12 Years a Slave - How Long Until the Reckoning?

It’s the curse of almost any American movie about race relations to instantly become a political football. I usually ignore the outrage, because in general, these are message movies exploiting furor to distract from dearth of artistry—but 12 Years a Slave is a startling exception.

For one thing, it isn’t a message movie. Well, it kind of is, but it’s not the expected message. This movie isn’t about skin-color, or even prejudice—it’s about slavery. And it’s really about slavery. Easily earning its R-rating, much of the film’s length is spent portraying brutal violence—psychological, physical, and sexual, all this amidst the poverty and privation, hopelessness, nakedness, and cruelty that was the slavery of the American south. It’s graphic, but (except in, perhaps, a few instances) never gratuitously so, never sensationalist, never Tarantino. Indeed, my overall impression was one of restraint, with many long shots, silent but for the sounds of crickets.

And it’s a true story.

Life is Beautiful - Movie Review

The last three movies I've watched have curiously prepared me for this one, which I finished Monday. To End All Wars was a WWII film, taking place in a camp of sufferers. The Scarlet and the Black was about a resistance movement in Nazi Rome. Kind Hearts and Coronets was a film from the 1940's.

Life is Beautiful takes elements from all of these and improves on them, being a WWII tale set in Italy with a 1940's style of filming. Mark Twain once said "the personages in a tale [should] be alive, except in the case of corpses, and...the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others." In Life is Beautiful, unlike To End All Wars, a vast amount of time is spent in ensuring the life of the characters, before even a shadow of death darkens the horizon.

The Scarlet and the Black strove both for an amusing main character and menacing villains, but both efforts failed. Life is Beautiful excels in both directions, always evoking the correct response.