Oh my. You're funny.

My my my my.

Also, the score was like Inception 2.0. Felt weird in some scenes.

I thought Hans Zimmer was doing a John Williams impersonation to match McQueen's Spielberg impersonation.

Steve McQueen is not impersonating Steven Spielberg. Ha.

I'm baffled by the backlash for this film.

Is that some sort of horribly tasteless pun?

Yes, obviously that's what Renton meant, it's not just your own attempt to use the "horribly tasteless pun" yourself.

12 Years a Slave. Good film. Great beginning and great ending, but the middle passage is a bit problematic.

Some people just see what they wanna see, I guess.

And I just meant that I've come across a lot of people who were ready to write this film off before they even watched it, calling it "just another slavery movie", or who refuse to watch it for that same reason, as if the subject of slavery has been exhausted and filmmakers should no longer deal with it. I'm not really speaking specifically of the reactions in this thread.

Having seen it a second time, I recognize that it's not a perfect film, but Steve McQueen's work here makes this a profoundly visceral experience. He gives the subject of slavery the treatment it needs, which is unlike many other films about the same subject. It's a film worth watching, whether one ends up loving it or not, at least in my opinion.

Overrated movies often see backlash greater than outright bad films. I don't see any F's in the thread. And it happens to every movie, big or small. The people who were already in on 12YAS, on the first few pages, highly enjoyed it. Then the people who watched it just to see what all the hullabaloo was about don't enjoy quite as much. The same thing happened to Avatar.

I wasn't specifically talking about reactions within this thread. I made that clear in my previous post. And overrated according to who? Overrated is a matter of opinion that undermines everyone else who rated it highly. You can't really say that 12 Years a Slave is widely considered to be an overrated movie. The difference with Avatar is that a lot of people were blinded by the cinematic experience and special effects, and many of them later realized that it doesn't really hold up on repeat viewings. (And for the record, I wouldn't call Avatar overrated. It was hailed as a crowdpleaser more than a cinematic masterpiece. The critics' praise was more for the film on a technical level rather than the film as a whole.) I hardly think it's comparable to 12 Years a Slave.

Thing is, outside of a few moments, 12 Years a Slave hardly brings anything truly original to the screen, in the sense that there is a lot we have seen before. It is a well crafted movie, but nothing special. And I do wonder if the subject matter being so serious and being handled in a very serious fashion played into praise for this film. I think if any film should be championed as overrated, this one meets the cut for the year. But then perhaps not everyone is as well acquainted with the brutality of the Antebellum South as someone who spent years studying it. As a cinematic piece of art, this film just frankly depends too much on the historical ignorance of its audience as if we were not even aware slavery existed before this film brought it to our attention. This irks me a little in what is otherwise a solid if unspectacular movie.

Once again if this film would have put us more into the feeling of a world where time seems to dredge on everyday, and his story drags on beyond memory of when and where it began, it would have been far more successful. But I think a lot of the meat behind the emotional punch of this flick depends on the revelation of what occurred back then. This would have been far more powerful if released prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and certainly as literature from the time period it was written in, but as far as Steve McQueen's take on the autobiography: I am not fully emotionally sold, but he makes a good pitch.

I disagree with this. This is an ambitious, big-budget, widescreen epic dealing directly with the slave trade in the American South and the day-to-day lives of slaves on plantations. I am not sure this describes any other film. One could perhaps bring up Amistad and Django Unchained, but both films wrestle with the subject in ways either safer (the former's focus on white lawyers and politicians played by comforting A-list stars) or wilder and more postmodern (Quentin Tarantino and slave empowerment by way of the iconography of Sergio Leone). The brutal austerity of 12 Years a Slave coupled with its earnest fascination with its subject coupled with its air of a major prestige picture represents a unique blend, whether it bowled you over with emotion or not. This is a big production which points its camera at slaves enacting a funeral ritual ("Roll, Jordan, Roll") and just lets the moment play for a few minutes, and there is a rarity to this.

I guess they were not big wide-released production, but in middle school I just remember seeing tons of these docudramas in class. This just didn't capture me in a cinematic way and it just felt like a slightly better version of one the various educational videos I saw during my youth. I wanted the film to focus more on Solomon on a person instead of a vessel to teach us about slavery, which I already know about. This is why I found the most moving scene to be the letter scene, because it was a moment about Solomon as a person, not just a generic slave.

I get why this film was made, and if it wins Best Picture, so be it, more films about slavery need to be made, but this just came across as super generic to me, nothing special, but I respect it.

Exactly.



If you were interviewing Lupita Nyong'o, would you think it appropriate to ask her opinion of the backlash?

The problem with 12YAS is it has one of the worst screenplays of the year... the talent otherwise involved in the project probably would've been good enough otherwise... it's just the high school play dialog cripples the film, along with the other script problems plot/character-wise.

I thought the theatricality of the dialogue fit perfectly with McQueen's directing style, and it was definitely not high school drama quality. I didn't think there were any major script problems at all. It's not the best screenplay of the year, but far, very far, from the worst.

I enjoyed the flow and quality of the dialogue, too. And, for the record, a great deal of thought went into it, drawing inspiration from the literature of the day and also from the style and vocabulary of the King James Bible.

whoa whoa whoa. How dare y'all argue with shack. He's KJ's most valuable reviewer.

I thought that was David?