Blogging and 12 Years A Slave

I can’t believe I stopped writing there for a while. Blogging is a really good therapy. Relieves you of all the things you want to say but can’t say because of SO MANY REASONS. Like this movie review I am about to write. Discussed it with a friend and all I got was “Chalo fit hai :P”. I guess it does feel WAY BETTER to write a public blog about it and get the feeling that someone out there reading it understands what I am saying. Like a silver lining of hope against a dark cloud of i-don’t-know-what.

Right. TO THE MOVIE REVIEW!

*/*****

Yeah that’s my rating for it. I know it won Best Picture in Academy Awards and what not, which only makes me wonder: Do people seriously not understand what a piece of art is?

One word: FAKE.

This movie is so damn fake. Every single thing about it is so unoriginal and ineffective. The elements of the movie aren’t in sync. Acting, characters, music, scenes, nothing.

From the very beginning, things don’t fit. The actors are ONLY acting. They have not let their characters wash over them and they haven’t been fully embedded in their roles. It is very obvious that they just learnt their lines and are trying their level best to fit into their character; only that they are trying too hard. 

You don’t get the feeling like they are living their roles. They are just playing them.

The storyline does not give you the feeling of reality. There are parts where you are supposed to feel sad or disappointed to sympathetic towards the characters but you just can’t because you can’t relate to them. The writers or actors didn’t really try that hard to make sure that audience FEELS emotions. They just order the audience: “Now is your time to feel sad” and they expect us to feel sad. They haven’t tried to build up the emotions to let it finally overcome the audience at one point.

Like the scene where Patty asks Solomon to kill her. It does not evoke feelings of sympathy because the audience has never been made to believe that Patty was living a terrible life. Light wasn’t shed on her feelings or experiences. It’s highly unrealistic that a slave would ask to be killed just because her mistress threw a glass jar at her or her master fancies her. There might have been more terrible things happening in her life, but we don’t know anything about them because we weren’t told so. Here, the directors just expected the audience to feel sad for Patty because she asked for death – not because we actually knew how terrible her life was. Or when Patty was crying about how her mistress doesn’t even give her soap to clean up with. SHE DOESN”T EVEN LOOK DIRTY TO BEGIN WITH! You want to give the audience a wild random reason for Epps to beat Patty up, fine, but at least make her look the part! At least make her look filthy and haggard. She looks like a hand-maid rather than a field worker.

There also was something VERY unrealistic about the setting. Slaves weren’t, how should I put it, “Slave-y” enough. Anyone who has read and seen Gone With the Wind will know what I am talking about. Every time you see a slave in this movie, you know they are educated, groomed humans who are playing this character (very poorly too). Like how the field working slaves aren’t ragged enough. Actors aren’t convincing. It’s like before a scene, they were asked to look miserable and that’s all they did. They did not FEEL miserable, they only (poorly) PORTRAYED being miserable. Like the scene where two slaves are getting hung. Look closely and you’ll see that all they look is “miserable”. For God’s sake man, your life is about to end. There are other things you would feel apart from being miserable. Where is panic, helplessness, rebellion, crying, and devastation or even silent resignation?

And what’s up with the music? Somehow somewhere along the road, Steve McQueen learnt that old slave chants give misery a power. So he decided to put it EVERYWHERE. He over worked the magic of old slave-music and turned it into something monotonous, over-used and misplaced. This is what I call racial stereo-typing: take an old black woman make her sing wise old songs. 

Also, in the scene where Solomon has been hung and is clinging onto his life by the tips of his toes: the background music is relatively modern techno which COMPLETELY remove all possible vibes of it being an old tale.

And don’t even get me started on how the slave woman gives Solomon a sip of water to drink as an act of kindness while he is hanging. Man’s larynx just got crushed yes that’s exactly what he needs – water. For surely, hanging provokes great thirst in men.

I don’t think I can ever stop criticizing this movie because every single scene is so flawed. So I’ll just jump to the ending – The scene where Solomon meets his family again. It made me cry tears of blood. The complete lack of feeling in the family re-union is enough to make one gouge their eyes out and swear to never witness another family re-union portrayed by Steve McQueen. Need I even mention how the old face make-up on Solomon’s wife was so realistic? *sarcast-o-meter is going to explode* Because in that part of the country, old women have smooth unwrinkled young shoulders and a straight back but wrinkled faces and white hair.

It’s just like what another critic wrote about the movie – it is aimed to shock the audience with a few supposedly terrible scenes and nothing else.

So basically, the fact that 12 years a Slave won Best Picture, proves that you can seriously hinder audience's capability to judge what is art and what is not, by whipping a black woman.