12 YEARS A SLAVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now opening at a theater near me today, that is, exclusively in Raleigh at the Rialto Theater:




12 YEARS A SLAVE

(Dir. Steve McQueen, 2013)

12 YEARS A SLAVE, the third full length feature by 44-year old British filmmaker Steve McQueen, is going to be the movie that everybody feels that they absolutely have to see this season. But don’t go mistaking it for just another piece of big issue Oscar bait, for it’s a powerfully personal story driven by an exemplary performance that movie-goers will benefit greatly from experiencing.

The British born Chiwetel Ejiofor has shown he’s got the actorly goods before in numerous movie and television roles, but here he works his worry lines like never before as Solomon Northup, a New York native who was born free but kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.

The film, based on the real life Northup’s 1853 autobiography of the same name, focuses without shuddering on Northup, renamed Platt by his abductors, as he tries to survive unspeakable conditions for over a decade on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

Ejiofor’s Northup would get beaten, brutally lashed, if he protests that he’s not a slave so he resigns himself to the misery of the hand he’s been dealt, and, despite the movie posters showing him on the run, largely doesn’t try to escape (on an errand he take off through the woods at one point but runs into some evil white men hanging slaves and thinks the better of it).

McQueen (wish he’d use a middle initial or something so people would stop asking me if he’s *THE* Steve McQueen) populates his film with recognizable actor folk like Paul Giamatti as a cold slave trader, Benedict Cumberbatch as a slave owning preacher, Paul Dano as a particularly abusive foreman, and Michael Fassbender as the worst of the worst slave drivers who constantly refers to Northup and his people only as his “property.”

All the white people aren’t evil however as Cumberbatch appears to have some compassion, and Brad Pitt (one of the film’s co-producers) shows up as a wizened Canadian carpenter and abolitionist, who just may be able to help Northup out.

Aided by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, who shot the director’s previous films, McQueen makes use of long takes and lingers on some shots in a effectively stirring manner that makes us feel what our poor protagonist is going through intensely. One scene, in which Dano strings up and attempts to lynch Northup, has our suffering lead left dangling with only the tips of his toes touching the ground as the other slaves continue their daily activities quietly behind him.

These harsh incidents are indeed hard to watch, but to fully appreciate the severity of what went down they are a vital necessity. Elements such as Adepero Oduye as one of Ejiofor’s fellow slaves crying uncontrollably over being separated from her children from one scene to the next are as harrowing and haunting as cinema can possibly achieve. Fassbender, who previously starred in McQueen’s SHAME, embodies a creature of pure cruelty so convincingly that you can feel the audience’s hatred of him in full force. There won’t be much sympathy for Sarah Paulson as his wife either, for she’s a wretched piece of wrong-minded menace as well.

Folks may compare it last year’s DJANGO UNCHAINED, but while they may share similar subject matter and may equal each other in the heavy abundance of the use of the “N-word,” Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist revenge fantasy was a cartoon compared to McQueen’s heartfelt and heartbreaking work here with its blindingly faithful to reality rawness.



12 YEARS A SLAVE is McQueen’s best film and one of the best of the year by far. It demands to be seen and felt by everybody who is unafraid to see and feel how somebody can endure such Hellish torture, and survive to tell their tale. It can seem like ancient history, especially as we now have a black President, but here we are reminded that it really wasn't that long ago that there were these horrible conditions in our country, and the repercussions of these injustices are still largely felt to this day. As Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”



It seems these days, the only way to even begin to get past such horrors is to fully acknowledge them. The unflinchingly honest 12 YEARS A SLAVE is here to make it even harder to look the other way.



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New Releases On Blu Ray & DVD: 4/16/13

Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western revenge romp DJANGO UNCHAINED, starring Jamie Fox, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio, heads the pack of new releases this week with a Two-Disc Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) edition, or a single disc DVD version, if you don’t have a Blu ray player. 



Special Features: A smattering of featurettes: “Reimagining the Spaghetti Western: The Horses & Stunts of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “Remembering J. Michael Riva: The Production Design of DJANGO UNCHAINED,” “The Costume Designs of Sharen Davis,” “20 Years in the Making: The Tarantino XX Blu-ray™ Collection,” and “DJANGO UNCHAINED Soundtrack Spot.”

Tarantino’s specialty label Rolling Thunder Pictures takes advantage of the home video release date of DJANGO with a Triple Feature Presentation of Ho Meng-Hua’s THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (a.k.a. GOLIATHAN, 1977), Arthur Mark’s DETROIT 9000 (1973), and Jack Hill’s SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975). Each film is presented with scratchy prints, and there is no bonus material, but if you’re a fan of grimy grind-house cinema, it’s a neat DVD-only single disc deal. 



Having seen all three films (SWITCHBLADE SISTERS screened in Raleigh as part of the ongoing Cinema Overdrive series at the Colony Theater in 2010), I can say that there is a fair amount of schlocky fun to be had, but I have more than a feeling that Tarantino is so much more amused by this sleazy stuff than I am. 

The cool retro release of the week has to be the Criterion Collection’s Blu ray Special Edition of Alec Cox’s REPO MAN. The 1984 cult favorite, which I wrote about seeing on the big screen in 2009 (Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of REPO MAN, 3/19/09), has been given a Cox-approved new high-definition digital restoration, commentary featuring Cox and other cast, interviews with Cox, Richardson, and Zamora and more cast, deleted scenes, the complete “cleaned-up” television version of the film (!) prepared by Cox, trailers, and a booklet featuring an essay by critic Sam McPheeters. Nice! Oddly, the DVD edition is a 2-disc set while the Blu ray is a single disc. Usually it's the other way around.

This being an ever lamer Blu ray and DVD release date than last week, there’s not much to report on. Two movies I haven’t seen, the French CGI-animated feature, Bibo Bergeron’s A MONSTER IN PARIS, that got good critical notices but little attention, hits both formats, and Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s 2011 martial arts thriller DRAGON gets a Blu ray release, but beyond that I’d be hard pressed to point out anything very interesting. Check out Amazon’s list of today’s releases and tell me I’m wrong.

More later…

Holiday Season Cinema Roundup 2012 Part 1

This hasn’t been the strongest holiday movie season I’ve experienced (how could it be without the Coen brothers or George Clooney?), but it’s a pretty strong one with a few entertaining epics, a couple of decent comedies, and one big overwrought musical competing for movie-goers attention.



So let’s take a look at what’s currently playing as the year is ending:

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 

(Dir. David O. Russell)

Although it must be stressed that this is ultimately a best-case scenario rom com, this tale of a bio-polar Bradley Cooper getting together with Jennifer Lawrence as a neurotic widower has a punchy screenplay that’s energetically (and very loudly) delivered by the leads, including Robert De Niro, in one of his most invested performance in years, as Cooper’s Philadelphia Eagles superfan father. Chris Tucker, who keeps popping up after repeatedly escaping from Cooper’s former mental institution, adds to the film’s already plentiful laughs. Director and screenwriter Russell's last film, 2010's THE FIGHTER, was a winner as well, so here's hoping he's on a roll.

HITCHCOCK 

(Dir. Sacha Gervasi)   



Sacha Gervasi’s (2008's rock doc ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL) second film as director boasts a stellar cast - Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collett, and Danny Huston – but a not so stellar story. The conceit that every good idea that went into the making of the classic 1960 thriller PSYCHO came not from the Master of Suspense, but from his wife Alma falls flat in the midst of these fine actors being put through T.V. movie-ish motions. Read my full review here.



THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (Dir. Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson takes us on another sweeping slog through Middle Earth in this prequel set 60 years before THE LORD OF THE RINGS series. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim on the mockumentary sitcom The Office [UK], stars as Bilbo Baggins who reluctantly finds himself on a quest with an unruly band of dwarves to overtake what looks like the Paramount mountain. I saw it in HFR (Higher Frame Rate) 3D, but, although it looked exquisitely sharp, it wasn’t as immersive an experience as I’d heard. Probably would’ve been just as well off with the 2D version.



There are some amazing heavily CGI-ed sequences, including battles and chases inside an elaborate underground city that comes off like THE TEMPLE OF DOOM times 100, but you can really feel its length (169 min.), and the idea that this is just part one of another trilogy seems to come more from greed than pure inspiration. 



But that's too cynical of me. This is really for the legions of Tolkien fans who can’t get enough of this stuff and will love spending more time with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, and getting cameos from Frodo (Elijah Wood), and Ian Holms as the older incarnation of Bilbo who presents the story as a flashback. What I enjoyed most was Bilbo's cave encounter with the slimy creature Gollum (once again beautifully played by motion-capture specialist Andy Serkis), which is nicely faithful to the original Tolkien text.

 DJANGO UNCHAINED 

(Dir. Quentin Tarantino)




Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western is also a long-ass film (165 min!) that could’ve been served by better editing (sadly his long-time editor Sally Menke died in 2010), but it’s still a hugely entertaining epic that tackles revenge, slavery, and possibly contains the most excessive use of the “N-word” in cinematic history. 



Jamie Fox stars as a slave who gets freed by a former dentist played by Christoph Waltz who offers Fox a new job as a bounty hunter. Together, they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the plantation of the brutal yet charming Leonardo DiCaprio. The film drags a bit in DiCaprio’s company, which includes Samuel L. Jackson as his cruel conniving house slave, but when its “on” it's a blast. Read my full review here.

Coming soon: Part 2 of Film Babble Blog's Holiday Season 2012 Roundup.



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Tarantino's Overlong DJANGO Is Off The Chain

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

DJANGO UNCHAINED (Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012)

Three years after his revisionist World War II epic INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, Quentin Tarantino is back with this blaxploitation Western, which tackles slavery, revenge, and how many times the “N-word” can be said in a 2 hour and 45 minute movie.

Almost as if he’s atoning for playing an evil Nazi in BASTERDS, Christoph Waltz portrays an abolitionist-minded bounty hunter who frees a slave named Django (Jamie Fox) from his sinister masters (James Remar and James Russo) in the deep south of 1859. 

Waltz recruits Fox to join him in his bounty hunting (“Kill white people and get paid for it? What's not to like?”), and they set off to rescue Fox’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Leonardo DiCaprio as a brutal yet charming Mississippi plantation owner.

Tarantino takes his sweet time getting to DiCaprio’s plantation, as Fox and Waltz make their way across the terrain, beautifully shot by cinematographer Robert Richardson. At times the film comes off like a collection of comedy sketches loosely strung together. One scene, in which a Colonel Sanders-looking Don Johnson as another villainous plantation owner named Big Daddy argues with his men about the badly cut slits in their proto Klan hoods, feels like it could’ve been an outtake from BLAZING SADDLES.

Dinner at DiCaprio’s, with his house slave (an intensely invested Samuel L. Jackson), is also leisurely paced. Fox and Waltz, under the guise of slave traders, are trying to pull the wool over DiCaprio’s eyes and liberate Washington, but Jackson sniffs them out. This is one of those slow burning sequences that can only end in bloodshed, but Tarantino drags it out too much, which calls attention to how slim the narrative is.

The Spaghetti Westerns and ‘70s grindhouse movies that Tarantino is forever paying homage to didn’t have very layered storylines either, so that’s not too terrible an issue, but it’s sometimes tedious how he cares more about hanging out with his characters than putting them into challenging scenarios.

From the retro Columbia studios logo to the RZA’s “Ode To Django” that plays during the end credits, DJANGO UNCHAINED feels like a Tarantino movie through and through. It’s a profanity-laced dialogue-driven violent action comedy with well chosen cameos (look for Jonah Hill, The Dukes of Hazzard’s Tom Wopat, Tarantino (you knew he'd show up, right?) and the original Django himself, Franco Nero), set to a hip soundtrack (a mix of Ennio Morricone, hip hop, and even a little Johnny Cash), that could only come from the twisted mind of the 49 year old former video store clerk.

Fox puts in a solidly stoic performance as the title character, interacting superbly with Waltz, both obviously having a blast with Tarantino’s way with words. DiCaprio, sporting a devilish goatee, also appears to be having fun, but he’s not given a very interesting character. DiCaprio doesn’t come off as despicable as he’s supposed to be. It’s Jackson who takes that honor.

And, of course, it's a boy's club, so don't expect much from the women present - Washington, at least, makes her presence known.

DJANGO may be more for Tarantino fanatics than casual movie-goers, so if you don’t have much tolerance for the man’s particular brand of abrasive cinema, you won’t be won over. Fanboys will be picking it apart and poring over the inevitable much longer director’s cut (a four hour version may be released to theaters depending on the box office of this one) for years, but I doubt many of them will think its Tarantino’s best film.

So anyway, it's pretty a pretty ballsy move for the Weinstein Co. to release this movie, maybe containing the most excessive use of the N-word in cinematic history, on Christmas Day. It's a move that proves that, these days, a Tarantino movie, however crude the content, is a tent-pole event.

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