Panic in sneak preview

Sneak preview is a nice concept, you pay a cheaper price for your cinema ticket and you don't know what you gonna see until you see it. If it's bad, then it's bad, but you just lost 5€ and you hope next time will be better. If it is good you can bother all your friends telling them you were the first, you discovered this director, you revealed these actresses and actors, you are the one with the gift, you can make star (you can send me your book, portfolio and other showreel I know people).

Despite pretending you love cinematography (remember this Uzbek underground film in last Cannes festival?) you are actually and secretly hoping for a big blockbuster or the last romantic comedy with that blond actress and other handsome hunk... Until the first picture frame you are still full of hope, ready to laugh out loud - so bad it is - you can't believe producers are still producing this and that you will never pay for this movie, even so you already paid and are ready to bother again your friends talking about this shitty but ok-ish movie (viral marketing for dummies). Wolverine actor fighting robots to regain the attention of his kid was very pleasant after all, robots, boxing, what else? yes no women in that film, but robots, boxing...

Yesterday was bad luck as they decide to show us a non funny movie: "12 years slave". You could feel all the audience getting deep back in their seat thinking "oh shit that will not be funny..." and it was not. Just one person try to laugh after two minutes, tension I guess, but nobody followed him and I may have heard people crying after. Sadly no phone connection in the room, meaning I could not check the film duration.

Let's go critical about the film: nothing to the say about the topic, it is just horrible like every transition in mankind when one group of men (here the whites) are slavering the other (here the blacks) and I do remember South Africa Apartheid happened after this transition, mankind is a slow process. Can you make a plastic film with stylistic images about people suffering (and I mean here people being killed at work slowly or slavery), Steve McQueen the director can... So you got the point (2 hours of horror) of the film after two minutes and I don't specially enjoy seeing people being whipped to death if they don't ask for it of course (spanking is another story for another post).

The editing is poor and follows this layout: slave at slavery duty, one random mistake made (it is the white master duty to find mistake in order the exercise himself whip to blood the slave but not to death because these things cost money, ahhh money), focus and de-focus of the camera on the open wounds bleeding, camera on the wind in the trees with sunset and next day. And sometimes whipping by night, this for twelve years. At least the question "can you produce beautiful images to horrible thing?" or "horrible and terrible thing have to be represented bluntly?" is asked.  Steve McQueen is not the first artists on this matter, but I always wonder what did the artist want to tell us: "look I can make beautiful images with anything, am I good? am I good?". And the music sucks, it was heard and used before thousand time in the movie and others.

Like many aspects in that movie subtlety was totally absent. At one point of the movie you think you will see the white woman starting to fight for her right and the slaves against her husband, but not, she is just an evil bitch in an american binary world: you are good or you are bad and only the view point of the good (the white here) matters. Hopefully Brad Pit the producer is here and manages to give himself the role of the good Samaritan open-minded-Canadian who can tell the landowner "you know these slaves are actually human as well".

As is was my first Steve McQueen experience I will give him another chance because I'm a good person.