Matt Zoller Seitz on Salon,"trash-talking" nine classic movies, and starting with the most deserving of all, "Gone With the Wind":
What happened? Maybe the country grew up just a little bit, and realized that, almost a century and a half after the Civil War's end, a democracy of free men and women should not be sentimentalizing the Confederacy as a fairy-tale kingdom in which good-hearted plantation owners ruled over happy, loyal darkies and threw big, beautiful soirées -- a land where things were just hunky-dory until those bad old Yankees came along and spoiled it. That's the part of "Gone With the Wind" that always gnawed at me.I hate "Gone With the Wind" and always have. It's four hours long, it's racist and celebrates things that are vile and horrible, and its heroine is a loathsome, despicable shrew. It shouldn't have even made the AFI 100.