12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

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knives
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#51 Post by knives » Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:14 pm

domino harvey wrote: I would bet money that in the actual slave narrative Northup owns up to more negative complexities than is afforded him in the film.
Probably a good time to put the whole book, in audio form, up. It's a long listen, but a really great one that I think addresses some of your problems with the movie in a more satisfying way though it is written in the style of the day and the narrator has an odd accent for some reason.

Clodius
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#52 Post by Clodius » Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:20 pm

domino harvey wrote:Again, my problems with the representational characterization are specific to this film and its aims and not all films. I haven't seen the Redford movie but I have no reason to think or know if such obstacles will be a hindrance or not until I see that specific film. In this specific movie, the one now under discussion, the lack of characterization for black characters in favor of white characters is problematic for me. When I think back of this film I can vividly recall Fassbinder's complex and troubling performance, Brad Pitt's Mennonite/Quaker figure, Sarah Paulson's tanty-pitching plantation wife, but when it comes to the slaves themselves, they are a blur. It would not have been hard to give them personalities, complexities beyond whore and saint and diligent worker, but the film isn't interested. And based on the overwhelming positive response, clearly it worked in their favor. But the end scene of reconciliation is particularly unearned in its emotional pulls, as we know literally nothing about his family, despite them being so important in his life as to merit this concluding sequence. The wife cooks. That's it. That's all we know. Would it have hurt the film to offer even one minute of characterization to his family so as to earn some small part of that finale? But that's the issue with the film: I ended the movie knowing about as much about the central figure as when it started, and that's not a journey.

The earlier invocation of Schindler's List is an apt one: at the time of release it was anathema to speak out against Spielberg's Holocaust drama. Now it seems the populace is at best split 50-50 on its merits. It's impossible to predict what films remain relevant going forward, but I can't in my heart or mind believe this will fare much better too far into the future.
Well I think we both were expecting, and got, different things out of the movie. You were looking for more of a personal journey whereas I was looking for something more overarching. I got what I wanted but you didn't. To be fair, I love historical epics so this was in my ballpark already. I'll say my audience gasped at the Dano beatdown more than laughed. I will also say that while I thought the film was great, it didn't rocket into my top all 5 or anything. I'm certainly going to be recommending it to people, but not the way I was practically forcing people to go see Zero Dark Thirty last year.

I'll also agree that I wasn't moved by the film. I was able to appreciate the quality of the acting, plotting, and directing but I wasn't weeping in the aisle or anything (the only real gut reaction I had was certainly Patsey's back). Strangely, Gravity was more compelling to me in the way it was physically draining and moved me.

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whaleallright
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#53 Post by whaleallright » Fri Oct 25, 2013 3:35 pm

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Last edited by whaleallright on Sat Oct 26, 2013 2:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

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knives
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#54 Post by knives » Fri Oct 25, 2013 3:41 pm

Yes, several are posted in this very thread.

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hearthesilence
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#55 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Oct 26, 2013 7:19 pm

Saw this. I'm not a "go-in-fresh" type of person, I have no problem skimming reviews and opinions ahead of time about specifics for a film because I got tired of reading them later and thinking "I'd have to see that part again."

So here's a rundown of how I responded to certain scenes in relation to criticisms elsewhere. (I can't pinpoint by memory who said what, but I'm certain many here can.)

First the opening. I thought McQueen made it pretty obvious that Solomon figured out that the juices of his berries could be used as ink. Cleanly edited, the matching, purplish liquids, etc., plus squishing what could only be berries from the bucket. Very straightforward visual storytelling, so I can't agree he botched that up.

I didn't really like the first act though, particularly the section that shows how he was brought to the South. It was too slick and moved too much like an action film where they were pushing more for your adrenaline (not raw emotion). For example, Michael K. Williams' introduction (the close-up with the mask) could've been very powerful for the indignity and inhumanity of how we first see him, but McQueen doesn't let that sink in.

Things get better though. Solomon seeing one of his ship companions rescued by his master and then cutting to the memory of the shop, that was great. I may have gotten this wrong, but he had a higher status than his companion, correct? He was completely free, his shipmate had his master. That enriches the flashback a bit. He distinctly remembers someone else astonished at his status as an independent free man, and even though he doesn't show it at the shop, the moment made an impression, and you think (or at least I did) he empathized what it was like to be that other man, to still have a master to serve. And now here's someone else, just like that man, except maybe now, it's a position of envy to him, having a master (now savior) that others have to respect as an equal.

Distracting stars is always a grey issue - moreso when you consider how familiar faces become less familiar to more people with time. But for the present moment, most of the time it wasn't. Williams and Giamatti were the first cases, and after recognizing them, you went right back into the film. There may have been a moment in a Fassbender close-up where I felt like an Irish lilt was coming out of his speech, and Paul Dano was distracting for a bit (nothing against Dano, but for some reason he stuck out more - maybe seeing him in too many U.S. history period pieces?) but it never sunk the film.

Long shots of a character in the foreground with horrors in the background were great. This may have been something detractors didn't like, what they complained as being too artfully done. I was wary of that, but I thought these scenes were perfect and hit home. That's how it is, or at least can be, when your everyday life is usually marred by something horrible or traumatic. Eventually with time, it's treated like part of the background while remaining much more alarming to an outsider who isn't used to being around that. And you don't necessarily go numb to it, you still know it's horrible, but it's sort of like behaving in a way that's at odds with your gut feeling or impulse. So for example, when Solomon is hanging there and people slowly emerge in the back, it's like the usual day-to-day life has to go on around him, even though the slaves are clearly aware of Solomon hanging from a tree. Eventually someone does come and help him, but again, no one cuts him down, it has to be left to the owner.

Finally singing - I think some reviewer who liked the film chalked this up as Solomon's final defeat, becoming just like the others. I'm not sure if I remember that criticism correctly, but it's not what that scene's about at all. If anything, it validates the role music (especially spirituals) have had in African-American history. When Solomon sings, he still remains pretty much in close-up. The others are in the background, but we only see his face clearly. And his voice is clear, up in the mix. Surrounded by others, but he's easily heard in that mix, not as a lead, but his voice doesn't blend in with the others, you can tell he had his own mic. When you consider the emotions overwhelming his face, and the actual words of what he sings and his actual vocal performance, it's very powerful, and I think you really understand how this material is apiece with Steve McQueen's other films in a much more profound way.

In Hunger, the person's only weapon against oppression, his only method of expression so that he could be heard, was his body, and he had to risk sacrificing it to use it. In Shame, a person's entire struggle with himself was his body and how his addiction to its physical pleasures was ruining him...It's hard to put in words without sounding too simple, but I'll try. It's a conflict of the spirit with the limitations of the physical. In Hunger your body's a weapon but it's imperfect, to use it meant possibly killing it and, of course, yourself. Shame is all about that body's failure, the addiction is physical. 12 Years of a Slave keeps returning to some kind of non-physical slavery, how people are expected to forget their past connections (Liza losing her children), their dignity as human beings, or even in the case of those who aren't slaves, to accept what they know is immoral (William Ford). All of this is made possible by physical domination, whether it's a threat to your life or just horrendous, legally empowered abuse. Everything in the physical world - from the people you know to the law - is either empowered to break you or disempowered from doing anything right. I'm not a religious man but I always felt that one reason the church had such a great influence on the civil rights movement was the idea of something greater than the physical world, of being able to transcend all these things around you because there was something greater and moral beyond the physical world's reach. When you're in that much despair, it seems like something you have to believe in to pull you out of it. And music, spirituals and gospel, that's a way of reaching that greater, moral force or God, or feeling that you can reach it, it validates it and gives hope. So to me, the scene wasn't about disappearing into what he didn't want to be.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#56 Post by FrauBlucher » Sun Oct 27, 2013 4:56 am

I saw this last week. While I liked it, I wasn't blown away by it. But what was more interesting was the response by my friend who came with me. She's a black woman, who is also a documentarian on African American historical topics. One of her docs is about African American mid-wives in the first half of the last century, and she is currently working on a doc about lynchings. She does not see many Hollywood films. She doesn't care for them. Well, anyway, enough about her background. As for her, thoughts. After the film, she said it was not what she expected. She shares Domino's interest in wanting to know more about Soloman's family in Saratoga, especially after he disappeared from their lives. Did they look for him; how hard did the wife try; did they get help from the white community? All valid questions I thought, but granted it may be a different film or a much longer one. My friend felt there was nothing new about the telling of a slavery story. As she said, "another beat the black man down slavery movie." My friend also said about the ending, "I didn't need a color purple moment." I laughed at that one. What she would have rather seen is a film about Soloman's life after he returned from being enslaved. Imparticular his taking up the cause for 'abolition.' She did like the performances and thought the look of the film was very good and well done. Having seen this with her was an enlightning experience for me.

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Jeff
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#57 Post by Jeff » Sun Nov 03, 2013 7:38 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:She shares Domino's interest in wanting to know more about Soloman's family in Saratoga, especially after he disappeared from their lives. Did they look for him; how hard did the wife try; did they get help from the white community? All valid questions I thought, but granted it may be a different film or a much longer one.
It might have been interesting, but what she's asking for is a different movie than the one McQueen set out to make. The entire film is from Solomon Northup's perspective. We don't get to see what went on with his family while he was gone because he didn't get to see it. Just like we don't actually see him getting kidnapped and chained up, because he was unsure of exactly what happened. We get the hazy drunken memories of him being taken upstairs and waking up in chains because that's all he remembers. It's Northup's story told entirely from his perspective. I don't think there are any shots in the film of something he didn't personally witness.
FrauBlucher wrote:My friend felt there was nothing new about the telling of a slavery story. As she said, "another beat the black man down slavery movie." My friend also said about the ending, "I didn't need a color purple moment." I laughed at that one. What she would have rather seen is a film about Soloman's life after he returned from being enslaved. Imparticular his taking up the cause for 'abolition.' She did like the performances and thought the look of the film was very good and well done. Having seen this with her was an enlightning experience for me.
I don't really think "I wish this had been a completely different movie about Solomon Northup's life after slavery" is a legitimate criticism of the film that was made. Northup didn't write that story, and McQueen didn't try to tell it.

I suppose there isn't anything new about the telling of a slavery story, but does there really need to be something new? Did that chapter of American history become an irrelevant point of discussion once Roots aired? Or was it done being told 160 years ago when Northup first wrote his story? I don't think so. What matters is whether or not the story was told well. I think it was for the most part. Sure it was sentimental, but the sentiment was genuine, and I don't think there were any unearned moments. I'm afraid I don't get the reference to The Color Purple. I felt the ending was a bit rushed, and I can see how some might feel it was staged in an especially maudlin way, but it's an accurate ending to this story, and damned if it didn't have me a little teary too.

I don't get the complaint about this being "another beat the black man down slavery movie" either. Surely she's not suggesting that the film endorsed this, so I'm left to wonder if she thought it would have been more powerful if it had elided the most horrific moments of this story, or if she was looking for a story in which the oppressed blacks fight back and win, which is unfortunately unlikely for 1840s America outside of Tarantinoland.

I totally get domino's "meh" reaction, even if I like it quite a bit more than that. I think it's a good and important story that's reasonably well-told. Other than a few really great shots, there's not anything particularly distinguished about the filmmaking, and it probably goes on a bit too long, but I was impressed enough by the performances and the writing to rank it among my favorites so far this year (there have been several of these "very good" films, but no great ones for me yet). It was probably oversold by early festival viewers, having established a reputation that's tough to actually live up to. I don't have any problem with the fact that it's going to dominate the awards season. I certainly admire it more than something like The Artist or The King's Speech. I didn't think much of McQueen's first two films, so I'm certainly pleased with the direction he's moving.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#58 Post by FrauBlucher » Sun Nov 03, 2013 8:27 pm

Jeff wrote:It might have been interesting, but what she's asking for is a different movie than the one McQueen set out to make.
The answer is, yes, she wanted a different film.
Jeff wrote:I don't really think "I wish this had been a completely different movie about Solomon Northup's life after slavery" is a legitimate criticism of the film that was made. Northup didn't write that story, and McQueen didn't try to tell it.

It wasn't a criticism as much as it was what she was hoping going in. She thought for what is was it was good but not her type of film about the black experience. As she said, there were many blacks and successful, that weren't slaves during that period. Northrup being one of them before and after he was enslaved. She wants to hear those stories.
Jeff wrote:I don't get the complaint about this being "another beat the black man down slavery movie" either. Surely she's not suggesting that the film endorsed this, so I'm left to wonder if she thought it would have been more powerful if it had elided the most horrific moments of this story, or if she was looking for a story in which the oppressed blacks fight back and win, which is unfortunately unlikely for 1840s America outside of Tarantinoland.

No she is not at all suggesting the movie endorsed the violence and she wasn't looking for the oppressed to fight back. Trust me. She certainly knows her black history. As I said, she is currently working on a doc about lynchings. She was disappointed. She was hoping for something else, and you can't fault her for that. As I stated she is not into narrative films. Knowing what she knows now, she probably would have turned down my invite to see the film.
btw... I didn't agree with everything she said, but I did feel a little enlightened by her opinions she shared.

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Tyler Michael
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#59 Post by Tyler Michael » Sun Nov 17, 2013 3:02 pm

I'm completely in the middle with this film. I think my main praise would come from the fact that I was very viscerally affected by the film, tearing up consistently and being genuinely disturbed by the events on the screen without feeling I was being led to that feeling unfairly. My main criticisms, however, come from a few sources. One is the weird savior complex moment with Pitt, during which I audibly groaned at that part to the chagrin of my girlfriend. Northup's Spielbergian quips and rants about the proper way to resist oppression also bugged me, but I will have to rewatch the film to see how righteous he continues being after the spiritual scene, which clearly went over my head as the turning point it possibly was - I instead perceived it just as another step of him becoming more aware of his own suffering than really gaining new perspective or humility. My main reservation was in the intensely self-aware way in which the film shows off its own aesthetic. I have read reviews that say this happened regularly, but the time that I distinctly remember was the whipping of Patsey ending in a lingering shot of the soap she went to get. It seemed heavy-handed to essentially say, "...all this for a bar of soap..." Still, I have a hard time parsing an opinion on this one because of how most of my criticisms were just minor annoyances during the film more than things that really took me out of McQueen's vision.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#60 Post by MoonlitKnight » Sat Nov 23, 2013 9:50 pm

I'd love to see Sarah Paulson score a Supporting Actress nod for this. She's been quietly building a fairly impressive filmography over the past few years.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#61 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Nov 24, 2013 11:46 pm

I'm not sure how I feel about this movie- it feels like a powerful work and something that achieves exactly what it set out to achieve, but on reflection I'm not entirely sure of what that is, outside of two hours of an almost unbearable gut punch, an endless morass of human misery in which for the vast majority of the work, no positive action can be taken.

I think if I had to guess at a thesis for it, it would be an examination of how different people on different sides live with a clearly inhuman and insupportable institution. For those upon whom it's visited, we see different strategies of survival, and differing levels of commitment to survival, but it's impossible to explicate their positions in much detail; the emotional world we see is one that has to exist in secrecy and in silence, and thus is mostly visible through hidden glimpses, or though the absence of reactions that should be there. I'm not on board with Dom's criticism about the masters having richer characterization than the slaves- I think the masters have more freedom of action, and a greater spectrum of reaction to the institution of slavery, and one of the implicit tragedies of the movie is how much the different personalities of the slaves can barely exist within the world we're seeing. As such, the difference between Cumberbatch's weak less-bad slavemaster and Fassbender's cracked Simon Legree is of course more visible than the difference between Northrup and the other men around him. Outside of the shipboard debate about the best course of action and the best way to survive, Northrup can't discuss what he feels or what he would like to do, and giving him more detail would require endless flashbacks, all of which would tell us about his life in what is essentially another world from what we're seeing.

There are some interesting flashes about Christianity, and the different meanings of Christianity within the world of slaves and slaveowners- Fassbender, of course, cherrypicks a passage that seems to support him and rests easy on that, and even when in the midst of the belief that God is punishing him, never considers that God might be opposed to the mechanics of owning human beings. Mistress Shaw, on the other hand, sees the God that punishes the powerful and loves the oppressed people of the world, and recalls the Jews in Egypt- a liberation theology that seems to have a relationship with the Christianity preached in the Civil Rights movement, even as the Klan laid claim to Christian-ness of Fassbender's sort. It's a subtle effect, and I think it works because it is subtle- were it more overstated, it would feel out of place in a movie that's more about feeling and lived experience than about theory or philosophy.

Honestly, this movie did make me wish I was watching Django Unchained- the feeling of powerlessness in the face of evil is unbearable, and though I'm not usually a violent person, the movie made me wish the slaveowners were getting shot down any number of times. It's a cry for violent revolution that could never happen. I'm not sure of what to make of that in modern terms, but there is a scene that seems remarkably pointed- when Northrup has a flashback to seeing the slave walk in and taken back out of the store, without having much reaction to it one way or the other, implicitly because it was part of a different world of which he needed have no part. It's not difficult to put oneself in his place there, more than anywhere else in the film- and obviously that feeling of safety and remove is no more accurate now than it was then.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#62 Post by vsski » Fri Dec 13, 2013 2:02 pm

I saw this movie last week after constantly hearing how it is one of the best of the year with superb acting performances and the only supposed downside I had heard going in (I try usually not to read too much about movies I want to see in general) was that it showed relentless brutality that was hard to swallow. I now also read this thread and frankly have to say that Domino expressed my sentiments probably better than I could have done right after seeing it.

For me I came out thinking, what was the point of all that - that slavery was bad a thing and was enacted by different people with varying motives and levels of dehumanization? At least to me that was nothing new and really didn't need a 2 hour movie showing progressively scarred backs of African Americans to make the point.
The biggest problem I had is that I couldn't emotionally connect with Solomon and after the second beating I stopped caring. For me he did come across as an archetype who was noble and tried to retain his dignity no matter what, but he wasn't "human" to me to use the term in this thread. And maybe it was the lack of back story or some flashbacks that would have been needed for me at least to see him as more of a fully fleshed out character. I could understand Epps' character more, because I better understood his emotions and motivations, however disagreeable they were for me. By the middle of the film I stopped caring and when Pitt as the saintly carpenter stepped on the scene I really felt this too convenient a resolution for all that had gone before even if this is what may have happened in reality (I haven't read the source material).

In summary I can say that while I don't think it was a dreadful movie, it didn't tell me anything new, I didn't connect with it and I can't agree that I would put in anywhere near my best of the year list of this year or any year for that matter. And even the performances for me were not that memorable precisely because they didn't allow me to connect with most of the characters, although it would be unfair to single out the actors for that, as I feel this was more the script and direction that kept them in check.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#63 Post by LQ » Mon Dec 23, 2013 9:44 am

Apparently ...yeesh... this is the Italian movie poster for 12 Years a Slave

Image

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#64 Post by willoneill » Mon Dec 23, 2013 11:30 am

To be fair,
SpoilerShow
if it weren't for Brad Pitt's character, it would have been longer than 12 years a slave
I hope it's obvious that I'm kidding.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#65 Post by hearthesilence » Mon Dec 23, 2013 1:07 pm

Hahah - they even gave him a Jesus-like glow. And his name is printed in big letters TWICE. Hilarious.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#66 Post by Zot! » Mon Dec 23, 2013 3:57 pm

It's great. That image should just be inserted on all posters from now on. Especially anything having to do with unpleasant subject matter.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#67 Post by Robin Davies » Tue Dec 24, 2013 6:06 am

Surely that's a poster for a different movie - the gay inter-racial romance Brokeback Plantation.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#68 Post by R0lf » Tue Dec 24, 2013 8:54 am

Robin Davies wrote:Surely that's a poster for a different movie - the gay inter-racial romance Brokeback Plantation.
This is the follow up movie I am most looking forward to this year asides from the A SINGLE MAN prequel THE RAILWAY MAN and the SAVING PRIVATE RYAN sequel SAVING MR BANKS.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#69 Post by Finch » Tue Dec 24, 2013 5:05 pm

Italian posters not approved by studio, reports the Guardian

Shame the film at the centre of this controversy is so unremarkable.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#70 Post by domino harvey » Tue Dec 24, 2013 5:15 pm

I'm just glad to know Brad Pitt is based on a true story

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#71 Post by rohmerin » Sun Jan 26, 2014 4:54 pm

I didn't love it so much as I waited because I was sick or all that "Prestige multi Awarded" perfume, and the idea of the film as THE definitive speech with educational purposes (for Schools, as Schindler was) about slavery; or even it is like a national "shame" atonement for American audience that you must watch (and I am not).
No doubt, Mandingo is a better film.

What about the "new" slavery in Europe? Except the chains and beatings, there's no much difference in the "quality" of life for the "Subsaharians" (I hate this n new word that everyone uses in Spain for not saying black - black has not any pejorative subtext into Spanish language) living as they can in big southern cities like Milano, Madrid or Barcelona today.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#72 Post by TMDaines » Mon Jan 27, 2014 11:25 am

Luke M wrote:I just came back from seeing it this morning. It lives up to the hype. Calling it the greatest movie about American slavery almost seems like an insult (has there even been a good one?!). It's emotionally raw, not at all manipulative like Spielberg or Ron Howard. I feel like it's a new classic, like the feeling I had after leaving There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men. Not just the best movies of their respective years but of the decade.
Agreed. It was one of the most visceral experiences I've had watching film in my entire life. It's hard for films to genuinely shock you and make you flinch in the way certain scenes did in this. I never felt as if my anguish and despair was being merely milked out of me; the reactions I had to the screening were surely the ones I would naturally feel if witnessing similar real events. It's a phenomenal film

For the life of me, I cannot understand the reaction of some to this film. I've read people stating that they weren't moved throughout the film. How on earth can you not be moved by some of the most powerful and violent scenes depicted? I genuinely cannot imagine sitting in the cinema, witnessing this stunning cinematography, spellbinding acting and raw sound, and not being affected. If one has a genuine negative response, or a lack of one whatsoever, then so be it, but there's little more tedious than contrarian criticism and negative hyperbole against films that so clearly deliver something special.
warren oates wrote:Hmm. The audience I saw it with gasped in horror when he started beating Dano, I'm guessing because we collectively knew what was coming next for him, that this was no Tarantino revenge fantasy, that it couldn't possibly end well for Solomon.
Indeed. I would struggle to envision an audience that would take it any other way.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#73 Post by kingofthejungle » Mon Jan 27, 2014 12:18 pm

rohmerin wrote:No doubt, Mandingo is a better film.
You know, after hearing everyone describe the viscerality of 12 Years A Slave, I was surprised to find that (with the exception of one shot) it really wasn't that far outside of Hollywood norms. It's nowhere near as raw, brutal, pointedly political, and flat-out disturbing as Mandingo. Neither is it as complex or cannily perceptive. McQueen's made a decent, sober film, but the memory of Mandingo has a tendency to make other films about slavery seem whitewashed.

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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#74 Post by adavis53 » Mon Jan 27, 2014 1:23 pm

kingofthejungle wrote:
rohmerin wrote:No doubt, Mandingo is a better film.
You know, after hearing everyone describe the viscerality of 12 Years A Slave, I was surprised to find that (with the exception of one shot) it really wasn't that far outside of Hollywood norms. It's nowhere near as raw, brutal, pointedly political, and flat-out disturbing as Mandingo. Neither is it as complex or cannily perceptive. McQueen's made a decent, sober film, but the memory of Mandingo has a tendency to make other films about slavery seem whitewashed.
I totally agree. Perhaps I've just been desensitized to a lot of violence in films but I found the mandigo fighting scene in Django Unchained miles more disturbing or visceral than any of the violence in 12 Years, let alone in the whole of Mandingo. The scene I found most upsetting or provoking (I'm losing my ability to find the right words, my apologies), in McQueen's was the long shot of Solomon as he was hung in the tree, partially because it was also the main sequence in the film that reflected McQueen's talent in Hunger and Shame, while the rest of the film felt much more like any sort of standard fare Hollywood drama.
I think part of my disappointment of this film is its claims to bring the brutality of slavery to a much larger audience than did earlier films like Mandingo, while ultimately backtracking and only making a wide audience (relatively) marginally uncomfortable. But again, it takes a lot to upset my stomach visually these days, so maybe I'm out of touch.

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DarkImbecile
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Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:24 pm
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Re: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

#75 Post by DarkImbecile » Mon Jan 27, 2014 1:40 pm

I don't think of the film's violence as being visually shocking nearly as much as emotionally brutal; a few whippings and hangings are surely not going to elicit a reaction on that front from those accustomed to the last ten years of torture porn, but the emotional savagery on screen, not least the scenes in which
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a woman is casually permanently separated from her children, or Fassbender's character's wife abuses his slave "mistress", or Solomon being forced to flay a fellow slave's skin
are more deeply upsetting to me than the overt violence of watching another college student get carved to pieces.

Even more so, the sheer inhumanity of the situation, and the protagonist's helplessness in the face of the institution, political and economic, of the callous machinery of slavery is the kind of element capable of making audiences more than "marginally uncomfortable" long after the film ends, even if it doesn't turn their stomachs while they sit in the theater.

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