Post by pim on Jan 23, 2014 11:58:58 GMT 10
Managed to get a couple of tickets for a preview of the movie so went to see it with my lady friend. I don't deny it's a good movie. I've read the critics and the reviews and I agree the movie is a very powerful one. My one criticism of the casting is that imho Benedict Cumberbatch's talents were wasted in the movie but that's a quibble. The main character, the character of the abducted free black man Solomon Northrup who was abducted and sold into slavery was brilliantly portrayed by the actor I'd never heard of before - and I have to look up his very exotic-looking name - Chiwetel Ejiofor.
But we ended up walking out of the movie. Something I think I've only ever done once before in my life long ago when I walked out of some French movie that I thought was so appallingly bad that I felt I couldn't spend another minute of my life watching it. But this was no bad movie, so why walk out? In a word, it was just too bleak. Yes I agree that the movie raises issues that you could spend the rest of your life talking about and maybe one day I'll watch the rest of it on DVD. By walking out I missed the Brad Pitt part completely and only got as far as the end of the Benedict Cumberbatch part. I won't say anything about the plot because I don't want to give anything away for those people who intend to see it.
It was at the end of the Cumberbatch part that my partner told me she couldn't watch any more because it was too upsetting. I knew what she meant and left with her. If I'd been on my own I probably would have stayed. It wasn't the violence so much, even though the violence is portrayed brutally and graphically and I'm a bit squeamish when it comes to sitting in an audience watching horrors portrayed on the screen in front of me. I admit it! I avert my eyes or close them and if I'm at home watching a violent movie I'll mute it when the gory bits start. We all have our ways of coping. But it was more than the violence, confronting as that was. It was the bleakness of the lives of these miserable wretches. You knew that the Solomon Northrup character was going to have to endure 12 whole years of the shit that was being dished out to him. The narrative in the movie begins in 1841 so you knew that at the end of his 12 years as a slave chattel, a piece of livestock in which even his name was taken away and he was given a slave name, his life would change for the better but, in 1853, his fellow slaves would still have a further 10 years of slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and another 2 years after that before it could be put into effect in the South.
It was too bleak, so we left.
As a postscript, reflect that this year 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1 which imho is the true end of the 19th century and the true beginning of the 20th century. In 1914 the end of the American Civil War which ended chattel slavery in the US was only 49 years previously. The past isn't that long ago.
But we ended up walking out of the movie. Something I think I've only ever done once before in my life long ago when I walked out of some French movie that I thought was so appallingly bad that I felt I couldn't spend another minute of my life watching it. But this was no bad movie, so why walk out? In a word, it was just too bleak. Yes I agree that the movie raises issues that you could spend the rest of your life talking about and maybe one day I'll watch the rest of it on DVD. By walking out I missed the Brad Pitt part completely and only got as far as the end of the Benedict Cumberbatch part. I won't say anything about the plot because I don't want to give anything away for those people who intend to see it.
It was at the end of the Cumberbatch part that my partner told me she couldn't watch any more because it was too upsetting. I knew what she meant and left with her. If I'd been on my own I probably would have stayed. It wasn't the violence so much, even though the violence is portrayed brutally and graphically and I'm a bit squeamish when it comes to sitting in an audience watching horrors portrayed on the screen in front of me. I admit it! I avert my eyes or close them and if I'm at home watching a violent movie I'll mute it when the gory bits start. We all have our ways of coping. But it was more than the violence, confronting as that was. It was the bleakness of the lives of these miserable wretches. You knew that the Solomon Northrup character was going to have to endure 12 whole years of the shit that was being dished out to him. The narrative in the movie begins in 1841 so you knew that at the end of his 12 years as a slave chattel, a piece of livestock in which even his name was taken away and he was given a slave name, his life would change for the better but, in 1853, his fellow slaves would still have a further 10 years of slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and another 2 years after that before it could be put into effect in the South.
It was too bleak, so we left.
As a postscript, reflect that this year 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1 which imho is the true end of the 19th century and the true beginning of the 20th century. In 1914 the end of the American Civil War which ended chattel slavery in the US was only 49 years previously. The past isn't that long ago.