I was introduced to a great site the other day, called framerater, (I am christof on there) which asks you to tick off movies you have seen, from various ‘best’ lists from IMDB and elsewhere. I was quite surprised with how many I had seen.

One of the lists was a 1001 movies you must see, which is ordered chronologically with the oldest films at the start.

The two oldest were filmed in 1902 and 1903, and are well worth watching. Many of the oldest on the list are out of copyright and available on either archive.org and YouTube.

Here is one: The Great Train Robbery, by Edison’s studio.

A couple of things stood out for me, a couple of cinematic conventions, one of which has been retained, and one amended.

Firstly, the convention that if you hit someone on the back of the head with a pistol, they will instantly lose consciousness until someone splashes water in their face. I have no personal experience of being clubbed, but I imagine it is rather difficult to judge a blow so perfectly that you do more than leave a nasty bruise, render someone unconscious,  but still stop short of permanent brain damage.

Secondly, how people react to being shot. People seem to die instantly when shot in movies (expect for important characters, who linger quietly, without vomiting or convulsing, until they have said their piece), and indicate that they have been hit by hunching and falling, and remaining still. But in one of these movies, they do not hunch: they all throw their hands vertically into the air as they fall.

Perhaps that is more realistic: heck, in 1903 you might have a people around who could draw upon personal experience of western gunfights. But it looks odd to modern eyes.

I can’t get the logic of this. There is an installed base of millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users: why not release the iBook app for those devices? I can buy books from Amazon’s Kindle app on my iPhone, who seem to be Apple’s chief competitor in this arena.

Surely it would help in negotiations with publishers (who are being pulled between Amazon and Apple) if they could point to sales from iPhone/iPod Touch users, and possibly even Mac users as well?

There are two possible explanations that I can think of. One, Apple are trying to use the iBook app as bait, so that existing iPhone users will buy the iPad as well. I don’t believe this: Apple always seem to play the long game. Which feeds into my second theory: That Mr Jobs just doesn’t think that reading a book on your iPhone is a compelling enough experience, and he doesn’t want to give people the opportunity to dismiss ebooks as a result.

I have no idea, of course. But I can’t imagine any other company that would deny themselves the sales: with one free download they could sell a lot of ebooks.