12 Years A Slave Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Chiwetel Ejiofor Movie HD

[Steve Williams]

This film apparently brings Academy Award buzz

By Esther Zuckerman | The Atlantic Wire

The first trailer for 12 Years a Slave, a film that a lot of people expect to be a contender during awards season, has been released. Directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch, the movie, due out December 27, is the true story of Solomon Northup, a black man born free but then kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery. It's based on a book that Northup published in 1853, which you have already read if you are keeping up with Richard Lawson's summer reading list for fall movies.
RELATED: Sarah Palin's Holiday Nightmare Will Be a Christmas Classic
12 Years a Slave is definitely different territory for McQueen, who most recently directed Fassbender in his schlong-showing turn in sex addict drama Shame. But the trailer suggests McQueen has taken to the intriguing historical drama genre. Ejiofor has always been underrated (just compare this trailer to his performance in Kinky Boots for a glimpse at his range), Fassbender looks snarlingly evil, and Brad Pitt, who shows up as a Canadian abolitionist, has yet another strange hairdo. Cumberbatch doesn't make an appearance in this trailer, but he has a habit of giving fantastic performances.

We're mostly intrigued by what this means for the Oscar race, especially in the Best Actor category. In the entire history of the category, there have only been 16 black nominees and only four winners (Sidney Poitier, Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington, and Forrest Whitaker). Back in May, coming out of Cannes, Kyle Buchanan at Vulture pointed out that there were already at least three black contenders for the category (all of whom in films released by the Weinstein Company): Michael B. Jordan in Fruitvale Station, Forest Whitaker in The Butler, and Idris Elba in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Though Buchanan considered 12 Years a Slave (which is being distributed by Fox Searchlight) a "wild card," Ejiofor could end up extending that list to four, which could make for a particularly diverse year at the Oscars.

 

[jazdoc]

Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of my favorite actors. I thought he was brilliant in "Dirty Pretty Things", "Children of Men" and "Inside Man". I really didn't like "Kinky Boots" which is one of his better known roles. I'm very interested in the Mandela movie with Idris Elba who is best known for his role as Stringer Bell in "The Wire"

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

My first reaction was "Steve McQueen is dead." Evidently there's another.

tim

 

[Steve Williams]

'12 Years a Slave' Stuns Telluride: Do We Have an Oscar Front-Runner?

By Chris Willman | The Wrap

The Telluride Film Festival is about nothing if not discouraging a sense of competition. But anyone at the fest representing the films that were riding a wave of Oscar hopes coming out of Cannes had to feel a bit unnerved by the world premiere of Steve McQueen's slave drama "12 Years a Slave," which rode into town Friday night and single-handedly sucked up all the awards talk in the room.
Suddenly, Chiwetel Ejiofor, a name not exactly on everyone's lips, became the front-runner for Best Actor, at least as far as the immediate post-premiere tweet brigade was concerned.

Passholders had the sated feeling they might now have seen four best actor contenders in the first day and a half of the festival – with Ejiofor joining a Telluride field already crowded with Bruce Dern in "Nebraska," Oscar Isaac in "Inside Lleweyn Davis" and Robert Redford in "All is Lost."
Ejiofor was hardly alone as an award likely at the Galaxy Theatre premiere. Lupita Nyong'o is even less of a household name, but she jumped to the front of the Best Supporting Actress list for playing the hardest-suffering slave in McQueen's brutal film — bypassing a long list of contenders despite noting, in the Q&A that followed the screening, that she was plucked out of Yale to have this as her very first feature credit.

Also on the dais was Michael Fassbender, whose supporting-actor nomination is a no-brainer, given how he takes a role that has no more than one dimension — as the purely evil slaveholder who makes Ejiofor's and Nyong'o's lives a living hell — and still manages to be riveting every moment he's on screen.
That left only one of the cast members who came to Telluride, Brad Pitt, not being touted in social media and among Oscar bloggers as award-worthy, since his role as just about the only virtuous white man in the movie is brief and straightforward.

But Pitt (right, with Ejiofor) probably doesn't mind being thus overshadowed, since he's the picture's executive producer.
"I've seen this film countless times now, and I find it a little bit difficult to speak directly afterwards," Pitt told the crowd after the screening. "I think it might be more productive if we all just had a group walk around the block or something."
That speaks to one possible hurdle "12 Years a Slave" might face on its way to winning Best Picture: It's so chock full of beatings and whippings in its 133-minute running time, that some Oscar voters may hit pause on their DVDs to go take a walk and never come back. But as far as further captive audiences for the captivity drama go, more standing ovations are likely in order.

The actors themselves said they'd had some difficulty accepting or going through with the parts. Said a muted Fassbender after the screening, "It's the first time I've seen the movie, and I'm a little taken aback."

When McQueen contended that Ejiofor had at first turned down the role, his leading man corrected him: "I needed a moment's pause — which Steve took as a no," he said. "I was aware of what it would mean and what it would take."
As for Nyong'o, the then-Yale student who sent in an audition tape, McQueen said, "It was like searching for Scarlett O'Hara, it really was. Over a thousand girls auditioned for the part … It was looking for that kind of magic, that kind of beauty and grace—it's very cliché, but when it happens on screen, a star is born."
McQueen talked about the unlikely path he and screenwriter John Ridley took toward adapting the historical memoir of the same name. "I wanted to make a film about slavery, (but) I needed an in for the story, and I thought the idea of a free man who was kidnapped into slavery was my in, somehow," he said.
After Ridley had toiled on a script with unsatisfying results, "My wife said to me, 'Well, why don't you look at a real account of slavery?' Duh."
McQueen's wife found the source material, "and I could not believe I had not read this book before, and the vast majority of people I asked had no idea of the book. It basically was a script. My eyes popped out of my head. I couldn't believe it: This was the film we wanted to make."
And for Telluride attendees who relish enjoying the world's first look at a front-runner, as they have previously with the likes of "Argo" and "Slumdog Millionaire," "12 Years a Slave" was the film they wanted to see.

 

[Steve Williams]

Review: '12 Years A Slave' Is Among The Year's Best Films

Scott Mendelson Forbes

The Box Office:

First and foremost, Fox Searchlight is only on the hook for about $20 million in production costs plus the usual marketing and distribution expenses. So unless 12 Years A Slave bombs worse than Jonathan Demme‘s underrated 1998 horror tale Beloved (which, despite starring Oprah Winfrey, grossed $22m on a $80m budget), the studio should see a return of their investment. Frankly, its (deserved) status as the Oscar front-runner should be enough to keep it in the public eye as it opens on October 18th in limited release and expands over the rest of the year.


It’s tough to imagine a film this relentlessly grim being anything approaching a blockbuster, but stranger things have happened. But strong reviews and unending awards-season victories should keep it in theaters for the next few months on constant rotation. Like a number of would-be “prestige pictures” dropping over the next few months, the victory is that Steve McQueen got the film made with relatively little artistic compromise and that it will play to a wide audience.

If it wins a bunch of Oscars, great. If it ends up actually making real money (basically anything over $50 million), all the better. If Chiwetel Ejiofor becomes a household name and/or gets cast as Lex Luthor in Man Of Steel 2, all the best. But the real battle has already been won because I’m writing this review. 12 Years A Slave is one of the best films of the year, and the real victory is that now we all get to see it.

The Review:

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave could have merely satisfied itself with being an unblinking look at the horrors of the American slave trade and that would have been arguably enough to achieve greatness and artistic value. The film, adapted by John Ridley from the personal memoirs of Solomon Northup, could have merely set out to be a defining American film about slavery and that would have arguably been enough. But the picture has something more morally complicated on its mind.

It’s story is openly despairing and unthinkably tragic, but more than that it is a mediation on the moral excuses that societies and cultures make for themselves to justify obvious acts of evil. The film is a relatively straight-forward telling of the many years that Solomon Northup spent in unlawful bondage after he was kidnapped from New York and sold into bondage in Georgia in 1841. Mr. Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in what should finally be a star-making performance, is the star of his own story, and once again we have a mainstream studio release that doesn’t pander by having black characters basically play supporting roles in their own fables.

The picture is unflinchingly brutal, both physically and emotionally, and there are frankly times in the first third where it flirts with being misery porn. But right when we’re wallowing in sheer brutality, McQueen gives us something interesting to chew on beyond just empathetic horror. There is real weight to the early debates among the captured prisoners about whether to risk death in order to escape versus survival at all dehumanizing costs. And there is painful nuance to how the various slaves find a certain relative morality in a plainly immoral situation.

The first slaveholder we meet, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a walking contradiction that personifies the times and I’d argue to the film’s deeper layers. He is seemingly kind and decent man who nonetheless owns slaves and thinks little of separating a mother from her screaming children (“It couldn’t be helped.”) for the sake of maintaining his own financial security. Northrup grows to like him, determining that he is a decent man “under the circumstances”. It’s no secret that racism was basically invented as a way for Christians to justify owning human beings while still holding themselves up as dutiful worshipers.


In every society where evil occurs on a cultural level, there are those seemingly good people who find a way to justify participation or indirect enrichment and still keep their alleged moral high ground. We see slave owners who are seemingly kind and those (such as Michael Fassbender and Sarah Paulson) who are cartoonishly cruel. We see a slave that used the system to their advantage, such as Alfre Woodard as a slave-turned-mistress-turned wife of her would-be owner, now enjoying the luxuries of an upper-class existence. We see another, Patsy (Lupita Nyong’o), condemned to unending hell for having caught the mater’s eye. Even a character who shows up towards the end to preach abolitionism is merely content to roll his eyes at the practice, rather than pursuing its end. The film examines not just the obvious sin of forced bondage but also the varying ways in which people, slaves and masters alike, thrived or suffered under the institution.

It is worth noting yet again that Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech in 1968 asked if America was going to hell because of its role in the Vietnam war and for its social and economic inequities. It’s this examination of moral relativism that makes 12 Years A Slave more than just a slideshow of slavery’s inherent cruelty. In hindsight we decry the decade-long captivity of Mr. Northrup yet make excuses to justify, for example, the various (and mostly innocent) detainees that spent years locked up thanks to the post-9/11 judicial black hole. We correctly turn our nose at those who sat by or profited during the slave trade, yet will our great-grandchildren cast a similar judgment on us for the damage wrought via our occupation of Iraq under false pretenses?

12 Years A Slave is a shattering work of genuine art, a nuanced and thoughtful look at an unquestionable and unforgivable crime. It is openly devastating and often almost unbearably sad. Taken at face value, it is a splendidly acted and potently written character drama, one of the best films of the year without question. The film is more than just a superbly made and incredibly important historical document. McQueen and Ridley use the horrors of the slave trade to force us to acknowledge the generational evils that we ignored or turned a blind eye to. It’s not just important or profound, but downright subversive in its judgment.