I think that we don't discuss movies enough, mostly its usually some general comments on a recent movie in the upcoming movie thread and that's it. This is a thread where you can share what you think about a movie you've just watched and want to discuss(doesn't matter if its recent or not).

To start us off, Twelve years a Slave. I just watched this movie and it was fantastic but I want to discuss something I read when I was reading some of the negative reviews for this movie and I was surprised because most of them talked about how the White man was largely portrayed as evil and that the movie was black and white and I honestly laughed out loud at that.

Then it got me thinking. I think this is one of the rarer movies about this subject where there hasn't been a largely sympathetic white man, who is there to show that yes there were was some irredeemably evil people back then but there were also good people who would stand up for whats right, where it becomes less about the slavery and how it affected the slaves and how they coped with their situation to more of how good this other guy was for standing up for the slaves.(at least to my admittedly limited film knowledge)

We never see the slaves laughing and dancing and having a jolly old time after a hard day at the cotton fields and I think this works because I feel that scenes like those(though they would have been true) would have served to only put people at ease. See it wasn't all bad, they had there comforts and I think this would have taken away some of the impactful power of this movie.

Although I saw someone else argue that

So thoughts, is it just a tired re-tread of the same old piece of history and are the people who liked just feeling guilty or just finding solidarity in their mutual hatred for slavers?

Any thoughts are welcomed and appreciated.

 

The vast majority of first-hand accounts from the deep-south cotton farms indicate that life as a field slave was fucking awful and then some.

So no. I think that was pretty accurate.