We did a brief review of 12 Years A Slave when the film came out nearly 10 years ago. Here in Oscar Month 2023, we delve a lot deeper with the benefit of perspective. This tough-but-necessary film is the pinnacle of slavery movies, partly because it was written and directed by black men (John Ridley and Steve McQueen). Prestige Movies have had far more inclusion in the above-the-line jobs in the decade since, so there's clearly been progress in the film business. As for the story, Solomon Northup was a free man who was forced into this terrible life. It seems even more tragic that it happened to this exceptional man, although the moral question is why did ANYONE ever have to go through this? Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o are tremendous at showing us what it probably really was like to be a person held under the boot of vicious racists like Michael Fassbender. So as you cue up our 502nd edition of Have You Ever Seen, we ask you to understand that we're two white Canadians trying to sort through the horrors of slavery and the intricacies of the landmark achievement that is 12 Years A Slave.

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There were several corrections that need to be made to this episode as well as some additional thoughts, so go to @hyesellis and watch Ryan's 6-minute YouTube video about this film, then the podcast itself plays in its entirety. One error you won't find corrected there is that Jordan Peele produced Blackkklansman, not Judas & The Back Messiah.

We're reachable via email ([email protected]) and Twitter (@moviefiend51 and @bevellisellis).

Ryan also talks about sports films on "Scoring At The Movies".