The Great Escape (1963)

Watching World War II action/drama “The Great Escape” -– based on fact, highly dramatized, three hours long -- has a new, unshakable tinge of sadness that did not exist during my childhood viewings. The entire principal cast has now passed, with Richard Attenborough and James Garner dying earlier this year. The true story: In 1944, 250-plus Allied prisoners attempted the most brazen escape from a POW camp ever known, with hundreds of minds and hands and three tunnels dedicated to infuriating Hitler’s military machine. Director John Sturges has made a near classic, even if it whiffs far too sanitized even for 1963. Attenborough, Garner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Donald Pleasence, and Charles Brosnan play the master escapists. Two hours document the dirt and work, the final rousing hour focuses on border runs. Pleasence’s forger is still my favorite hero of the bunch. The motorcycle chase with McQueen is exciting as hell, all stunts, no CGI. This kind of epic -– gifting character development and attention to process -– exist no longer. In Michael Bay’s world, it’s all flash and bang. Another sad passing. A-

12 Years a Slave (2013)

I don’t want to know anyone who doesn’t walk out of “12 Years a Slave” a crushed soul rebuilt from the ground up by the final and finally at-last hopeful moments of this true horror tale that is deft enough to show beautiful –- stunningly so -- landscapes amid recreations of terrifying acts of inhumanity that were the start of this great (and terrible) nation. 

These shots are clear: As they degrade the lives of those they see as less than themselves, the allegedly greatest of our kind –- rich, educated, and privileged beyond measure -– bring ruin to their own lives with the heinous need to control and take all treasure. 

Brit-born filmmaker Steve McQueen (“Shame”) has done what few American directors have dare tried: Tell the brutal story of slavery in the United States with unblinking detail and absolute you-are-there authority. 

This is the anti-“Gone with the Wind,” with its Southern celebration and happy slaves, and certainly the anti-let-us-have-fun-revenge-flick “Django Unchained,” which I like less and less the more I recall my two, one too many, viewings of it. 

Solomon Northup was a born free African-American in 1840s New York, a musician and engineer, until he was kidnapped and sold into bondage below the Northern line into death, rape, and forced labor that should shock anyone with a hair of decency. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Children of Men”) plays Solomon, a man who must deny his own greatness and abilities, essentially his outright normalcy as a human, lest he be murdered or worse -- and yes there are worse fates -- by his white masters who will not see anyone of color as their equal. 

Solomon does this for 12 grueling years, his longest stretch as “property” of a sadistic drunkard (Michael Fassbender, a regular in McQueen’s films) who is abusive to all around him, including his own wife (Sarah Paulson) who can equal her husband’s acidic temper. 

This is an age when a black slave could be killed for learning to read or write, an act I cannot even muster in my head as a reality. But McQueen shows us many disturbing realities – including a brutal whipping that Solomon is forced to take part in – as every day, and as much a part of the American spirit as apple pie, George Washington and fireworks. 

To deny this, to ignore it, to wish it away as a past that should be forgotten and “get over it,” -– and I heard that a lot in Alabama and here in Virginia from racist cunts who then turn around and celebrate the rah-rah-rah spirit of the Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, or what their university did in 1881 -- is a great as sin as those who meted out this disaster of inhumanity. 

Ejiofor truly, sorry this sounds cliché, this film has robbed me of most words, astounds in the lead role. I have been a fan of his for years, and now just stand in awe. He plays a freeman forced into not just slavery and near unspeakable cruelty an acting chore, a sick live stage act that lasts some 4,400 days, an educated, bright, angry, hopeful man who must show near none of those traits. 

That’s what sticks with me. Burying oneself as dead although you are yet alive, and long to see your wife and children, and parents, etc. 

In one bravo scene, three quarters, McQueen dishes out a scene that pulls no punches: Ejiofor as Northup looks out into the sky of his “home” and then directly into the camera at the audience, daring us to not just continue in his harrowing story but to never forget his suffering and the untold numbers of his fellow slave captives in an American that only called itself free, but in a blatant knowing lie, a wink as the rich and powerful killed hundreds of thousands, or more, of people of color, all for greed, and wealth, and land. 

The final moments, and this is no spoiler that Solomon lives, where he apologies –- apologies –- to his family for missing out on their lives, just laid waste to me. Can you imagine? I simply cannot, and have no words. McQueen and company have left me near silent. 

(Note: As with “The Butler,” a host of big names pop by for cameos, Brad Pitt among them, but these roles are mostly commoners, owners, bigots, and others, and the cameos do not stick in the crawl as, say, John Cusack does as Richard damn Nixon. OK, stop, hold on, Pitt almost grinds and pops too much a saint-like liberal progressive.)

Lest we need proof this story must be told, loud and in every corner, lest it ever be forgotten, a darling of the right-wing conservative movement has written a review of “12” –- without seeing the film, and stating he has no intention to -– saying McQueen and the film are too “harsh” on slavery, which has economic merit and can actually be healthy…. That such thought still carries cultural weight today is truly paralyzing. 

And makes “12” all the more vital. (If you can, read the book source. STAT.) A

The Blob (1958)

Steve McQueen is the world’s oldest teenager in “The Blob,” the corny, campy horror classic that opens with the funniest, catchiest theme song that I can recall. “Beware of The Blob, it creeps/ And leaps and glides and slides/ Across the floor/ Right through the door.” It’s a laugh riot. The movie is too, right from the start with McQueen playing 17 (!) calling a first-date gal named Jane (Aneta Corsaut) as “Jenny,” and getting away with it because he’s Steve Freakin’ McQueen. Anyway, meteor hits, a blob pops out, eats an old guy’s arm, and it’s on  -- laughs, goofy special effects, and punk teen kids saving the world when the cops won’t listen. Classic scene: The cinema! What’s hard as hell to take is the sexism: Every woman and girl is a helpless twit prone to hysterics and less brave than the 7-year-old brat in PJs prone to carrying around his teddy. Actually that’s the gist of the film: Those nightmare fantasies kids have about monsters coming true and no adult will believe them real. So honk the horns, and hold those ladies’ hands tight. B

Bullitt (1968)

Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt” is justifiably famous for its long, crazy car chase through the up-down-up hills of San Francisco. It’s a killer scene, even if the villain’s car pops hubcaps like the Hyrda grows heads. Best bit: Before the chase begins, the mafia getaway driver calmly buckles his seatbelt. Perfect detail. It sets the tension while making a literal joke of that line in “All About Eve.” But before all that begins, we start in Chicago as a man is hunted by assassins as truly ugly opening credits jump and ricochet on screen, rendering the action a visual mess. Small fault. We bounce to McQueen as SFPD detective Bullitt as he’s tasked with a court witness baby-sit job under order from a soulless DA (Robert Vaughn). The job is tied to the failed hit we just saw and the mob hits back successfully, leaving Bullitt racing to outwit the bad guys and heel Vaughn’s prick. “Bullitt” works wonders far more than the cars with its on-the-street Bay Area locales, foot chases through hospital corridors and a bustling airport, and McQueen’s perfectly dressed no-bullshit hero, the absolute of cool. Also tops: Pre-stardom’s Robert Duvall’s cabbie. A-

Shame (2011)

“Shame.” Call me crazy, but it’s all about the liquids inside us. Poison. The bodily fluid liquid Shame in all of us. A weight, a black hole, a soul crusher. The bodily fluids must be purged, at all costs. They. Must. As demons are exorcised, memories are downed in drugs and booze. Liquids purged. This crazy-daring-disturbing-beautiful art flick, from Brit director Steve McQueen (not the dead Hollywood star of the 1960s, but a young black Brit artist) follows Brandon, an Irish-born, American-raised 30-ish man in New York City. Some dub him a sex addict. Maybe. He certainly relentlessly, ceaselessly, and carelessly picks up sex partners where ever he can find them, or pays for the pleasure for quick encounters. And if no woman is available, porn via Web or magazine will do, and he can masturbate out the semen from his body. His rage, his demon. Men will do, too, to help get that liquid anchor out. What past he leads?

Rising star of 2011 Michael Fassbender, quickly becoming a favorite actor, should have landed an Oscar nomination for his Brandon, a tortured, lonely, angry soul, long past dead inside, who – in the long, wordless climax (I mean that many ways) – cannot fathom intimacy or love or a relationship, and during a three-way, looks as tortured as a man undergoing water-boarding. His one shot at intimacy, an actual relationship, is a full disaster, he calls the woman boring and denounces love, and fails in bed, sexually. It’s all about release, nothing more. There is no love in this world. Not here.

Brandon’s cold, hard, life, all the sex and porn, leftover take-out, and relentlessly repeated classical music played as white noise is thrown a devastating loop when his equally mentally unstable sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up in his shower, unexpected. Uninvited. Unwanted. Unbounded. She longs for a connection to Brandon. His openness at her nudity and she at his, hints at a dark, horrible childhood. Never explained. We don’t need to know, and maybe would be too horrified to know the truth. Their first run-in onscreen, I thought she was his ex-wife. I said dark and disturbing, and I meant it. Few films ever go this dark.

If Brandon ejaculated out his pain through sex, masturbation, or any stimulant, Sissy is a cutter. Blood. A long series of scars mark her wrists and arms, and she wants to lose more blood. And she will in the end. Pints. The whole movie is liquids -- blood, semen, music, fast-moving subway cars, and rain, never stopping, spinning in an endless circle, down a bottomless drain. Even the music is liquid. Always moving, flowing.

The final scenes mimic the first scenes. McQueen’s film is epic, and cold and small, and amazing, full of sex and nudity. That climatic three-way starts out explicit and erotic as hell, as porn, and then turns painful as Brandon shows nothing but misery, a cold, hard punch to audience-mandated expectations for such a NC-17 sex film. This is eroticism turned ugly, anti-erotic. If the screenplay, by McQueen and Abi Morgan (who wrote the lesser “Iron Lady”) is slight on details, McQueen’s camera – the cinematography is beautiful, and in ultra-wide screen – tells us so much more. Watch how, when Brandon and Sissy talk, the camera is behind them, their faces, eyes, expressions cut off. Cold. Only when they fight, scream, yell, and he attacks her, him fully naked, do we see their faces. As dark as this film goes, I want a re-watch. STAT.

Fassbender bares it all, literally. The rage inside him is barely contained, and when he stares down a woman, his flirtation by eye, masks something far darker. That’s acting. Art. Beauty, Danger. Sex. And ... bottomless doom. The character of Brandon barely speaks. Mulligan, she of “An Education” and “Drive,” will not not speak, and lays out a tortured version of “New York, New York,” so dark, so long, so painful and hopeless, I’m not certain what we saw on screen was reality within the film, but her singing/talking directly to her hardened, hard-on brother, how the cold, dark, big city -- life itself -- will kill them in the end. Brandon cries at the moment, by his sister’s beauty and pain, and is horrified to see that kind of liquid, a tear, come from inside him. Pulsating rage follows.

Do not trust anyone says this film is dead and cold; it is about death and coldness, and sex, in all its glory, and pain and misery and Shame. And always about liquids, bodily fluids, escaping from the body, and the pain of an unexplained past. Pure fucking genius. Bravo, Mr. McQueen, and Mr. Fassbender.A