Got to see an advance preview of 12 Years A Slave. PLEASE SEE THIS MOVIE
While I doubt ANY movie can do the horrors of slavery in the antebellum American South true justice, this movie comes the closest to it that I've ever seen. DON'T bring your children. While it's not gratuitously violent or graphic it IS true to the period so you won't be spared. But it will put into clearer perspective what the Civil War was really all about - from my admittedly biased perspective anyway.
There WILL be Oscar noms all around beginning with Chiwetel Ejiofor who stars as Solomon Northrup a free Black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. He makes his character's heartbreak and anguish viscerally clear with assistance from John Ridley's unflinching screenplay and director Steve McQueen's steely, don't-you-dare-look-away direction. McQueen's nom is practically a lock and I would put money on Ridley getting best adapted screenplay. Supporting actor nods will surely go to the gloriously beautiful and expressive Lupita Nyong'o as Solomon's fellow slave Patsy and to Michael Fassbender - in a fiendish tour de force - as the plantation owner who beats her and worse.
This is epic stuff folks that takes you beyond the superlatives - because really can there ever be enough expressions of outrage to level at the foul institution? - and shows you in heartbreakingly human terms the wreckage slavery made of the lives of those in bondage and the craven megalomania and outright murder it inspired in those who perpetrated the enslavement. Go see this movie to take a look at how our country began - and DON'T look away. I DARE you.
There WILL be Oscar noms all around beginning with Chiwetel Ejiofor who stars as Solomon Northrup a free Black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. He makes his character's heartbreak and anguish viscerally clear with assistance from John Ridley's unflinching screenplay and director Steve McQueen's steely, don't-you-dare-look-away direction. McQueen's nom is practically a lock and I would put money on Ridley getting best adapted screenplay. Supporting actor nods will surely go to the gloriously beautiful and expressive Lupita Nyong'o as Solomon's fellow slave Patsy and to Michael Fassbender - in a fiendish tour de force - as the plantation owner who beats her and worse.
This is epic stuff folks that takes you beyond the superlatives - because really can there ever be enough expressions of outrage to level at the foul institution? - and shows you in heartbreakingly human terms the wreckage slavery made of the lives of those in bondage and the craven megalomania and outright murder it inspired in those who perpetrated the enslavement. Go see this movie to take a look at how our country began - and DON'T look away. I DARE you.