12 Years a Slave - 10/10
Wow. This and Dallas Buyers Club transcend the idea of cinematic entertainment to provide something more than just an escape. They're both lessons in our failures taken from real events. And they are failures we should be aware of and never forget. They examine our failures on every level of who we are as a species.
Not to take anything away from the other great movies of the year, but these deserve a level of attention the rest don't require.
I'm not forgetting that WOWS and Hustle were based on real events as well, though Hustle was the loosest of them all. And we know that rich dicks are always out to take everything they can and ruin things for the rest of us, like Leo and Jonah tried. That's a universal constant, fun as it was to watch. LOL But they rest on a plane beneath movies like 12 Years.
All of the performances in this were spectacular. I was moved by everyone, the simple, the small, the powerful, the complex, the good and the bad.
I get the feeling that PC backlash, as being in full-force now because, tough guy d***s being what they are and all that, disallows me from stating it upset me tremendously, but it did. And the knee-jerk PC naysayers can kiss all of my *** if they want to be bothered by that, because they're obviously so entrenched in a mindframe of reactionary opposition that they can't sympathize with simple human suffering so they can keep hammering home their belief that racism died long ago.
This movie resonates through today, to right-fricking-now. Human trafficking is a goddamn horror we should all understand we can't allow to continue.