Tag: Steve McQueen

12 Years a Slave

“12 Years a Slave” is the heaviest, hardest film to watch of the year, but it’s much more than a grim history lesson.

A black woman in tatters is sitting in a cart crying uncontrollably as she pulls up to a luxurious Southern plantation home. A wealthy white woman comes to greet her new “property” and asks her husband why this one is in tears. She’s been separated from her children in the slave trade; it couldn’t be helped, he explains. “Poor woman,” the new master opines, “Your children will soon be forgotten.”

Such coldness despite an occasionally glossy and soothing tone is business as usual in the masterpiece “12 Years a Slave.” Like the stylish but burdensome “Shame” before it, Steve McQueen’s film is by far the heaviest, most difficult film to endure of the year. It should not be taken lightly that this is a film about slavery and all its harsh colors. Such devastating films are usually just about braving it only to learn a history lesson. “12 Years a Slave” is about maintaining your fortitude and still knowing who you are when you come out the other side.

The film is quite simply the story of a free black man living in upstate New York in 1840 who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for 12 years. That the man lived to tell his tale and write the memoir that inspired this film is magnificent enough. But McQueen uses Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) story to show us what freedom is. It’s not the ability to live in wealth and privilege, to live free of pain or to be allowed to walk where you please. Northup earned his freedom by remembering who he was when the time came. Being strong enough to retain that memory: that’s freedom. Continue reading “12 Years a Slave”

Rapid Response: Bullitt

“Bullitt” has not fully achieved the iconic status of some of its other ’60s cop movie peers.

Despite “Bullitt” being one of the definitive ’60s cop movies and being hailed as the starting point for all modern car chases, Peter Yates’s film lacks many of the in-movie charm and out-of-movie extras that would make it iconic.

No sequels, no catch phrases, no spin-offs or copycats, not even a classic villain. It does have the green Mustang, which Ford released as a special edition model in 2008 to commemorate the film. But for all “Bullitt’s” original critical accolade and box office success in 1968, perhaps the film has simply not aged well.

That’s not to call it bad, but it’s approach does not even begin to embellish the more cathartic pleasures of the action genre. Steve McQueen as Lt. Frank Bullitt is one of the era’s flatter male leads. He lacks a backstory, an attitude and even much dialogue, regardless of McQueen’s steely glances and reserved delivery. We realize how quiet he really is when he finally does have an “outburst” near the end of the film. He does have a girlfriend in the lovely Jacqueline Bisset, but her appearances seem superfluous.

I see “Bullitt” not as a gung-ho cop mystery with a salty Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, nor as a gritty, hard-nosed thriller like “The French Connection” (which in my view tops “Bullitt’s car chase), but as a strict procedural designed to show a cop immersed in the job, one whose tragedy is that he has no outside life. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Bullitt”