12 Years a Slave

I took the time to read a little more about the whole Solomon Northup thing. Right up to the moment when he is freed from slavery, it is a wonderful account of the American South before the Civil War. But why does the film end here? Because what happened later and how much information there is about it would not be as clear. It is no coincidence, after all, that the memoirs helped Northup write and publish it just a year after "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published. None of those involved in his abduction were punished. Northup himself disappears very soon after a brief tour to promote his cause and book. Given the kind of manifesto the film version of 12 Years a Slave was meant to be, it raises more questions, and it's not just about the pious parallel with today. Why all the acting orgies by Fassbender, Paulson, or Pitt? Nyong'o is only acting in the MCU these days anyway, so I'm not really feeling all that good about it. (2019-01-30)

I sort of see parallels with today’s society in this and not an anti-racist fairytale with a happy ending, which they obviously seemed to want. McQueen has disappointed me for the first time, probably because he couldn’t be sufficiently detached from the topic and he forgot to spice it up with something. These torturous 12 years seem fairly relaxed and Platt doesn’t experience proper slavery until he’s with Fassbender, who is cutely eccentric and interprets the Word of the Lord in his own special way. And eventually he alone really deals out punishment. Chiwetel Ejiofor (how the heck do you pronounce that?) acts well, but he honestly doesn’t have that much to do and the nomination for an Oscar is a little bizarre. The concept of time passing was poorly intimated, it’s hard to tell how long he was where and if it wasn’t for the title and the granddaughter, it could have easily been like four years. Lifelessly filmed and if it weren’t for Fassbender, I just don’t know. Nothing exceptional, but it’s watchable. P.S.: Hans Zimmer sometimes shines, but the music is mostly pretty ordinary and the gospel overkill is just awful. I said dance! Come on! Get goin’, Platt! (2014-01-24)

I’m sort of thinking about the US history. It wasn’t very joyous. And then I think about ours. But I’ll return to the US history and I can only say that people were real bastards in the past. I’m not saying that they’re not bastards nowadays, but what happened on the US territory during its colonization is just unparalleled. The land bought by the blood of Native Americans and then subsequently African Americans that the white men have brought in… that’s not exactly something you can brag about nowadays. And a very interesting British director Steve McQueen introduced one such chapter into a story that made me sick throughout the entirety of the movie. I almost didn’t make it till the ending. And I believe I can take a whole deal when it comes to movies now. But I guess I can’t, I haven’t seen a movie this heavy in a long time. Some of the scenes reeked of absolute despair, loss and sadness from each day spent on a cotton field. But the director filmed it really well. I won’t ever get some of the scenes from my mind. And not only because there were insane things happening, but also because the director has purposely filmed them to be lengthy, sometimes even silent. The ending itself is all-telling. And those actors? I don’t need to take a long time to talk about them. They all left such an impression on me. Not only the main African American ones, but also those portraying secondary characters, who had a whole array of famous names. (2014-02-28)

Django turned upside down. An odyssey into the emotional and mental state that results from the loss of dignity and absolute humiliation, quietly conveyed in wide-angle shots of marshy Louisiana with music by Hans Zimmer that is reminiscent of his score for The Thin Red Line (Williams’s strings would have worked better here). The unimaginative but “safe” Hollywood narrative template keeps the film unnecessarily tame and moves it away from the original character we had hoped for from the film’s director, Steve McQueen. He made a huge mistake by casting the likeable Fassbender in the key and most complex role of the sadistic, evil and weak Epps. Even Benedict Cumberbatch would have been a better fit for this paraphrase of the character of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) from Schindler’s List and, with a more believable embodiment of ultimate human evil, the last third of the film escalating in the final flogging could have been the most powerful movie moment of the year. (2014-02-04)

The film is shot decently, with exceptional care, and it can be seen that if not the director himself, then the producer was definitely counting on a festival award - after all, the subject matter is the sort where the creators claim a film award in advance. However, my 4 stars are rather meant as my appreciation of the formal qualities rather than an expression of emotional solidarity with the film. It has a strong story and theme, and yet I watched a film that didn't touch me emotionally in any way, and what's more, it didn't surprise me at all. It has exactly what one would expect, and while Hunger from the workshop of Steve McQueen, which is rated worse on FilmBooster, got under my skin and made me think about the film and come back to it in memories, in the case of 12 Years a Slave, I feel like I just ticked off having seen it. Overall impression: 70%. Sometimes the term film academism appears in film comments - I would say that it fits quite well with this film. (2015-12-25)