'12 Years a Slave' and the Best Actor race. Movie houses are now so packed with presumptive Academy Award contenders that in a few weeks, when we’re facing Thor 2: Thor Harder and The Hunger Games: Jennifer Lawrence Is Still Contractually Bound To Do This, we may look back on October with nostalgic pining. Gravity is making serious money — summer money — and will likely become the highest-grossing live-action Best Picture nominee since Inception. Captain Phillips is securing its spot in the race with exactly the right combination of influential reviews, appreciative adult audiences, and sorting-the-truth-from-the-filthy-lies backlash (which has become such a ritualized part of the prestige-film gauntlet that nobody really cares).
And as All Is Lost gradually goes wider, people are turning out in … well, not in droves. In modest human clumps of a size that indicates the movie will need strong word of mouth to survive in a crowded field. (Potential ticket buyer overheard, verbatim: “That thing about the old man in the boat? The cultural crater of '12 Years a Slave'
It is a grim sight, the man hanging from a tree. His neck is noosed. His arms are tied behind him. The toes of two booted feet tap, tap, tap in the mud, neither foot firmly on the earth. Each skates a bit. I’ve never seen a sequence that so elegantly uses duration to lay out an ecosystem of power and powerlessness, one that ripples across time, from the 1840s to the 21st century. 12 Years a Slave manages to do that again and again. The hanging man is Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a violinist, carpenter, husband, and father, whose 1853 memoir gives the movie its source material. The entire film presents savagery in civil terms. Ford takes Solomon, too (the violin seems to impress him), and after Solomon beats a dim, bullying overseer (Paul Dano) and the overseer attempts to hang him, Ford cuts him down and ships him off to another, less benevolent owner named Epps (Michael Fassbender).
The object of Epps’s lust is a petite field worker named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). A Conversation with Nichelle Nichols. A Defiant Dance of Power, Not Sex: Beyoncé, the Super Bowl and Durga. The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972. Is 'Django Unchained' Postracial? Movie still of Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington (IMDB) (The Root) -- As all of the Django Unchained reviews hit the Internet, I'm sure plenty of African Americans will list why they hate Quentin Tarantino's new film about a slave's journey for revenge -- but not me. A friend and I recently attended a screening for the film, which opens on Christmas Day, followed by an awkward question-and-answer session with the director. We were two of perhaps 10 black people in the theater -- that's what makes what happened next so awkward. In the film, Django (Jamie Foxx) is purchased by Dr.
King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter, and the two pair up to collect the bodies and ransoms of outlaws across the South. Because Django is such a natural, Schultz asks him to work with him through the winter in exchange for his help finding the former slave's wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who was sold to a different plantation. In the end -- spoiler alert! HOME. Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story.