Two Hours of Guilt

Horror movies don't horrify me for the most part because they're bland and shit and I tend to find myself relating to the killer. I think these days the studios generally care more about cheap shocks than actual scares and so spend less time creating relatable characters and more time deciding how many ways there are to stab a person in the tits. Instead of ‘characters’ we now have these airheaded mongtards that say and do things so stupid that you want them to get their face ripped off just to shut them the fuck up. To change the subject slightly there are also period films which I have issues with because they can also be a bit po-faced and worthy. I'll honestly watch any film with an open mind but if it involves a Queen who died over a hundred years ago then the odds are it's going to be a proper bitch to get through. Just three hours of people staring out of a window whilst contemplating their duty and whinging like the boring twats that they are. However I'm pleased to announce that in an effort to address both these issues, a character driven horror/period film has just been released which is set during the ever so cheerful period of the slave trade. If you're white and fancy feeling guilty as fuck for a couple of hours then I can't recommend 12 Years a Slave strongly enough.

Okay, so to summarise.. the film is set in America before their civil war and so at a time when owning people was a perfectly acceptable past-time. Solomon Northup is a free black chap just living his life and indulging in his basic human rights as though he thinks we're all allowed to be equal. Well as nice a thought as this is, he quickly ends up with egg on his face as he wakes up one morning to find himself chained to a floor after an evening out on the piss with two shady gents. Don't you just hate it when you treat yourself to one night of getting rat arsed with strangers and then before you know it you've been stripped and sold into slavery just because you had the God damn nerve to be black... It's happened to the best of us I guess! Anyway, from this point on Solomon finds himself being thrown from pillar to whipping post by his various masters who bat him back and forth like a dark ping-pong ball during a bigots game of wiff-waff. With his owners varying in unkindness on 'The Great Twat-ometer Of Evil' and over the course of twelve years Solomon patiently waits for an opportunity to escape as though all the horrendous abuse isn't quite his idea of a good time. I won't ruin what happens by saying whether or not he does manage to get away in the end and so to find out, you'll either have to watch the film or read the book that it's based on which was written by the man himself several years later... Or you could just work it out from that I suppose.

I can whip you or we can watch Jonah Hex.. you choose!

Anywho, so obviously this movie probably wouldn't technically be labelled as a horror film but after enduring it for two hours it really fucking should be. Like I said, it takes a lot to horrify me but the graphic depiction of how we crackers used to treat black people really was nothing short of demented. It's one thing to know that people used to get whipped but it's another to see it happen to a young woman whose only crime was being owned by a wealthy-but-mental knobend. Seeing pieces of her back flick off was absolutely horrendous as she screamed for death in an unforgiving sequence that was so much more powerful than any mere history book could possibly ever get across to me... and not just because I don't read history books. If this film has a purpose beyond simply re-telling the story of Solomon Northup it's also to remind our species of just how cruel we can be and have been to anybody we outnumber. In fact, the movie was so miserable in its depiction of our inhumanity that it reminded me of one of those dystopian sci-fi films in which society has gone to shit and we're all rounded up and tortured by either broken, naked robots or damned dirty apes. Except instead of being completely fictitious, this is a true story, has already happened and the evil cunts were us.

The treatment of the slaves is shown in all its mad bastard grimness with the owners and traders beating down on their hostages with more force and fury than a teenaged boy at a regional wank-a-thon. When I first got my dog she used to shit in the house and so to stop her doing it I was told to shove her nose into the mess. However because I'm not a psychopath I couldn't do that and so instead next time she took a kitchen dump I pointed it out to her and then flicked her on the nose. That was seven years ago and I still feel guilty about it now even though all she did was look at me with mild curiosity and briefly wondered why I'd just been such a bell-end to her. My point is that I really regret something my dog would have forgotten about a minute later and so how in God's name could those owners treat the slaves with such violence and so little empathy? Maybe this is one aspect that 12 Years A Slave doesn't really delve into as it seems more concerned with what happened than why it happened. Of his various owners, Solomon finds himself belonging to Benedict Cumberbatch who is depicted as being fairly sane however even he at his kindest still owns people and so is complicit to the cruelty being inflicted throughout the system. The basic equation to work it out is simply One person + People owned = One ignorant fucknugget. Although no reason for how we can be so horrible is suggested beyond a mass mental illness of the collective honky mind, though religion seems to be a common defence for it. Cumberbatch and Solomon's next owner Fassbender both quote the Bible as a way of justifying their own dickishness because if God says it's right then it damn well must be. To be honest, it'd be easy to blame God for allowing the slave trade to happen considering he's omnipotent but as he's also a fictional character that's been spunked into the world by our paranoid minds, I guess we're still at least a little responsible.

What do you mean Brad Pitt is in this film?!

These reasons above are why I think 12 Years a Slave is a pretty mental horror film and obviously also a great period piece. Somebody else could have made this as a bland, watered down slab of Oscar bait rather than the traumatic slice of shitty life that it is and so let’s all be grateful that Lee Daniel's and Oprah Winfrey were busy. Although that's not to say that it won't necessarily win any Oscars by the way, just that if it does it'll be by being true to itself and not because it was already lubed up and gaping for the voters pleasure. It's directed by Steve 'not that one' McQueen, who has brought the same kind of unflinching tone over from his previous films however this time adding the odd flash of influence from Terrence Malick. In case you've not seen a Malick film, this basically means that every time something interesting happens then you cut to a shot of some grass for ten minutes to highlight how important everything is. His previous film Shame very nearly put me off ever jizzing again and so if you've ever dreamed of legally being somebodies bitch then maybe give this one a bit of a miss. Everything about his direction here is pretty spot-on from the framing to the pacing to the performances with a hanging scene being a particularly great way of demonstrating the nonchalant horror of the time. In fact despite the hanging scene lasting a good few minutes, the film affected me so strongly that I'm not even going to make a David Carradine wanking joke about it... which is a shame because I have a good one too. However as well as direction, the other thing that makes this film so powerful is of course the cast who are all pretty much perfect. Chiwetel Ejiofor is brilliant, Fassbender is excellent, Cumberbatch is great and Brad Pitt... well he definitely turned up... so fuck it- lets stick Pitt’s face on the poster!

Anyway to wrap all this up I suppose I can't stress enough how important this film is and how much you should see it. I had a snack to eat during it and I have honestly never felt more awful in my life for chowing down on a chocolate flake as some starving black guy got branded by an evil land baron. I'd been waiting for the one moment I could have it but in the end I had to just eat before my treat melted. The whole situation was a real tragedy. Once a year we hold a minute’s silence for those who have died during all the wars however after seeing 12 Years a Slave I think we should start having one days silence a month to repent for our bastard ancestors actions during this unforgivable shit stain on history. Although having said that, I suppose it does seem to be coming kind of common place at the minute to make films about slavery. I won't bother comparing 12 Years a Slave to Django Unchained though because so many other people already have, this blog is already way to long and I'm dying for a piss right now. To summarise- they're completely different to each other. There was also Lincoln which came out recently but although I haven't seen it, I think I might have to if only to try and restore any faith in our horrible, horrible species. I used to worry about the inevitable expansion of the Sun one day destroying everything humanity has worked towards however now I worry that by the time it happens we nasty cunts might have worked out a way of surviving. See this film and feel the guilt!

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The Good, The Bad, and The Racists

Because I live in a predominantly white area, racism is just something I don't understand. I think there must be one black family who live near-ish by and whenever I spot them I have to stop myself from staring. Not because I have any ill will towards them but because it's just so rare to see someone here even slightly darker than pure cracker-white. In fact the only exposure I really get to what racism might be like is the abuse I receive from my friends. On the Dulux skin colour chart I would say I'm only a shade below Wookie brown but even that's enough for me to be the group’s 'token darky'. They've never said it out loud but I know that if we lived in a horror movie they'd expect me to die first out of a simple respect for the rules. 

Thank fuck he's dead.

As everyone will be aware, Django Unchained is a Western that deals with the subject of racism and slavery. Director Tarantino has actually been referring to this as ‘a Southern’, due to it's location but I think that's more because he arrogantly just likes the idea of inventing a new genre. So the Western begins with the bounty hunter Dr King Schultz freeing Django, a slave who can help him identify his current targets. In case you can't tell by the name, Schultz is a German, but don't hold that against him. Played by Christoph Waltz, the bounty hunter has to be one of Tarantino's more likeable characters which isn't difficult when he's surrounded by a country of bigoted pricks. My knowledge of slavery isn't exactly expert but from what I can tell, America in 1858 was basically the large scale equivalent of a smoky, working men’s club in Salford. It's as though the past is some alternate world in which society was run to the abhorrent values of some ignorant fat shit like Bernard Manning or Jim Davidson. For any non-Brits, those two are basically what racism would look like if it grew a layer of slimy flesh and an unsightly pair of man tits.

So Schultz makes two promises to Django, if he will aid him in finding his targets. The first is that he will allow the man his freedom and the second is that he will help him find his wife Broomhilda. Apparently slaves back then weren’t allowed to get married but some people just don't want to do as they're told. As a result, Django and his wife were split up which is a punishment that ironically most married couples would these days relish. As it unfortunately turns out though Broomhilda now belongs to DiCaprio who treats slaves with sheer malice in an attempt at win any acting award that he can. Therefore Django and Schultz are forced to go undercover with the aim being to infiltrate his plantation and get her out. So basically this movie is simply a cross between the underrated Miami Vice and the overrated Blazing Saddles.

Over the years I've regularly found myself slagging off Michael Bay and Tarantino but for significantly different reasons. As a director, Bay is the evil king sitting proudly atop a back catalogue of unfiltered shit and depressingly high profits. Tarantino on the other hand is a film-maker who used to be brilliant until he started to believe his own hype. Bay pisses me off because he can't make good films whereas Tarantino annoys me because he could be doing a lot better. Like a manipulative parent, it's not that I'm angry- I'm just disappointed. Although.. I am angry as well...

I do not need to see that face on the big screen.

Like everyone with at least two working senses, I think that Pulp Fiction is clearly brilliant and Jackie Brown an absolute masterpiece. The reason something like Death Proof irritated me so much was because of how indulgent it was. It was overly long, boring and too derivative of shit movies that we've all tried to forget. If I wanted to watch grainy footage of forgettable actresses screaming I'd probably just check out porn. In Jackie Brown, the dialogue was expertly written to sound like it belonged to its cast of mixed characters. In Death Proof however every syllable sounded like it belonged to a person who if interviewed might threaten to shut someone's butt down. Although, if there's one thing more irritating than everybody sounding like him, it's Tarantino's insistence on cropping up in his own films. Watching one of his movies is like walking home in the dark when there's a rapist on the loose. You're just constantly on edge waiting for the moment of horror when he jumps out with his massive fucking chin.

Having now seen Django Unchained, it's obvious that it's certainly not his best film but nor is it his worst. In fact for the first couple of hours, I really enjoyed it as the two main characters travelled around bonding and shooting the crap out of people. It kind of felt a little bit flabby like a fat girl in need of a corset, but fuck it- it was still good fun. The problem was that after a while it just started to go on and on and on. Without giving too much away, the film seems to climax in a pretty cool shootout and then appears to end in an ambiguous Butch and Sundance kind of way. This would have been fine but then the movie kicks back in and goes on for what felt like another nine days.

"You call that an accent?!"

To make matters worse, the scene in this surprise fifth hour is bloody awful. So bad in fact, you wonder if the people involved had been held hostage and this was their way of warning us that something was wrong. I'm a huge fan of Wolf Creek and so got a little bit too excited when I heard that John Jarrett had been cast in this. But when he turned up, he was in the company of two other people. One was Michael Parks and the other was fucking Tarantino. Michael Parks always pisses me off because he mumbles so much I genuinely can't understand a word he says. It's as though every line he delivers is dubbed by Kenny from South Park whilst wearing Bane's breathing mask. But before I could even care about that, Tarantino had opened his mouth and shocked me with the worst performance I've ever seen. I mean- fucking hell- I've never been a fan of his 'acting' in the past but this was something else. The man can have the greatest actors in his movies and yet he repeatedly casts himself as the only person who struggles with his own dialogue. This time however, he decided to stretch himself by playing an Australian. I say Australian but that's only a guess based on the fact that John Jarrett is hovering silently somewhere in the background. As accents go, this is Aussie via Essex after a stroke and being punched in the throat. It's so bad that I forget everything that had happened in the last two and a half hours and just sat there in absolute shock. Considering the film should have ended by now anyway, this was like watching the Captain of the Titanic get to America and then hitting the iceberg because he decided to do a few more laps.

On the bright side, all of the other performances were brilliant and if anything I appreciated them even more after his film-destroying cameo. I also actually thought that a popcorn movie was a brilliant way to demonstrate the horror of what something like slavery must have been like. There's a scene in which two black guys are forced to fight which is genuinely horrible. Beyond the fact that the awfulness is brought home with some unexpected realism, there's also an added layer of guilt in that I had been looking forward to seeing a fight. It's kind of like when you jokingly get two tramps to wrestle over some crack and before you know it one of them has slit the others throat. No matter how much you tell yourself you aren't to blame you'll still feel a tiny bit responsible.

"I did this for you, Oscar!"

I don't think that this kind of film trivialises the issues but instead probably presents them to a larger audience. Paying to see a poe-faced lecture doesn't seem quite as appealing as a film in which DiCaprio self harms for an Oscar and smears his blood over the rest of the cast. I also don't think there should be any controversy about the films use of the word 'nigger'. I know in general Tarantino seems fairly obsessed with it but here is a genuine reason for its use. Nobody is arguing that people back then used the word less than is presented in this film so really- what's the problem? I suspect it's just another example of society trying to hide its shame by passing the blame onto cinema. I'd mention the constant accusations of movies encouraging gun violence but I could probably write an entire blog on why that's complete and utter shit. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But people kill people a hell of a lot easier when they have access to guns. The only film that's made me want to kill was Battlefield Earth and that's only because it was so bad I felt like topping myself to forget.

In the end though, Django Unchained is exactly what you'd expect from a Tarantino film. It's got a great soundtrack, brilliant acting, mostly witty dialogue and is indulgently long. It kind of pisses me off the way he steals shots and music from other people’s movies but here, he mostly gets away with it simply because the characters are so strong. That last point goes both ways though so I don't sound like I'm picking on just him. In Ridley Scott's American Gangster he stupidly uses Bobby Womack's Across 110th Street which thanks to Jackie Brown couldn't belong more to Tarantino if he pissed on it and shoved it up his arse. I know QT stole that song from a film of the same name too but fuck it; it's hard to find anything completely original in one of his movies. Because of his cinematic kleptomania, he has been referred to a 'DJ director' but lets face it- that's not an excuse that would stand up in court is it? If I refurbished my house with furniture I'd stolen from mates I couldn't use the excuse that I was a 'DJ Interior Designer' no matter how nice the room ended up looking.

Don't say anything...

Despite all that moaning though, I did genuinely like the film which for the most part was really good fun. I'd be curious to know what any black people actually made of it because it seems that for the most part it's really a bunch of well meaning honkey's getting angry or defensive on their behalf. As mentioned at the start- with me being a middle-class and mostly-white chap, I really don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when it comes to prejudice. When I was about eight-years-old I curiously asked an Asian girl why she had a moustache which resulted in her calling me a racist but if anything I asked with admiration and jealousy. As a brief introduction to slavery, this film was genuinely a real eye opener and if anything added to my confusion. I just don't understand how people can be so cruel simply based on the colour of somebody’s skin. If we're going to start making ignorant snap judgements then why focus on black people? There's an entire country of French people that we've just been allowing to live in freedom for far too long.

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Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.

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