Good morning and welcome to my first entry. I had not intended to start a blog, but once my comments on this lovely article
 went over 2000 characters, I didn't have a choice! So here we go.

I was born decades after the end of the silent era, but because movies became my passion, I discovered silent movies...and I fell in love (and am still falling love) with quite a few.

When I was a kid, I owned a little paperback book -- with a title I know longer remember -- which detailed what were considered the greatest and/or most famous horror and science-fiction movies. I knew a lot of them of course: Bride of Frankenstein, Lugosi's Dracula, Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Wolfman, and science-fiction classics like The Thing.

But then I read about three movies I'd never heard of before, all German. One was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Another was Nosferatu. The last was called the "first" science-fiction movie: Metropolis, and the chapter was set up by telling the legendary story of director Fritz Lang coming to America and seeing the glowing lights of the New York City skyline. It was allegedly his inspiration for Metropolis (I have always loved that story and keep hoping that it won't turn out to be another of those tales with little basis). I later saw all three as I was growing up: mangled versions, poorly edited ones, and some with footage so badly deteriorated, you could barely see the action, which was already almost indecipherable. Of all of them, I liked Metropolis best, even if it didn't make sense. All I knew was there were two worlds -- the workers and the aristocracy; a girl named Maria, and some mad scientist that made an Evil Maria Robot. At some point I probably saw all of those same plots in a couple of Star Trek episodes LOL (Good Kirk, Evil Kirk in The Enemy Within; a bad Robot Kirk in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, and a third-season episode with a workers' world and an aristocracy that lived in the clouds and paid little mind to the workers and their needs.

And yes, Metropolis sounds very capitalist  vs. worker when you look back on it and analyze it in greater detail, but I just knew it was something special. I had no idea of course that this is the movie that set the path for Star Trek and Star Wars, for Blade Runner and the original The Matrix. This is one of those "granddaddy of them all" that honestly was the granddaddy of them all!

Over the years I saw other Fritz Lang movies on VHS (his first of the Dr. Mabuse films, M), then DVD came along and you started seeing many of these old flicks appearing in that format, but most of them simply poor transfers of what was on tape. Metropolis was regrettably one of them as it was -- sad to say -- pretty much in public domain, meaning that anyone and their grandmother could pump out their version of it, poor versions and all. Finally, in the early part of this decade, along came what was considered the most definitive version of the movie, but when I saw this news Thursday night, I was so excited I could barely see straight.

THIS is a real find and that's an understatement. Discovering a silent movie always heard of but thought lost is a major coup in itself. To discover what appears to be the complete "final" version of any silent movie after 80+ years -- especially when it has undergone major edits, most of those by a movie studio dissatisfied with the film -- is the Holy Grail of movie history. And I realize this has absolutely nothing to do with politics and all, but to someone who has loved movies all my life, and has watched them turn into little more than CGI-obsessed, unoriginal, oversexed pieces of trash, this news has had me walking on air for two days now.

I won't come down to Earth until this is released on DVD...which according to reports will be in 2009 in both standard DVD and Blu-Ray formats. More on that a little later.

Happy Independence Day weekend everyone. This Movie Girl is off for a mini-spa day.