Steve McQueen's 12 YEARS A SLAVE, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/12-years-a-slave-glory-without-redemption?page=1#blogPostHeaderPanel

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/11/12/244851884/12-years-a-slave-is-this-years-best-film-about-music

Ann Powers on the use of music in the film

One concern during production had been whether they were measuring the passage of the years in the right way. “We didn’t want to put up captions saying ‘Year 3,’ ‘Year 4,’ or whatever, because then the audience might count down in their heads,” says Walker. So, they decided to add one very unique shot: “Chiwetel under a tree, just looking around — off to the distance, and at one point at the camera.” The scene wasn’t in the script; the filmmakers hoped that the close-up would poetically represent the journey of twelve years on Solomon’s face. And so, after the shoot had effectively wrapped, an extremely streamlined crew — McQueen, Walker, Bobbitt, and his camera assistants — met Ejiofor in a parking lot right outside the cutting room. “All we needed was a tree,” Walker says. “It was a Saturday, a day before the cameras were to be sent back. No craft services, no sound. We all arrived in cars on a day off. We did the shot, right there in the parking lot. And the hairs on the backs of our necks all went up. Then we got back in our cars, and went to dinner.”

http://www.vulture.com/m/2013/11/behind-the-scenes-of-12-years-a-slave.html

i also don't see melodrama as a bad object, and i'm not sure why you would. i also wish you would define your idea of "melodrama" since there are as many definitions of that term (most of them ahistorical) as their are critics. you seem to use the word in a wholly negative sense, which surprises me.

amateurist could you say more about this? like i am dimly aware that melodrama is sometimes a slur, but apparently there is a taxonomy of melodramas? or differences of opinion about what it means?

The Taxnomy of Melodramas! Sounds like a good Northrop Frye title.

i remember a defn like "in drama characters influence events, in melodrama it is the other way around", which seemed too glib?

oh man let me think about this for the weekend, ok?

Saw it, thought it was OK, but a bit of a missed opportunity. I wish it was an hour longer, so that it showed the passage and weight of time a bit more. I also wish it seemed a little less of a cavalcade of familiar white faces getting to overact at length; I would have prefered to see more interactions and relationships between the mostly nameless slaves, who surely spoke as much offscreen as we get to watch Fassbinder froth on screen. And deus ex Pitt ... distracting, at the least. It's sort of a shame he shows up and then bam, more or less the next scene Solomon gets freed. As I told my wife afterward, I find it a little insulting that this movie, set over the course of 12 years, runs 50 minutes shorter than the mostly worthless "Django Unchained."

Odie and Steve take it on: http://bigmediavandal.blogspot.com/2013/11/black-man-talk-12-years-slave.html

― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Tuesday, November 12, 2013 12:38 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

this is a great read. i agree mostly with boone... i keep thinking about this movie... i dont any coherent thoughts on it, its an impressive and visceral movie but it left me cold outside of some exceptional moments. i wihs mcqueen was as interested in the things i'm interested in i guess. i do think Hunger is still his best thing. also said this in another thread but i wish cranston played epps

boring oscar-bait pabulum imo,but better than the execrable,unintentionally hilarious shame. Seems like,the deeply flawed,hunger was a case of beginner's luck.

Oscar bait is such a strange descriptor for this, aside from the score.

it's certainly not doing anything from a formal standpoint that would disrupt the average american filmmgoer's investment in the narrative. it's a tearjerker and it's meant to be engrossing. that doesn't mean it's not an intelligent, thoughtful, or well-crafted film though, but it is definitely the kind of movie people call "oscar bait"

"oscar bait" remains one of the least useful terms you can use to describe a movie, probably worse than "boring"

it just means "hollywood drama"

there were two movies I saw in recent months that were labeled "Oscar-bait". One was "The Butler", the other was this.

This was much, much better than the former.

"the butler" seemed pretty cynically sentimental. "pcs" is what they should call those kinds of movies instead of "oscar bait"

Well it's not avant garde or anything but narratively it is the opposite of oscar bait IMO. Hollywood Dramas rely on comfortable narrative tropes such as the power of the individual to overcome through the triumph of the human spirit etc, which this film decidedly doesn't.

Xposts

i'm not sure about that. he is reuinited with his family in the end. they don't show the part where he (apparently, according to the best guesses of some historians) was kidnapped again and either murdered or sold back into slavery.

the movie definitely explores brutality with a frankness that (i assume) the butler does not, but still, that's not so beyond the pale for "oscar bait." i agree the term is stupid like all dismissive cliches are stupid, and i like this movie a great deal, but i don't think steve mcqueen made the movie thinking that the oscar committee would never go for something so violent and bleak.

actually, how is this film not about the triumph of the human spirit? he endures unspeakable horrors but in the end he is still the same person. he is true to his word to not indulge "melancholia" and in the last scene he is fragile and shaken but still essentially the same person he was in the beginning, down to his manners, consideration for others, etc.

Oscar bait saves me saying ponderous drama about a BIG subject,with lots of strings on the soundtrack,some harrowing scenes, and a bittersweet ending.

He survives by subsuming his personality and becoming a person that has to go along with the cruelty, and only gets reunited by his family through a Bradus Ex Machina.

That goes back to a problem I had, that Chiwetel Ejiofor, as good as he is at what is he doing, is mostly made to be silent and act with his eyes and demeanor, which is something, but buried a bit behind the frilly flash of frothing Fassbinder et al. It's hard to concentrate entirely on said worthy face - at least it was for me - when almost every single white role was played by a slightly distracting more familiar face, right down to the dude from Madmen or SNL (why them in roles that could have been played but anyone?) or the drunk from Deadwood. The most "Oscar bait" aspect of this movie is Chiwetel Ejiofor, yet ironically he may be the least Oscar-bait thing about this.

The ending ... I'm not sure what to make of it. By any stretch it's a happy ending, in that he is reunited with his intact family. It feels bittersweet because of what came before it; this isn't really a triumph, pe se, almost strictly endurance and sacrifice. I do wish the movie did wait us make a little longer before Pitt Ex Machina (the sympathetic relief-valve white face spouting "we're all not like that" dialog that some stronger defenders of this film for some reason claim the movie lacks).

i dug that pitt's character was the rarely-seen Magical Honky archetype

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/why-i-wouldnt-see-em-12-years-a-slave-em-with-a-white-person/281883/

This is miles better than what the demurrers claim, but I do feel sections of it are either weirdly detached -- from Northup -- and reliant on maximum graphic violence as the only path to the truth. Also disliked Hans Zimmer's perpetual tuneup dirge.

OR reliant on...

You are really covering your bases thoroughly when you cast Paul Dano as the only white man Northup physically attacks.

So Morbs, were you as disappointed by the amount of froth time allowed Fass et al. at the expense of seeing more of Solomon and the slaves in their "off" time? I also wish there was more, or more to, Cumberbatch, who was sort of a fascinating character, clearly conflicted yet corrupted to the soul all the same, which gives him a complexity the other white characters (Dano, stacked-deck drunk/rapist/racist Fass, Giamatti) lack. And I really was distracted by the parade of familiar faces in supporting roles, often to really no or no real necessity. And did you think it should have been longer?

I definitely agree that the Alfre Woodard scene is among the film's most powerful, if anyone said that.
― midnight outdoor nude frolic up north goes south (Eric H.), Wednesday, November 13, 2013 7:01 AM (2 weeks ago)

As Jerry Lewis says, "Very good, one in a row."

JiC, I like long movies if they're good enough, so yes.

For a serious historical film, from Fox Searchlight, I think "familiar faces" are an inevitability, and since Dano (and on limited exposure, maybe Cumberbatch) is the only one who irritates me, no I wasn't distracted. (In the case of Alfre Woodard, one of the great and underutilized American screen actors of the last 30 years, esp not.)

right down to the dude from Madmen or SNL

Well, you know why those wouldn't be familiar to me.

As for abolitionist Pitt, well, there were such people and they did talk like that; I haven't read the memoir yet, but I presume the guy existed.

the guy existed and his speech is apparently almost verbatim, though some argue (quite reasonably) that his dialogue was conjured by the co-writer of the memoir to beef up the abolitionist cause. Dano obv hatable but his rendition of that song was one of the best moments in the movie so I'm cool with it.

The scene where Northup is hanging and everyone else goes about their day, including children just playing around in the background, says a lot about the downtime and the attitude necessary to survive. It was a succinct sequence that spoke volumes. Cumberbatch character not *really* conflicted imo, just an example of a "nice" slaveowner that's still, ya know, a slaveowner, as nicely put by Northup's argument with the crying lady.

Indeed. The hanging sequence happens, when all's said and done, on Cumberbatch's watch.

yeah i didnt need more of the cumberdude, though he was very good in the role (giamatti gave my fav perf of the evil whites)

Yeah, the slave showroom was undoubtedly the most vicious of the Gone with the Wind as directed by Jacopetti & Prosperi sequences.

I played a slave purchaser in an auction scene we did in high school. Yes, we were all white. #70s #suburbs

In 1852, itinerant Canadian carpenter Samuel Bass came to do some work for Epps. Hearing Bass express his abolitionist views, Northup eventually decided to confide his secret to him—the first person he told of his true name and origins as a free man since he was first enslaved. Bass wrote several letters to Northup's friends with general details of his location at Bayou Boeuf in hopes of gaining his rescue.

It's truly an amazing story. I'm most amazed that to the best of my knowledge I never had to read it in school.

Cumberbatch really did play the character as conflicted, which is partly what made him so insidious (and yeah, why he earned his own behind the scenes takedown from the other slave). I thought a lot of the most interesting contradictions took place in this sequence. You see the slave master guy "rescue" Solomon, saving him from getting lynched, but then quickly see that there is no bravery or honor to it at all. It's simply a matter of protecting an investment, and he makes no effort to untie him from the tree. Later, Cumberbatch casts Solomon loose with no sentimentality, just divesting. A lot of this is relatively subtle, which is partly why I did not like the very not subtle Fassbender, true to his character though he may be.

I didn't get to see it, but as recently as 5 or 10 years ago, there was a nearly all-white school performance of The Wiz.

I saw a nearly all white performance of The Wiz last year at a local Catholic school!

I'm still figuring out why this didn't move me.

Oh, i was only moved -- as opposed to horrified or made anxious -- by the graveyard sing. And then Ejiofor was directed to overact in closeup.

Can't remember or not if that's the moment when he accepts his position among them, rather than thinking he was a uniquely wronged individual.

I think so.

As to why to film may or may not have moved, I think I chalk it up to failure - or, ironically, success - of direction, depending on your perspective. McQueen works hard to keep things unsentimental, but sometimes to the point of being clinical. He casts relatively unfamiliar faces in the roles of slaves, which makes them more "real" (less actors playing dress up), but then surrounds them with more familiar faces playing dress up. Which is important, probably, to give the film an anchor, commercially speaking. There are a number of probably better artistic decisions McQueen could have made that might have made the movie better, or stronger, but in the end maybe worse, because nobody would want/get to see it.

I presume the Gordon Parks-Avery Brooks PBS version will recirculate soon.

Screening in New Orleans at an arts centre this week iirc

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BcJQgKYCYAAlQN-.jpg:large

if putting pitt (the worst actor in the film fwiw) on the poster makes people go and see it, im all for it.

weird things i thought about this film - chiwetel is good, but not THAT good. i would rather have seen michael k williams in that role (*SPOILER* so gutting that he doesnt last the length of the movie). its not that i didnt think CE was good, i loved a lot of the closeups, when its all about his face - i think i got teary watching him get teary during one closeup - but his accent was a bit shaky, and i think hes too mannered, or idk, too british? lol. anyway, i ended up thinking fassbender stole the show, which i didnt really want to think for a film that should be all about solomon. in fact id say CE is the weakest actor here, except for brad pitt (who is distractingly terrible). not read the rest of the thread so its probably already been said, but i loved hunger, thought shame was good though prone to unintentional hilarity in its poe-facedness, and this is basically a mcqueen movie, but hollywood-ised, which are two poles that never quite come together for me. hes not a conventional narrative guy and i think he was compromised between doing what he usually does/did and what hes trying to do for a big prestige period piece (those stagey scenes where solomon talks to other slaves and the film goes into manic exposition mode are borderline ridiculous). id rather he just made a smaller film like hunger personally - hes not cut out for this kind of film. that said, i love that hes taking the arthouse to the multiplexes and doing it with such an unflinching story.

the weirdest thing about the whole film actually is that i kept thinking the slavemasters were more interesting characters than solomon. they were all rather sympathetic and complex and multilayered in a way im not sure CE was, which obv has a lot to do with his character being reduced to slavery, but even then, i think CE was just surrounded by too many great(er) actors. if i think about some of the stuff ive seen him in since the wire, michael k williams would have killed in that role. while im happy mcqueen pulled through another british actor, i think it was the wrong choice.

in spite of all that, i dont think ive been more overcome at a movie ending than i was with this one though. i cant think of a better earned 'happy ending' (though it isnt exactly as you imagine the horror of having to adjust to normal life again, and how broken he must be now) in recent cinema.

when you write that the film doesn't really want to touch the issue of the "pleasure of giving pleasure" to one's abusers...

this is interesting because i think the film did such a good job of making the slavemasters NOT cartoonish villains that it almost went the opposite way

going to stop posting about this now