Thursday, January 2, 2014

A man does how he pleases with his property.

12 Years A Slave - 7/10
I like Steve McQueen, or at least I say I do. He clearly knows how to point a camera, he clearly knows how to attain a performance, but damn if I can't find the same thing I found missing in 'Hunger' – an emotional connection. And as he does in 'Hunger,' he doesn't judge – he just points a camera and says 'look at it.' It may be that movies have trained me to expect a punctuation point at the end – a line or two, a look, a something that says 'hey, if you missed it, this is what the movie was about.' And in this movie, it's in the title. He spends 12 years as a slave. It's a passage of time as a man is degraded and eventually degrades himself willingly to forgo the being degraded. Small but increasing decreases of your opinion of your moral self. And so he walks out of his ordeal apologetic, because he's been so totally trained to be wrong. And that's great, and I like the idea of it, but for some reason, I don't feel it. I don't know. I walked out of the theater thinking that slavery is bad. Not to be a dick or anything, but I already knew that. I don't know – writing this makes me think I might like it more on a second go. 

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