I found 12 Years a Slave so frustrating and unrewarding because only the one slave is freed, but I came to care more about the other slaves who did not get freed than I did about him.
The British filmmaker/ director of
12 Years a Slave (Steven R. McQueen who has Grenadian and Trinidadian ancestry), changed a lot that was in the actual real story as it was written. While it's okay to change things for a film dramatization, I think one should be careful about a true story that is as senstive as this one. I wish McQueen had stuck more to portraying important details accurately. Also, the casting and motivations were not right for some important characters. So frankly, while I was glad to see
12 Years a Slave become a film, I was disappointed with the overall result. I always tell people to read the actual book, because you will get more truth about what really happened.
Frankly, I think the crazy and imaginative Quentin Tarantino's bloody mayhem with tragicomic twist,
Django Unchained, actually managed to deliver a more important impact and to examine more hard truths in an interesting way than
12 Years a Slave did. While McQueen is an excellent filmmaker and some scenes were very powerful, for the most part his approach was overly serious, navel-gazing and often off-base. But at least, McQueen's film introduced us to gorgeous and fiercely talented Lupita N'yongo and furthered the career of the mesmerizing and sexy Irish actor, Michael Fassbender (even though he played an asshole in that film). Fassbender has been thought by some to be German because he speaks fluent German. He has said that he'd like to perform in a German-language film or play.
I haven't seen the director McQueen doing much of anything else, post winning the Oscar for Best Picture. He's done some short films and maybe a couple of other films that came out in 2016 which I haven't heard much about, so apparently they weren't widely successful. Last year, McQueen's film,
Widows was released. I think it's still in theaters, but I don't know how popular it is, since I don't follow first-run movies the way I used to.
Widows is apparently a crime genre film focusing on strong women, with Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez starring (Liam Neeson has a cameo role playing Davis' husband, who as the title hints at, is killed off early in the film). I've only seen preview clips. So far, it's taken in $74.2 million in the U.S.
Mr. McQueen studied fine art early in his career, and he's known for his experimental work as a film artist. His earlier films,
Hunger (2008) and
Shame (2011) both starred Michael Fassbender and catapulted Fassbender's career into greater recognition and opportunity. McQueen should have been Oscar-nominated for both of those films -- they are works of art and truly extraordinary filmmaking! For several years, Fassbender dated African-American actor and singer Nicole Beharie (who starred with him in
Shame). Then Fassbender met Swedish actor Alicia Vikander when they worked together on
The Light Between Oceans, and that was the piece de resistance for his love life, as Fassbender and Vikander were married in 2017. They live in Lisbon, Portugal.
Nicole Beharie also starred in the little known romantic film,
My Last Day Without You (2011), with German actor Ken Duken. I don't think that film was released to theaters, and it's no longer available on Netflix. It can be found on STARZ (Prime Video) or purchased/ rented on Amazon. It's also possible to rent or buy the movies
Hunger, and
Shame on Amazon (or possibly rent from a library). Carey Mulligan also appeared in the movie,
Shame.
