12 Years a Slave

            I watched 12 Years a Slave last night. 12 Years a Slave is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who gets kidnapped and sold into slavery. It’s a true story too; Northup wrote his autobiography, 12 Years a Slave, after his ordeal, and this movie is an adaptation of that. It draws comparisons to Django, due to superficially similar content, but I don’t think they’re really warranted.

            I’ll start off by saying that it was a great movie. Chiwetel Ejiofor does a great job portraying Solomon. Benedict Cumberbatch plays “benevolent” slaveholder, William Ford, and Michael Fassbender is the sadistic Edwin Epps.

            12 Years a Slave had an interesting pacing and tone. It wasn’t written as a movie; it’s based off a book, which is based off of real events. As such, the plot is a bit meandering at times; real life doesn’t have a main plot, antagonist, and shoehorned love interest. There’s also much less justice in the movie. This isn’t Django, where a slave kills his masters and does cool cowboy stuff. This is reality, and reality is never that poetic.

            I’m going to be honest here; I was made uncomfortable by some of the content in 12 Years a Slave. However, I also recognize that the movie is supposed to make you feel that way, and I wouldn’t change a thing. The rampant use of the n-word is much more hard-hitting here than in Django, because this is real. At the risk of redundancy, slavery was horrible, and this movie confronts us with that fact. We brush over the fact that the United States had slavery drive a large part of its economy. This shows us the full face of slavery, and it should make us uncomfortable. We’re watching people on screen be whipped, watching them be raped, watching them be dehumanized. This is a movie where a woman begs the protagonist to kill her, because she can’t stand living anymore. It’s awful stuff. It’s a powerful movie.

            On the more cinematic aspects, the pacing didn’t quite feel like a movie, but that’s because it was based off of real life, as I said. Cumberbatch made for an interesting character: a “benevolent” slaveholder. He treats Solomon relatively well, accepting his suggestions for how to make the plantation more efficient, and he gives him a violin, which Solomon knows how to play. He almost treats Solomon like a human. When buying slaves, he tries not to break up a family. However, he’s still a slaveholder. Regardless of how he treats Solomon, he owns people, and he treats most of them like animals. He also does break up the family, because it’s what he can afford. I thought he made for an interesting character. Can someone be moral if they’re in an immoral position? Can you have a good slaveholder? I say no, but it was interesting to watch.

            Michael Fassbender makes for a good villain too. He’s a truly deplorable human being; he whips his slaves for fun, justifying his actions with scripture. He has a perverse obsession with one of his slaves, and there’s a scene where he rapes her. However, as mentioned earlier, 12 Years a Slave has a very different tone from other movies. This isn’t a villain who you love to hate, or who is so cheesy you almost root for him. This is real life. This is a vile man who does vile things. When I say he was a great villain, I don’t mean that I enjoyed his performance. I mean that his character made me feel uncomfortable, and that means Fassbender did a good job acting.

            Overall, 12 Years a Slave is a pretty good movie. It’ll definitely be nominated for a few Oscars, partially because of the subject matter, but also because the movie and performances really are quite good. I recommend it.

Sam's Adventures in Parkour

I suppose I’ll start this off by saying that I’m not an especially athletic person. Working out is kind of alright, but I would never play sports or go running by choice. That being said, parkour is universally acknowledged as being really cool. I signed up for the Parkour club in my freshman year at club fair (remember signing up for way too many clubs as a freshman?), but have never actually gone, because it sounded too similar to running.

I finally decided to go to parkour a few weeks ago. I figured it was probably about time. I mean, I’ve been in the club for three years now, I might as well make an appearance. After struggling to find the room where we met, I went inside. There was a fairly large gathering of people (I’d say around 30) and we all divided into groups of whose car we would take to get to the gym.

The gym was pretty cool. It was the kind of gym used for gymnastics, not working out. There were a few balance beams in the corner, and there were trampolines built into the floor. There were several soft obstacles, but the most fun part was a squishy floor. The main floor was raised slightly and bouncy. I‘m not sure how it worked, my guess is springs under the floor, but the floor was slightly bouncy, which is helpful if you’re going to be doing flips on it.

Anyway, it turns out that in addition to being really cool, parkour is pretty fun too. We started off by running laps to warm up, then we practiced breaking our fall by rolling. You know in how in action movies or in video games, the main character will dive into a roll, then be back on his feet? We practiced doing that. It was kind of jarring at first; I was a complete novice, and this looked like an advanced technique, but it really wasn’t that hard, and now I can do badass stunt flips (disclaimer: I can do awkward stunt rolls on a soft floor).

After that was jumping over blocks. There are several different cool jumping techniques in parkour (henceforth referred to as “vaults,” since that’s what they’re called). They’re pretty hard to do as an amateur. I only did one-handed vaults, since I found that the easiest; that is, I put on hand on the obstacle and used it to push my legs over the side.

It’s kind of hard to describe, but this is a picture.

 Pictured: not actually me

Then we just kind of did our own thing for a bit. I practiced doing flips off of a trampoline into a foam pit, and doing flips off a model house they had into a foam pit. Flips are fun and cool, and an important life skill to have.

We finished it up by playing parkour tag, which is really just “the floor is made of lava” with pushups involved. More specifically, we put obstacles all over the floor, then we played tag where you were only allowed to stand on the obstacles. If you touched the floor, it was a 5 pushup or crunch penalty.

Parkour was a lot of fun, and also probably a good workout, which got me thinking. As kids, we do a lot of this stuff naturally. Running and jumping is fun. As we grow older, we stop enjoying ourselves so much, or our parents tell us to be careful, and we eventually develop a proper sense of fear; not being afraid of monsters under the bed, but fear of hurting yourself doing physical activity (which is honestly kind of understandable; my risk of being eaten by a monster is 0, my risk of spraining an ankle by landing on it wrong is a bit higher). A lot of this is just learning as an adult to do what felt natural as a kid, and also attaching numbers to it. The fact that parkour is fun is good; the fact that it’s fun and probably counts as exercise is better.

I feel like I should also point out that people who are good at parkour are amazing to watch. Sure, we don’t have any pros or anything, but the more advanced members would dive over blocks, then sort of hand-walk over them while in the air. It’s insanely cool, and sort of feels wrong; you think to yourself that it shouldn’t be possible, somehow. But of course, it is; you watch your friends doing flips and flying through the air, and all is right with the world.

I dunno. I’m kind of rambling here. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that parkour is cool.