After watching Widows, I can very confidently say that if you team up director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) and writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, HBO’s Sharp Objects), I’m going to have my butt in a theater opening weekend. I’ve heard about Widows for months and saw the trailer the day before I saw the movie. And I still haven’t seen the whole trailer. I only needed to watch the first half of it to know that it was a movie I wanted to see immediately. McQueen, who was narrowly beaten out for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón – Gravity), hardly seemed upset when, half an hour later, his 12 Years a Slave won topped Gravity (and others) for Best Picture of 2013. He’s been off the grid for the last five years (save for a few shorts), but he is back with a movie that might be better than any of his previous three masterpieces (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger Strike). The only thing missing is an appearance by Michael Fassbender, but you won’t even notice.
Category Archives: Steve McQueen
12 Years A Slave (2013)
The typical moviegoer of America will soon be introduced to one of the next big names in feature film directing when the Academy Award nominations come out in a few weeks. Steve McQueen will undoubtedly earn a Best Director nomination for 12 Years A Slave, a movie that some say is the greatest movie about slavery ever told. While those who have seen the film have talked a lot about the acting (and rightfully so), this movie, like any great movie, needs a captain to steer the ship and bring the story together. McQueen does just that. In a few weeks, the typical moviegoer will ask what else McQueen directed. Well, this is just his third feature film. He has 23 “Shorts” that he is credited with directing, but only two feature-length films. But these two other films weren’t just any movies. Much like Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento), everything that McQueen has touched in his young career has had a purpose. He doesn’t have any “throw away” movies. The movies he has tackled thus far in his full-length directorial career have been on slavery, sex addiction (Shame), and the true story of an Irish Republican Army activist who, in 1981, protested the way British guards were treating him and fellow inmates by embarking on, perhaps, the most internationally recognized hunger strike since Gandhi (Hunger). While Shame and Hunger earned critical acclaim, many people didn’t see them. Shame is a brilliant movie about the taboo topic of sex addiction. As a result, I expected much more when I saw Hunger after this. While I appreciated many aspects of Hunger, I found it rather dull. So now, with 12 Years A Slave, McQueen has three movies I admire and two that I think are brilliant.
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Shame (2011)
Shame was that 2011 movie that most people heard about but few people saw. It happens to at least one film each year. In 2009, the movie identified with this label (The Hurt Locker) won a Best Picture Academy Award, putting the talented Jeremy Renner on the map for the first time. In the case of Shame, there was more of a reason for its obscurity than in some of the movies in other years. Shame is rated NC-17, and rightfully so. It chronicles the day-to-day lifestyle of Brandon (Michael Fassbender – A Dangerous Method, Haywire), a 30-something-year-old man addicted to sex. After earning similar recognition at other awards ceremonies, including The Golden Globes, Fassbender was considered a lock for an Academy Award Best Actor nomination. Fassbender, however, was not one of the five finalists for acting’s most prestigious award.
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