The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka

Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.

I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.

"In the Room" (2013)

I had never heard of Bentley Little before reading this impressive story, but I see he's had a prolific and accomplished career, with lots of nominations and awards. He's also something of a recluse and prefers to call his work "horror" instead of "suspense" or "supernatural fiction." All these things make me like him more but it started with this story, which must have hit me just right. "In the Room" is not even mentioned as one of Little's stories on Wikipedia, let alone getting its own article. It makes me think some of his other stories might be even better. The strongest feature here feels inspired and profoundly uncanny, but it's just a simple phrase that is repeated with some variations: "In the room, I do my dance." They're the last words his father says to the first-person narrator before he disappears—abandons his family. I would be interested in hearing more about the genesis of this story. It reminds me of an episode of the TV show Six Feet Under where Nate discovers that his father secretly rented a studio apartment where he goes to hang out, smoke dope, and play records—his father's secret place of freedom. In this story lots of people have secrets, or seem to, or at least seem to know secrets exist. "In the Room" starts strange and harrowing. We get the abandonment story first, and then it gets more strange and more harrowing. People go mad. They disappear. They behave in ways that don't make sense. The father leaves when the narrator is 10. When he is in high school a girl invites him to a Sadie Hawkins dance. He says he can't dance but she says she will show him. "In the room, I do my dance," she says, and it works on us nearly as much as on our guy. At the dance, the girl goes mad, and the narrator never sees her again. In college, he gets an English degree and wants to be a writer. His day job is teaching school. One day, shopping for supplies, a woman he does not know tries to get his attention. He ignores her but she finally catches up with him at his car:

"Can I help you?" I asked.
"In the room," she said softly, "you can write your story."

It piles on from there, all thoughtfully layered, until finally we actually arrive at the room. His father is in there, his Sadie Hawkins date, many others. It feels crowded in this dreamscape. Someone suggests, "In the room, you can kill your father." "In the Room" is a remarkably good, remarkably effective horror story and I love it for exactly that. Even the phrase itself now feels haunted. I listen for people saying "in the room." I want to hear it again and know what they mean.

Cemetery Dance #71
Turn Down the Lights, ed. Richard Chizmar

Story not available online.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

USA / UK / France, 104 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Photography: Bruno Delbonnel

Music: Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, Max Casella, Jerry Grayson, Jeanine Serralles, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, Alex Karpovsky, Garrett Hedlund, F. Murray Abraham

Just to get some sense of where I stand here, I did a quick and dirty internet search for lists of "best Coen brothers movies" and then, a little appalled by what I was finding, made my own list (off the cuff, without benefit of systematic review). See below. I know I have been in the minority in not thinking much of this early-'60s Greenwich Village period piece, at least the first time I saw it when it was new, but it turns out there's a fairly wide range of opinion on Coens movies—one list has True Grit last, for example, while another has it at the very top, as the best movie they ever made. Inside Llewyn Davis reliably makes it into the top 10 of these lists, sometimes the top 5, and it was #2 on one list.

After a second look more recently, I agree top 10 of their 18 or so pictures total seems fair enough. My first reaction was a matter of my own biases, which start with a lifelong indifference to midcentury American folk music, particularly the fruit of early-'60s Greenwich Village. Then the way Llewyn Davis uses Bob Dylan was too much for me, and it is still annoying. He shows up off-camera at the very end as approximately the Inevitable Future of Folk Music (iconic voice of a generation not far behind), which struck me more as cheap pandering than ... well, I'm still not sure what the idea of sticking him in there that way is supposed to be. Mostly it feels like playing cynically to Greenwich Village folkie sentimentalists like Pete Seeger.

Yeah Yeah Yeah (2013)

At the moment I am very high on Bob Stanley's massive thunk of a history of pop music. It's one of my favorite kinds of pop music book, telling the curious history of youth music from 1955 on. Nik Cohn did it. Charlie Gillet did it. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll did it. Even I did it, by way of dead rock stars. Scott Miller too! Miller and Stanley cover the greatest amount of sheer metric tonnage of years, taking their histories well into the 21st century. Miller's (and Cohn's) are idiosyncratic and rooted deeply in quirks of taste, whereas Stanley is encyclopedic. And rooted deeply in quirks of taste. Stanley also has a day job as a principal in the (essential) band Saint Etienne, which may help you know where he is coming from. I'm tempted to call Yeah Yeah Yeah the best of the class and the new standard by which all others, etc. For one thing, no book has yielded up so many prizes for me (and so tested the capacities of my streaming service—at least a quarter were too obscure even for its seemingly vast holdings) as I root-hogged down and filled my playlist to capacity for most of a year. Besides Saint Etienne Stanley has also made his way as a music journalist in London, where for years three or four or five papers spent years operating at the level of the Village Voice or Boston Phoenix in the US. He is as opinionated as anyone but somehow more mild-mannered in the expression, which helps reduce friction of any peevish inclination to quarrel with his odder lapses or views. By and large he is impeccable on the history. I learned a lot from reading this, about house and techno and rave culture, and was often impressed by the connections he can make. They were sudden little illuminations about things I've lived with all my life and suddenly saw anew: all of R.E.M. in one song by Them, all of the Ramones in one song by the Bay City Rollers, all of Electric Ladyland in the music of the Impressions. You never agree all the way with anyone, but I was happy to have some of my own eccentricities affirmed: the best album by Todd Rundgren is A Wizard, a True Star, it's impossible to overestimate Joy Division, and Blondie's Parallel Lines is life-changing. Yeah Yeah Yeah was an immersive experience for me, I just read it and I didn't take very good notes. But I think I noticed there was good stuff literally on almost every page, wonderfully thought through and argued delicately, with no doubts whatsoever about his points. Then I spent a year listening to as much of the music he writes about as I could get my hands on—some of it old favorites I knew well, some entirely new to me (e.g., see my February 2020 Top 40). In practical terms, it's a goldmine.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Under the Skin (2013)

UK / USA / Switzerland, 108 minutes

Director: Jonathan Glazer

Writers: Walter Campbell, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Faber, Milo Addica

Photography: Daniel Landin

Music: Mica Levi

Editor: Paul Watts

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Kevin McAlinden, Andrew Gorman, Krystof Hadek, Adam Pearson, Scott Dymond

Under the Skin is one of those allusive shape-shifting science fiction horror movies that are not so easy to get a bead on. I didn't like it the first time I saw it. It seemed too charged with wanky mood and not enough explanation. But then I liked it a lot a second time. It put me in mind some of pictures such as The Man Who Fell to Earth, Liquid Sky, or Alien. These aliens are truly alien. They are on missions we don't understand. In Liquid Sky they are comically tiny and feed on human chemicals released during orgasm or opiate use. In Nicolas Roeg's Man Who Fell to Earth, the alien is solo, but humanized as Thomas Jerome Newton, attempting to save his family and dying planet by trading entertainment technology on Earth to amass the resources. In Under the Skin, "The Female" (Scarlett Johansson) remains inscrutable—perfectly alien. It is credited as "The Female" but that's misleading. It is gender-neutral, genderless. We don't understand its gender. It needs something, apparently from human men, and it wears a human costume, posing as a prostitute, to lure them into its trap and get it.

Director and cowriter Jonathan Glazer came up making music videos for '90s acts such as Massive Attack, Blur, and Radiohead. His first feature, Sexy Beast, is standard caper fare but has an amazing performance by Ben Kingsley, more of an actor's piece as a film. I haven't seen Glazer's second feature, 2004's Birth with Nicole Kidman, which got mixed reviews but seemed to be headed more in the direction of Under the Skin, with uncanny elements freely deployed. Under the Skin is the picture Glazer then worked on getting made for eight or nine years, and in fact he hasn't done a lot since, so in some ways we may need to think of it in terms of the work of a lifetime. But surely that's putting too much weight on it. You probably won't like it much the first time either with expectations set like that.

Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013)

There were already at least four biographies of Norman Mailer when J. Michael Lennon's brick was published in 2013. I'm not sure why it's the one I grabbed but generally by the reviews I seem to have made the right choice. It is detailed and exhaustive, covering every step of Mailer's professional development, from The Naked and the Dead in 1948 to The Castle in the Forest in 2007. Lennon was a friend and colleague of Mailer and his huge family, which probably makes him the "authorized" biographer. He is more kind, or politic, than I would be on some of Mailer's work (notably The Prisoner of Sex and maybe Ancient Evenings). But he also attempts to imbibe the Mailer spirit and let the chips fall where they may on some of the ugliest chapters, such as Mailer stabbing his second wife (a crime that would have sent many to prison) or his judgment vouching for the parole of Jack Abbott. Mostly I appreciated getting the stories more or less straight. I feel confident I could pass a test now on who each of his six wives were, though I'm probably still muddled on which of the nine kids belongs to whom. I'm envious of his support too—his greatest fan, from inside the womb, was his doting mother. It's such an improbable life in many ways. He studied engineering in college but already wanted to be a great American novelist. He tried to get out of being drafted but decided war experience would be good for his literary career—and it was. Mailer and James Jones are generally credited with writing the "great" American novels about World War II—conventional in many ways, but big and sprawling and ambitious. Jones never tinkered much with his impulses to churn out massive pulpy narratives, but Mailer went around the bend a few different ways, eventually arriving, 30 years later, with The Executioner's Song, back at writing very big books—but now with virtually all the pulp extruded. Jones never came close to the place. Lennon's title means all kinds of things—the double portion of vitality Mailer seemed to have, his lifetime of philandering (well detailed here, speaking of delicious pulp—he had sex with Gloria Steinem!), and his theology / cosmology in which he believes every person bears two conflicting persons at war in a single body. Beyond that an intriguing vision that God is not omnipotent and is engaged in a deadly war with Satan. Mailer's case for faith is thus that God needs all the help he can get. On the other hand it does make some intuitive sense and explains a lot about what we can see in the world and church. I think one of Lennon's ambitions is to restore that side of Mailer's work to credibility. It was often ignored, or laughed at and treated as a joke. Lennon's biography is so thorough and answers so many questions about Mailer, he's entitled to advocate for what he likes. If you have any interest in Mailer it's also fun to read.

In case it's not at the library.

The Next Day (2013)

I have long counted David Bowie very high on my list of various original classic rock heroes. His astonishing '70s run was already in place and ongoing when I caught up to him with Hunky Dory a few years past its release, with the song "Changes," and then the first side of that album and then the second side, and so through the '70s. He mattered to me for all the reasons people talk about—he embraced and forced the issue of "being a weirdo," continually morphing into cartoonishly colorful "identities," full of knowing sexual overtones as well as childish innocence, often explained in summary with the assumption, which he played to all the time, that he must be some kind of alien from outer space. The best of Bowie's career is built on providing an outlet for anyone born knowing they are an alien from outer space too. He mattered to me more at some times than others, even in his heyday. After Aladdin Sane, he didn't interest me so much, except for a few singles, for several years, until he was in Berlin with Eno.

But if David Bowie is anything he is uneven, so it's little surprise that's as true about his glory years as his (admittedly arguable) years in the desert. He wrote and performed terrific music. When he put away his underlying alien persona for one more on the order of a refined gentleman of the world, a lot of us checked out. There was some merit, I can still find it, in Let's Dance, as there was merit (or likely) in Tonight, Never Let Me Down, Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, Hours, Heathen, on and on. Some were hailed as comebacks. Some I don't know at all, full disclosure, but I know the majority were variously disappointing and/or underwhelming. In short, I didn't think he had another good album in him, let alone a great one.

Random Access Memories (2013)

Full disclosure: Though it's only their fourth studio album since 1997, Random Access Memories is the first I've listened closely to Daft Punk. In previous encounters, I was left cold by what I heard as robotic and repetitive, a typical problem of one flavor of electronica I'm quick to dismiss (Fatboy Slim is another example). So my first surprise here was how melodic and soft it is, with conventional pop structures, mid tempos, and even room for improvisation—those are virtues to me, though I understand the "easy listening" and/or "soft jazz" charges I've seen leveled against this. It offers a great big glorious wallow in musical sweets. It might be fair to say it's intended for an audience approaching middle age, as long as the band is too. There's a nice sense of history (another sign of age), with Nile Rodgers on board for the big hit, "Get Lucky," which also features Pharrell Williams. That sense of history is perhaps most evident in "Giorgio by Moroder," in which Giorgio Moroder himself narrates the story of his career as a producer, songwriter, and iconic disco figure. It's a nice story, in a few different ways. Moroder, an avatar of that very robotic and repetitive style I was just complaining about, comes across in his oral history more like a winning scrapper in the mold of indie rock bands, driving a van to gigs, sleeping where he can, and scratching it out, when all else fails, by pure belief in himself and what he is doing. Other collaborators stepping in on this album include Julian Casablancas, Chilly Gonzales, Panda Bear, and Paul Williams—an interesting range in the collaborators. Daft Punk makes good use of them too, as they generally appear on the best songs, such as "Lose Yourself to Dance," dominated (in all good ways) by Pharrell Williams. The album ends on the only song with a sample, "Contact," which includes a musical figure from the Sherbs and audio from the Apollo 17 mission describing a strange light in the night sky. Beautiful mood. Random Access Memories is not a challenging album but it is a very charming one—that is, it comes all the way to you, and does its best to please. I think I might have used it up some time ago, as recent sessions have found it more receding into the background while I pay attention to other things. Still, I think it has the potential to be a pleasant if temporary infatuation for anyone, and perhaps for me again too.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Germany / UK / France / Greece / USA / Cyprus, 123 minutes
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writers: Jim Jarmusch, Marion Bessay
Photography: Yorick Le Saux
Music: Jozef van Wissem, Sqürl
Editor: Affonso Goncalves
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin, Slimane Dazi, Jeffrey Wright

The only thing you can call Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire movie, which means it comes with the usual clutch of confusing vampire rules about sunlight, wooden stakes, invitations across thresholds, garlic, reflections in mirrors, and all that. As a project of director and cowriter Jim Jarmusch, however, Only Lovers Left Alive is nearly as much a movie about hipsters, his more typical theme, reimagining them as a secret society of long-lived rationalists who love music and science and poetry to distraction, even as they can't put much time or confidence in actual people. They are the usual bunch of misplaced record store clerks in a Jarmusch picture. Their tastes are refined, precise, even admirably noble, but their pouty arrogance is off-putting. It's the usual problem with hipsters.

I'm probably not making this movie sound very good, but I actually think it's exactly that: very, very good. You have to skip by the various conceits—for one, the main characters are named Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, the alternative Meryl Streep). A friend of theirs with many names (John Hurt) is the actual author of most of Shakespeare's plays. These indulgences mostly work with the given air of romantic hedonism, but in spite of themselves, and just barely. What's best to me here is the touching faith in Enlightenment values, the romantic passion these vampires have for science, clarity, and beauty, which is the result of centuries of perspective. They refer to plants and animals by their Latin genus and species names. They share latest news of scientific research. They can't believe the stupidity of the masses. Only Lovers Left Alive has a wonderful sense for how it would feel to be marginalized and intelligent for centuries, with an incidental appetite for blood that's guaranteed to keep you out of the lamestream.

Before Midnight (2013)

USA / Greece, 109 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Kim Krizan
Photography: Christos Voudouris
Music: Graham Reynolds
Editor: Sandra Adair
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

The third installment of the Before series, which has increasingly become a collaboration by director and cowriter Richard Linklater and its two stars, Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Celine, is probably the weakest. Thirds in sequels usually do poorly as movies, but that's not exactly the problem, partly because this is not a typical series. Before Midnight certainly has some of the strongest scenes of any of them. But the ending is hard to believe, flipping an unlikely switch out of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory it has wandered at deepest levels and into sparkly upbeat, in order, one suspects, to help guarantee another installment (providing everyone makes it another nine years). It's a bit of a fairy tale, in other words, and not in a good way or one that really works with the title. Jesse and Celine are more like pumpkins until midnight, at which point they become a prince and a beautiful love relationship with glass slipper, etc. Maybe—it's also ambiguous, as all the endings are.

I should say I've never liked Before Sunrise that much, which possibly leaves me with just the second, Before Sunset. I had to check it out again this week just to be sure it's as good as I remember. It is. The strength of the later movies is that they look like real relationships. Before Sunset has a good deal of hope and an ingenious way to make it believable, with a relationship renewed before our eyes. In Before Midnight, Jesse and Celine are married, with twin girls, and settled after nine years into a comfortable life—conventional bohemian bourgeois, more or less, on vacation in the summer in Greece. Dig the scenery.

Silence Yourself (2013)

I found out about the latest update on Siouxsie & the Banshees via the rock critic Everett True, who was quite evidently smitten with them (and/or working PR for them) when this came out a few years ago. They've put out another album since, Adore Life, but so far I like this debut better, and I like it quite a bit. Among other things, these four women are perfectly upfront about their art-damaged instincts, starting with dropping the definite article in their name. They are Savages, not the Savages or even thee Savages. You almost feel by osmosis before you know by looking it up in Wikipedia that they are French, at least in part. That part is the singer, Jehnny Beth. How important is she? The rest are Londoners and all song credits go to the band as a whole, so hard to tell. What's easier to make out is the churning, melodic attack, decked out with dramatic production dynamics and a reasonably ferocious rock band piling it on from the rear. It grabs from first listen, and it's no joke. The main appeal for me is the electric charge of the music itself, which is undeniable. I admit I'm not paying much attention to the lyrics and themes, but they're obviously there, with the album title itself and song titles such as "Shut Up," "Hit Me," and "Husbands." It's dark and angry music but it's pulsing with life. The best part for me is the drama. I like how on my favorite song, "Strife" (yes, "Strife"), Gemma Thompson's moody electric guitar is often in charge, tracked by bottoms suddenly dropping and swelling and big artful squeals of feedback. In fact, feedback is one of the things they do best on every song here. Jehnny Beth appears more or less to be the face of Savages, as the lyricist, Frenchman, and chief label honcho, but don't miss how well guitarist Gemma Thompson is working to effect here. She's got a big set of riffs and hooks which are often the centerpieces of these songs. And the rhythm section is solid. It's a team effort generally, as signaled by the songwriting credits, and it's pretty much one of the biggest blasts I've had listening to an album for a while.

Trouble Will Find Me (2013)

Trying to figure out why I'm a little embarrassed to like this album so much. It's not because I'm late to the party—I'm always late to the party. Trouble Will Find Me is the sixth album by the National in some 12 years, following up the commercial breakthrough of 2010's High Violet with another big hit. Learning about something with the rest of the masses is not it either. Sometimes you just have to use those masses for your cues, and I have no problem with that. No, it's something more about the grain of the music itself, which is insinuatingly moody and often beautiful, but also has a certain softness that makes it feel just a little weak-kneed. But I'm a little weak-kneed myself in the presence of these lilting, lovely songs. I love that the origins of the band are in Cincinnati, Ohio, and that it's the label 4AD enjoying the bonanza of betting on them. Matt Berninger's deep croaking vocal loses power at certain ranges, which coupled with the lyrical strategy of banging away on evocative phrases ("you should know me better than that," "I stay down with my demons," "I'm not alone," "I need my girl," so on so forth), produces a certain equivalent to the movie aesthetic derisively labeled mumblecore. It's usually framed as a generational problem—mumblecore is for millennials and late Gen X-ers and real adults have no patience with it. So the National fits that way. But it's not a fair knock—mumbling has significant  sources reaching back to Marlon Brando and James Dean, not to mention R.E.M. It represents an ideal of the soulful incoherent, who communicates primarily emotion, primarily by gesture. That's not exactly what the National is doing—the production values have a good deal of clarity and precision, they are articulate, and 4AD makes a nice home for the kind of high swooning oblivion bliss-out exercises that are also touched here. But somehow the combination of effects undercuts one another just a little for me. I often feel a yearning to connect with it, even as it plays, and even as fragments of it reach me and nag at me when I'm distracted with other things. But on another level it somehow remains elusive to full attention. The surface of this music promises great depths, or implies them, and I'm starting to think they might not be there after all. But certainly it remains a lovely surface.

Gravity (2013)

UK / USA, 91 minutes
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Writers: Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron, George Clooney
Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Music: Steven Price
Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Mark Sanger
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

I see that my single favorite shot of 2013, which sent me back to see Gravity one more time while it was still in the theaters (and in 3D both times), is a well-known quantity at this point. At least, it serves as the climactic point of the looping scenelet on the DVD main menu. I'm talking, of course, about the final seconds of the 17-minute take that opens the picture, when astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) goes hurtling untethered into black space. It's when you realize that the carefully managed long take, with its slippery revolving camera, has totally communicated how vast, deep, cold, and alien it is in outer space.

I'm glad I indulged that second trip, because I must say Gravity loses a lot of mojo in the living room. It's faithful to the basic disaster movie template and with a great big tremendous finish. But it's just a little more puny like. In this movie, the two principals, Stone and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), have urgent things to do and critical places to go. A cascading disaster has killed the three others on their space mission, damaged their vessel, and cut off all communication with Earth. They continually encounter obstacles and then overcome them—it's a little bit like The Martian that way. Gravity benefits from its brevity, at just over an hour and a half, because its structure is so thuddingly repetitive. It doesn't mean you won't get caught up in it, but 90 minutes is probably about the right limit. What it lacks in originality that way, however, it makes up for with its fresh approach to outer space.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

USA / UK, 134 minutes
Director: Steve McQueen
Writers: John Ridley, Solomon Northup
Photography: Sean Bobbitt
Music: Hans Zimmer
Editor: Joe Walker
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Garrett Dillahunt, Paul Giamatti, Scoot McNairy, Lupita Nyong'o, Adepero Oduye, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, Michael Kenneth Williams, Alfre Woodard, Chris Chalk, Taran Killam, Bill Camp, Deneen Tyler

It's probably worth asking why so few honest movies about American slavery have been made, but the answer is pretty easy. White people in the United States still control most such decisions and they don't like being reminded of their heritage of slavery, arguing (dancing madly) that it's in the past and more or less best forgotten (because what's to be gained by remembering?), and besides, they (those alive now) didn't have anything to do with it. In the South, they like to call it their "peculiar institution," and to this day many believe that life for slaves was soft and easy, with all expenses paid—like living on welfare. It took a black British director with the name of a Hollywood icon to make an important step toward changing this, if it's possible to change this.

As a white person, I have been duly reluctant to look at 12 Years a Slave, approaching it both times I've seen it with sinking dread. To some degree that's based on qualms about director Steve McQueen, whose well-respected Hunger left me so cold I never bothered with Shame. Mostly, of course, the resistance is about the subject matter (see title). Based on Solomon Northup's slave narrative memoir written in the 19th century, it tells the story of a talented and accomplished Northern black free man who is tricked and abducted in Washington, D.C.—yes, that Washington, D.C., the seat of all liberty—and sold into slavery in Louisiana, where he experiences all we've heard about and some that perhaps we haven't. Though scrupulously accurate and with little tendency to sensationalize for cheap effect, it is harsh, explicit, and unrelenting.