Also caught the feel-good movie of the year – 12 Years a Slave… starring Chiowetel Edjifoer (I have no idea if I spelled that right), Michael Fassbender (boo hiss), Paul Dano (boo hiss), Paul Giamati (boo hiss), and a bunch of other, sometimes recognizable people.

It’s the true story of a free black man in NY state in the 1850s who’s kidnapped and sold into slavery in moss-covered Louisiana. Stated bluntly, if you don’t have a strong stomach and aren’t willing to look a flayed back in the cuts, you don’t want to see this movie. It’s utterly unflinching and unwilling to compromise its desire to show the debasement of slavery.

The audience I was with was truly drawn into it and audibly reacted to every slap, punch, kick, insult, beating, and whipping… I was as well but not to the same degree and I hate to admit that I was kind of feeling a little desensitized to a lot of it. I’ve kind of seen this all before in other movies like Roots, Glory, and even Passion of the Christ (which has a flaying scene that’s now second only to the red mist of this movie).

A crass side of me even says that, revenge porn though it is, Django Unchained handles some of this better… and at least we get some good old fashioned Hollywood catharsis…

I don’t want to minimize what’s no doubt going to be a hell of a movie experience for the majority of people – this is good work, extremely well-acted, and very powerful. And, hey, partly produced by Plan B studios… that’s Brad Pitt’s company that also did World War Z… and Pitt gives himself a plum role that’s only distractingly Brad Pitt for a few minutes… but when you’re putting up some of the cash, I guess you can afford to be the big, damn hero of the piece!

Score: 86