2 hours and 10 minutes a slave

Rating: 1/10 (24 March 2014)

If you plan to go and watch the three Academy Awards winning '12 Years a Slave' (best movie, best adapted scenario, best supporting actress), be warned that it comes without a patient information leaflet. It should have had one. The movie will expose you unsolicitedly to massive amounts of racism, physical violence and psychological cruelty. And for what reason? Is there anything in the story that alludes to historic events we did not know about? Will we walk out of the theater as better human beings than we were before? Does this production leave us with an experience that bears relevance for the way we live our lives today? Unlike you may expect me to answer these three question, I'm going to say yes.
Yes: most of us didn't realize yet that the elite of white celebrities today have so mindlessly accumulated so much power, that they feel no hesitation abusing two-hundred years of creating prosperity by enslaving millions of Africans for a mere defamation of cinematography.
Yes: after watching this destruction of suggestiveness and denial of our imaginative abilities we will have become more aware of the true nature of art, that its magic is not in getting our questions answered by a nifty recreation of reality, but in challenging our sense of reality in ways that awaken a desire for other questions instead of answers.
Yes: when we are offered an opportunity to reflect on the storyline from a present day perspective, i.e. when we try to become more conscious to the thought that we are living in an era where our debt slash guilt is sublimated in seeing a black man saved from his misfortune in the ocean of badness by a rare drop of white Christian goodness personified by the movie's producer Brad Pitt himself, how could that not be relevant for our lives today?
'12 Years a Slave' is by far the most lazy and disgusting piece of anti- cinema ever produced, shamelessly just for the money and the fame of its creators alone, at the expense of non-consensual emotional investment by an audience that the movie industry has imagined to own and enslave. Indeed, "A man does how he pleases with his property. At the moment, Platt, I am of great pleasure. You be goddamn careful I don't come to wantin' to lightenin' my mood no further."