in terribly high regard outside of its innovations.



As for its racism, it's really really racist. The reputation is more than earned. But at the same time, as depressing as its depiction of this is, I don't see this as being a particularly arduous watch. Knowing what it was going in (essentially a trumpet for the resurgence of the KKK), I was more than prepared for what it offered and it was exactly that. It was gross and sad. But of course it was going to be that. Nothing caught me off guard in its repugnance though.


Maybe I feel this way because I already have zero expecations of how ugly people can be though, and so it is pretty hard to shock me out of my perma-despair.

Hey, leave my son out of this!

My beautiful baby boy.

Just too ugly to watch.
I’d vomit 🤢

Agreed. I watched it for a history class in high school during a unit on Reconstruction. Yes, it has some stuff that was groundbreaking at the time, but aside from it being really racist, it didn't make a huge impression on me as a film.

I think it serves as an important reminder of how overt racist sentiment was and the kind of narratives that were created to justify that sentiment. I think it's almost a bit like Night and Fog. It's one thing to know something, but quite another to actually see it. I wasn't surprised by the emotions I felt watching the film---disgust, despair, depression, annoyance---but much like other primary source documents, confronting them has value.

gosh really 😫 that must sucked alot😫, ahhh that was my favourite fight scene n well lucky but atleast u got the movie right? i have the whole collection.

Oh, for sure. But I think in the case of Nation, I kind of already imagined what I was going to see. It wasn't only what it presented to me, but how it would look and feel and unfold, that seemed to have already been predigested by me. Which is one of the reasons it didn't really have much of an effect beyond 'yup, really racist'.


Night and Fog on the other hand, takes images I have seen many dozens of times, and shows them to me in a way that made me unprepared for how to deal with what I was seeing. Resnais finds ways to articulate the incomprehensible. And maybe even makes it even more incomprehensible in doing so. It's terrifying and life ruining. Griffiths, on the other, hand, is just a mouthpiece for vile ideas. Doesn't mean it isn't horrendous to see, but I don't think watching Nation actually made me think about that horrendousness in even a slightly different way than I did before I put it on. He hated black people. His heart was black. And so is the movie. Because of course it is. I just moved on and barely thought about it since.

I guess seeing it as a 15 year old, I wasn't quite as prepared for just how blatant it would be.

I get what you mean. Birth of a Nation didn't stick with me aside from the shock I felt at the racist content. Night and Fog is haunting and exists in this crux of being both great and, as you say, terrifying and horrible. Like I said before, Birth of a Nation feels more like a historical document to me than "cinema". Now, I do think that it could make for a really powerful double-bill with Within Our Gates, just to understand the gap between perceptions of Black people at the time.

Just to be clear, I think it is important that Birth of a Nation exists and people can see with clear eyes its awfulness. We should never be allowed to erase these blights from sight. It's only on the personal level, and how it affected me, that I'm speaking from.



I'm also not above being affected by other films that have just peddled blanket hate (without any great insight into it). But they are usually ones that I didn't have my defenses already up for. And they have usually been regarding misogyny and in the horror genre. I've seen some films that, from the outside probably just seem like your standard woman hating slasher, but somehow they really made me understand this particular ugliness with a clarity I'd never seen before....not that they were good movies mind you, only that they were so undiluted in their ugliness, they made me see the unseemly underbelly of these kinds of movies for the first time (I think I am mostly thinking about the movie Don't Answer the Phone here, which is garbage, but really made me see the attitudes that the slasher genre is peddling a little more clearly...and shamefully)

He just needs a loving home.

I'll probably watch it anyways as I'm still kinda curious about it. I feel like knowing about its racism ahead of time should make it an easier watch. I also feel like reading up on the films innovations and actually watching them will make for a different effect.

Agreed. There are a lot of films that you go into with your guard up, and sometimes even a really specific understanding of what you are going to see, and it can slightly blunt the impact. But there's something really shocking about not being "ready" for an attitude or portrayal that hits you out of nowhere.

Wait, there are horror films with problematic attitudes toward women?!

Not to dissuade you, but I was a bit let down on this front.

It's like racism, racism, racism, racism, ADVANCED FOR ITS TIME DISSOLVE TO MORE RACISM, racism racism racism.

He needs a shotgun to the face

Really, is this horrible nastiness actually acclaimed. I’m ****ing disturbed they exist. I think god will hate it. Remember reading about the wrong’en that went to great effort to make these was pulled over by airport security, they found the tape and thought it was actual snuff. Vile. Pleased you outgrown it. All the arguments about why it’s alright are so ****ing feeble. Used to go through it with an ex friend, in the end found so many flaws about this guy, the empty headed muppet. This lanky streak of piss up in his dark bedroom watching torture porn and trying to rationalise it. Sorry I digress a lot but I think these are the worst films ever made and they kinda upset me that they just exist and yeah it gets stronger as I get older. Torture and murder exist and it’s strange and horrible. That’s enough for me, I just draw parallels to real life. If people are watching this into adulthood there is something wrong there. If they wanna argue to me it’s merits, I’m even more sickened

Hm, I'm starting to wonder whether it's not worth checking out after all.

Again: I think it has value as a historical document.

But as a movie . . . . meh. Like, you know when you first see the effects in Bride of Frankenstein and it's like "Whoa!!!!". This is not that.

I might check it out then. I'm not expecting to be wowed, but I'm sure it will be interesting to some degree.

I watched Citizen Kane just to prove to Citizen Rules that I could. Man, it was a torture.

Same here. Both torturous. (Casablanca & Citizen Kane.)

Terrific movie. Seen it many times.

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