Tam's momm recently asked in the comments section whether I managed to watch Gone with the Wind to the end and was it worth my time. In all honesty, I thought the movie was a hell of a lot of fun. The view of the Old South portrayed in it is obviously morally objectionable, sentimental crap. You can't take it at all seriously (I mean both in the sense of "can't take it seriously and not feel ill" but also that it's just not possible to do). But I found the (melo-) drama of the story quite engaging, and the Scarlett/Rhett relationship ludicrous, sexy, and bigger-than-life in a good kind of way. It's like the greatest trashy romance story ever.
You know how some movies (or books) are hard to get into? That you have to be in the right frame of mind to deal with its difficulties or strangeness, and you struggle with it for a while, but that eventually you reach a point where everything clicks for you and you start enjoying it? Gone with the Wind is not this kind of movie. If you have tried to watch it a couple of times, and it didn't do anything for you, I doubt you're going to like it any better any other time. For pop-cultural literacy, it's good if you have at least seen a bit of the movie and are thus generally familiar with its characters and style, and everybody should be able to recognize the origin of its famous lines (not giving a damn, needing to be kissed by somebody who knows how, birthin' babies, never being hungry again). But this isn't a movie that is good for you, that improves your mind, or anything like that, so don't force it, I say.
I have always liked Roger Ebert's review of Gone with the Wind and his observations the movie is very much a creature of the 1930's and an embodiment of widely held ravishment fantasies.
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I especially liked his comment that a politically correct GWTW would not be worth making and would be a lie.
Which brings to mind the time that the girls and I went to the library and they were stacking Nancy Drew mystery books on the counter and when I asked what they were doing with them I was told they could not keep them in the library because they had black people in subjugated circumstances. i.e., the black housekeeper and that wasn't politically correct(in so many words). It struck me as very odd since at the time the books were written many homes did have black housekeepers. I guess if the author is famous enough they won't pull their books off the shelves when they reflect life as it actually was.
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