12 Years a Slave (2013)Movies

Brad Pitt drops by 12 Years a Slave

after a barnraising on the Witness set From my movie review in Taki’s Magazine:

New Movie, Same Old Skin Game

12 Years a Slave—a biopic about Solomon Northup, a black fiddler born in New York who somehow wound up a slave in Louisiana from 1841 until the law rescued him in 1853—is the nearly universally acclaimed frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar. 

Yet it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. 

12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics...