Film critic Armond White has been booted out of the New York Film Critics Circle. Officially it was for heckling Twelve Years A Slave director Steve McQueen at a press conference. But they can’t have liked him telling the truth about the movie. Namely, that it’s crap.
We should listen to hecklers. Especially when they’re as serious as White. That they have to heckle their message is usually a sign that something is up. And something is up. The consensus surrounding Twelve Years a Slave is getting unhealthy.
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For many the very act of telling Solomon Northup’s story is enough to immortalise the film. No matter that the acting is one-note, the editing clumsy, the score criminal. Twelve Years is the first film to tell the real story of slavery. Which could have been true were the film not a remake, and were it not for the existence of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, the enormously popular 70s TV series Roots or Steven Spielberg’s Amistad.
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