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| Brad Pitt drops by 12 Years a Slave after a barnraising on the Witness set |
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
New Movie, Same Old Skin Game
12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar.
Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.
12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes:
12 Years A Slave is a remake....
You can watch Gordon Parks' 1984 version, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, online for $2.99.
The remake has more whippings, though.
The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.
