12 Years a Slave May Just Be the Most Important Movie Ever

My grandfather, Wade Mackie, was a great civil-rights leader in the Martin Luther King Jr.-era south of Louisiana. So when Roots came out when I was a little kid, I think I sort of inherently “got it.”

The TV miniseries certainly still hit me over the head like a sledgehammer. I’ll always remember Kunta Kinte’s plight and will always feel bad for all slaves and puzzle over how some people can be so downright bad, or at the very least clownishly imbecilic, with a big dose of sadistic. It’s still happening all over the world today. Unfortunately, slavery in some way will probably always be happening.

So then Django Unchained was released. With Argo, that was my favorite movie of 2012 (in fact, I named it my 67^th favorite movie of all time). This attacked Roots-era, pre-Civil War-era slavery with an eye for how violent it was and how ruthless. It added a huge dose of Tarantino humor and his style of the unorthodox. Despite that overlay, it was powerful. That’s why it was so good.

But then along comes 12 Years a Slave. This blows Roots and Django out of the water. There were loud sobs throughout the theater. I personally don’t think I’ve cried that hard since E.T. (seriously, I’m not making light, I always cry during E.T.).

So it’s a sad story, to say the least. It’s on-fiction based on a book written by Solomon Northup, a wonderful family man and talented and free musician from Saratoga Springs, New York who was recruited to tour the East coast in 1841 before getting kidnapped in Washington D.C. He was one of the few kidnapped slaves to ever escape captivity, which he does after 12 years at a string of hellish plantations throughout Louisiana.

It will be a crime if Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Solomon, doesn’t win the Oscar for best actor. This is a very important movie, and I’m really happy, in my grandfather’s honor, that, at least judging by Hollywood, we’re getting closer and closer to coming to terms with our country’s ugly past and moving forward into a much more tolerant understanding and appreciation of all our differences and similarities.

***** out of ***** stars

Django Unchained is Tarantino's Second-Best Movie Ever

Django Unchained is a stunner. I never thought I would say that a Quentin Tarantino film is almost as good as his piece de resistance Pulp Fiction, but this one comes close.

Much like Pulp Fiction, this movie is not so much about the plot but rather about the dialogue that drives the masterful suspense and the scene after scene of purely tantalizing cinematography and episodic brilliance.

Chapter after chapter roll past and the viewer rarely wants the scene to end, but it always does, and Tarantino always leaves us wanting more. Even the most graphically violent scenes never overstay their welcome, which helps make them so enjoyable and some of them even downright hilarious (like when the southern lady gets swooped off her feet and out of the room by one of Django's righteous bullets).

Christoph Waltz, who was so captivating in Inglourious Basterds at "The Jew Hunter," is flat-out the actor of the year in this one. Forget Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln. It's pretty safe to say that Waltz is the top master at delivering Tarantino's also award-deserving scriptwriting lines.

Jamie Foxx as Django and Samuel L. Jackson as an influential house slave are also great. Leonardo DiCaprio could be better as the wack-job slave-plantation owner Calvin Candie, but that said, perhaps I have too high of expectations for the actor, who may not be capable of being quite as evil as he needs to be in this part. (He's still pretty darn evil though.)

This is my movie of the year, and the second-best Tarantino movie ever.

***** out of ***** stars