#100 - Ben-Hur

You all know how I feel about epics. This 212-minute 1959 Biblical epic stars Charlton Heston in the title role. The entire title is "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ," and the film shows how Ben-Hur interacts with Christ and the events around his life and death.

Heston plays Judah Ben-Hur, the richest man in Jerusalem who is wrongly imprisoned and enslaved and has to fight the corrupt politicians of Rome to find out what happened to his mother and sister. Sounds a lot like "Spartacus," but we're not going to talk about that.

The classic scene that everyone identifies with the movie is the ten-minute long chariot race. The scene is great, and it actually got my pulse pounding. The scene took five weeks to film, and it shows that some time and care was taken to get everything to be as suspenseful as it could.

The movie won 11 Academy Awards, a record that still stands today, with two films tying this epic: "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." Unlike those movies, however, this film won awards for acting, both for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. As much as I dislike epics, I do believe that this is the best of the three movies with the 11 Oscars (I also find it interesting that all three movies have a running time that clocks in over 3 hours).

So, even though the movie had one of the greatest and most recognizable scenes at the beginning of the second act, the rest of the movie just didn't do it for me. I think I have learned my lesson: epics just aren't for me, unless I need something to lull me to sleep faster than usual.