12 Years a Slave

So the list of nominees have come out for the Oscars. Since I have till March, I thought I'd finally get to some currently nominated movies, hopefully as many as I can get to and make my picks for at least Best Picture and maybe a couple others.

And for some ungodly reason, I decided to start this series (I use the word series lightly, you've seen my Batman "series" lately) out with 12 Years a Slave.

Now unfortunately, I think I came into this movie with a bad attitude.

Hopefully you grew up in school learning about slavery and you saw movies about it. Well I feel like I saw A LOT of those movies. I wish I could say all of the movies I watched growing up about slavery and I think I just got numb to it. A black slave being whipped, while I still think its horrible, isn't really something new for me to see in a movie. I know a lot about how slavery was in the South prior to the Civil War.

Well... I was wrong.

12 Years a Slave is the horrifyingly true story about Solomon Northup, a black man living in New York in 1841. He's free. He has the papers and everything, he isn't a slave... until he's kidnapped and sold into slavery. And the movie spans over 12 years where he's in slavery.

This movie is not going to be easy to watch if you decide to.

Like I said, I consider myself a little bit numb to this history lesson and I had moments where I just sat there with my mouth open just saying "....shit". Again, its a hard movie to watch.

But I think the great part about this movie is so many things that are not blatantly explained but instead alluded to. I think the people making this movie knew that the plot would lend itself to the blunt horrors and not everything was that obvious.

That being said, there are a lot of things that are very, VERY blunt and really uncomfortable to watch.

There's a part where the plantation owners wife is angry, she grabs a heavy glass bottom of whiskey and just throws it square in the face of one of their slaves.

The movie really gives tangibility to the mindset in the South, that plantation owners believed that these people were their property. Its just an insane mindset that is hard to grasp.

There's so many elements of this movie, the subtleties, the scenes that are just horrifying, the interaction between characters are just phenomenal. Its interesting watching it now knowing that this movie is nominated because you begin looking for signs that would merit that nomination. And I think the actors themselves knew this was an award winning script and overall film.

And that really brings me into the characters themselves. They're just fantastic.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup. And this movie is just about him and he owns it. He absolutely owns it. You can see the pain, you can see the very same thoughts that you're having watching these things happen in his eyes. At first he tries to fight this wrongful enslavement but you can tell eventually, it just overtakes him. He just succumbs to it and his performance evolves just beautifully.

There's a lot of big name actors in this movie. Benedict Cumberbatch is in this movie and you can tell he's not entirely comfortable with the idea of slavery but its the circumstances he finds himself in that force him to buy into it. They even explain in the movie, he's not as bad as other slaver owners... and then they just analyze that statement. Cumberbatch gives a great performance despite only being in the movie for a short time.

Oh... and Paul Giamatti is a douchebag in this... but he's sooooo good at it. He's the guy that sells blacks as though they are livestock and he's just an asshole. He also has a really small part but again, its potent.

Its funny because the last thing I saw Giamatti in was Saving Mr. Banks where he was this friendly 50s life loving limo driver and its just an incredible change in character to this piece of shit guy selling people. Props to Giamatti.

I think the best performance (save Ejiofor) was definitely Michael Fassbender.

Yes, Giamatti was a total piece of shit in this movie but he was barely in the movie. Michael Fassbender is known in this movie to "break niggers" and break them hard.

He just has this incredibly ignorant and close minded view of slaves that you just sit there and wonder how a piece of shit like this could ever have existed but he does it in such a way that you realize, this guy existed, and not only that but there were a lot of assholes like this guy.

I think this is probably one of Fassbender's best performances to date and its comparable to that of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. In fact, there are a lot of similarities.

I heard one person call this movie, the Schindler's List of American slavery, and that's not far off.

The last notable actor in this movie is Brad Pitt. He has a very small part and really only has two scenes. I can't say he did a phenomenal job but you can tell this movie was a big deal if you have Brad Pitt saying, I don't care what part you give me, I want a part in this movie.

Probably the only thing I noticed about the movie is that it wasn't always clear how much time was passing as the movie went along. Obviously the title explains that 12 years are suppose to be happening but if I didn't know that, I maybe would have thought it was a span of a year, maybe two?

Luckily that doesn't take away from how real the movie gets. It touches on a lot of aspects of slavery in America and its not always as clear cut as, white people were cruel to black slaves. It touches on the harsh slave owners, and the "nicer" ones. It touches on slave and master relations and how uncomfortable that can get. There's the consequences of runaway slaves. I don't know how accurate the movie is to the actual story but it is a brilliant and accurate description of slave culture and it hits hard.

There's a lot I can say about this movie but I think I'll leave it with this in that its going to be hard to compete with this movie. I haven't seen many of the Best Supporting Actor nominees but I have my vote for Michael Fassbender already because he gave such a solid performance and as much as I hated his character, I recognize it was a brilliant job well done.

So that's my review of 12 Years a Slave. Its a gritty, very uncomfortable, movie giving you a Schindler's List feeling in your stomach... but its incredibly good.

Have you seen 12 Years a Slave? What did you think? Comment and discuss below.

I don't feel I described this movie well enough but its worth checking out. I may come back and edit this but for not I'll leave it like this. No video this time, doesn't feel appropriate.