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.
Continue reading 12 Years A Slave (2013) →
A decade before Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Roma) was winning Oscars for Best Director, he directed the critically acclaimed and now cult classic Children of Men, a post-apocalyptic thriller set in 2027 Britain. In this dystopian world, it has been 18 years since the most recent human has been born. Humans have become incapable of reproducing for reasons unknown, resulting in a global fear that the extinction of our species is imminent. England is now the one remaining civilized society on the entire planet, making it a place where everyone can immigrate. The borders are strong, but people still illegally enter. Those caught are promptly placed into refugee camps. While this scenario may seem completely foreign to many of us, it should be a fear in our minds that lawlessness is entirely possible, and situations like these are already happening (though not globally) in many of our smaller countries that cannot defend themselves.
Suppose you watched season 1 of HBO’s True Detective, and you were as much of a fan of the six-minute single-shot shootout scene that ended episode four (titled Who Goes There) as I was. You might like John Hillcoat’s (