Movie.

This is why society makes those of us at British Balls vomit.

In 1927, Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, staring Al Jolson as the aforementioned singer of jazz. It’s the story of a young performer coming to terms with his Jewish heritage by taking the morally repugnant high ground of putting on blackface. As far as historical significance goes, it was the first film to incorporate synchronized sound, as would later be witnessed in such modern classics as Citizen Kane, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Tokyo Story, Brazil, and of course, Tango & Cash.

And so, the world was introduced to the talkies.

Get it? They talk, so they are talkies.

Not walkies, or gawkies, or cousin balkies… oh my, that would have been ridiculous.


So ridiculous, that we now scorn the thought of even implementing the term talkies as anything other than irony. How marvelously quaint it all seems. That motion pictures, once known as movies, were then, eventually referred to as talkies. Yes, we have crawled out from our primordial stink, freed ourselves from such archaic terms, only to come right back around and refer to them as…

…that’s right, you high-and-mighty sons of bitches.

Movies.

Movies, you goddamn, snuff-snorting, powdered-wig luddites.

We scoff at the notion that people were once amazed that movies could talk. We take for granted the genius of Kevin Smith's outdated banter, or the fresh dialogue courtesy of the fifty-eight movies released by Judd Apitow every thirty minutes or so. And yet, even as Keanu Reeves flies through the matrix, and Tom Hanks candy-coats the atrocities of the American Century by shaking hands with that old mischief maker, Richard Nixon, we still insist on reverting back to a time when it was hot snot to watch a thirty second, stop-motion clip of a rocket ship piercing the eyeball of an ornery, hideously disfigured moon-face.


Why not go back to calling cheese barf-milk, addressing peep shows as hag-portals, or measuring external hard drives in quantities of giga-rocks?

As I write this, America is well on its way to possibly electing Barack Obama to the highest office of the land, and yet, the term movie is still thrown about as though black and white film never came to known as Colored. And then just Black. And after that, African-American. And after that, Digitized.

You all disgust us. You are all, essentially, racists.

But don’t ever change those little things we love about you.