Genre #1: Epics

I'll admit, I always sort of thought that an epic had to be a poem. Evidently this is not true.
I also thought that an epic had to be about something specifically heroic, like a war, or a quest or something. An epic, to my knowlege, has to be very, very long.

And ships. I feel there should be ships.

However, Titanic, for an example, is on this list. Mind you, a ship is heavily featured in Titanic, but I've never noticed anything particularly heroic about it. But the American Film Institute has, and the American Film Institue is never wrong. Clearly, I don't know exactly what an epic is.

I asked Dictionary.com for a strait definition of the word. Among the first couple of definitions, Dictionary.com assured me that an epic was "an epic poem," "epic poetry," or "something worthy to form the subject of an epic," which was less than helpful. After some further digging,
"Any work of literature, film, etc, having heroic deeds for its subject matter or having other qualities associated with the epic," came up, which was much more helpful, although still a bit vague toward the end. This is about what I said earlier, but without the ships.

Interesting.

First up: The Ten Commandments.