Birth of a Nation (1915)

After 4 days and an entire box of lemon Girl Scout cookies, I have finished The Birth of a Nation. The birth of my daughter Azalea took me 24 hours. This movie is over 3 hours and is just as painful.
The first half is a tedious personalized account of the entire civil war. Now, my family lives in Florida, but we are from Alabama.  So every year in school we were taught all about the War of Northern Aggression over and over. That's all they really focused on.  I don't even know what happened during the Vietnam War. So I don't need yet another long history lecture again. Yes I know Lincoln was shot. He died on my birthday, April 15th.  The first half was like living my childhood history lessons all over again. I thought I was done with that. In fact, the only way I could sit through a silent movie is to provide a soundtrack of my own. So the entire time I was watching it, I played Rage Against the Machine.

   So the second half is where it gets interesting. I could show this to my in-laws, tell them it's a documentary, and they would accept it as fact. That fact I find hilarious.  My half of the family is white, while my husband's is Native American. He said that "you won't hear us whining about reparations, and they took our land". Probably why you don't see any Native Americans in this film.

After the civil war, it shows how Congress gained its first black members.  They drink alcohol, eat fried chicken, and put their bare feet on the furniture. These are terrible people.  Something must be done, and the main cute white guy in the film sees some kids being scared off by other kids under a sheet, like a ghost costume. Ghosts are really scary, but not as scary as Ferris wheels. I don't know about you, but I am terrified of Ferris wheels.

The main evil guy in the film is Silas, who is half black and half white.  Unlike panda bears, who are both black and white and everybody loves them, Silas is a shady ass motherfucker who is bent on power.  In school we would have referred to him as "shady tree". He tries to force the pretty white girl to marry him against her will, but luckily she is saved by the unicorn people.

The other little girl in the film gets chased by another black guy, but leaps off a cliff to avoid him. However, she doesn't die immediately, she dies a slow painful death, like a Shakespeare character. Actually everything is slow and painful in this movie. This movie gets a 7/10 because I understand that it was groundbreaking, but it was too long.