The Birth of a Nation (Official Thread)

[Originalman]

My older brother was telling they did the same to Malcolm X a lot of tickets were going to the sales to Home Alone 2 at the time.

Yep and it was reported two. I think Jesse and Al called it out too back in the 90s.

 

[Hope]

I'm giving up on seeing this. Will catch on DVD and watch with a family member or something. Don't like films much (unless comedy) and this looks too serious and dark. Better to own anywayz, they way add extras and you can rewatch.

Went to theatre today hoping to see it, but had to wait to long, and saw Girl On Train. Despite controversy, I don't think Girl on train should have done better than this Turner flick. Girl On train was really bad.

Next theatre outing will be a comedy, hope a good one comes out soon. Why pay money and waste time sitting down, if you won't come out feeling like u laugh real hard? Not gonna pay money to feel anything deep. I could do that at home and pres pause or something. Pretty sure people decide no to support because it's just not a movie you watch in a regular theaters.

 

[Rapmastermind]

Weekend Box Office Results for October 28-30, 2016 - Box Office Mojo

Crossed 15 Million even with the theater drops, had a great hold this weekend. Had it still had the screens with all the awareness going on about the sabatage it would of done even better. LOL @ Tyler Perry beating Tom Criuse and Tom Hanks in back to back weeks.

 

[Skooby]

UConn Coach takes entire team to see "Birth of a Nation":

Kevin OllieVerified account ‏@CoachKO_UConn 3h3 hours ago
Great time wt the guys watching Birth of a Nation. Left the movies wt my heart filled wt Gratitude. #BetterTogether

We need to find another salute smilie...someone other than Melo.

 

[lamont614]

I'm giving up on seeing this. Will catch on DVD and watch with a family member or something. Don't like films much (unless comedy) and this looks too serious and dark. Better to own anywayz, they way add extras and you can rewatch.

Went to theatre today hoping to see it, but had to wait to long, and saw Girl On Train. Despite controversy, I don't think Girl on train should have done better than this Turner flick. Girl On train was really bad.

Next theatre outing will be a comedy, hope a good one comes out soon. Why pay money and waste time sitting down, if you won't come out feeling like u laugh real hard? Not gonna pay money to feel anything deep. I could do that at home and pres pause or something. Pretty sure people decide no to support because it's just not a movie you watch in a regular theaters.

You would've waited on some Jordan's or iPhone


Get the fukk outta here with the excuses

 

[Dr. Narcisse]

After seeing it twice...


yea this wasn't a great movie. Just from a technical aspect. Hate to say it, but I agree with some of the flaws that @mastermind pointed out. However, I'll say thats primarily because the lack of money and because Nate was taking on a very big role as a first time director.

I bet any money if this was his 2nd or 3rd picture it would have been much better, crisper, clearer. I think the story for BOAN was more interesting than 12 Years a Slave, but Nate doesn't have the craftsmanship of Steve McQueen as a director.

The lack of money hurt it from an epic standpoint. You could feel the lack of budget holding it back from its larger potential.

The other part of it is first time filmmaker flaws from Nate. He's got a good hold of creating powerful scenes, but he hasn't quite mastered how to transition into those powerful scenes. There's a certain substance that could have been added to this movie if a Ryan Coogler directed it.

I will say that Nate did a great job as an actor. I would nominate him. The issue is Nate the director/writer could have fleshed out a bit more around Nat. Just little snippets, or a little scene here or there could have gone a long way.

He tried to make it a Mel Gibson movie. No doubt, Nate all but admitted this.
Mel is a racist but a great filmmaker. He knows how to make a movie intimate, but feel cinematic/epic. He's also heavily resourced. Nate needed more resources to elevate this movie imo. Still a solid job for his first film.

Still happy to have seen it. Not a great movie. I think the oscar buzz from sundance probably overhyped it, but it still was powerful.

I give about a 7/10 maybe 7.5 because of how good/powerful the last 5 minutes or so are.

 

[Dillah810]

I just saw the film today. I think the film is aight. The 1st 2 acts were borderline boring, but I understand why the film was written this way. No rebellions/riots start at the drop of a dime. There's always a build up to them. The thing, whatever it may be, that starts a rebellion is never the cause of it, but just the spark that lights the dynamite that took years and decades to build. I understand that the film was trying to show how Nat built up that spirit of rebellion. I just think the pace could have been better.

 

[MikelArteta]

I just saw the film today. I think the film is aight. The 1st 2 acts were borderline boring, but I understand why the film was written this way. No rebellions/riots start at the drop of a dime. There's always a build up to them. The thing, whatever it may be, that starts a rebellion is never the cause of it, but just the spark that lights the dynamite that took years and decades to build. I understand that the film was trying to show how Nat built up that spirit of rebellion. I just think the pace could have been better.

I kind of wish they started with some shots of the rebellion like cacs being slaughtered left and right and then going back into his story and then ending with the rebellion.

The rebellion seemed so fastm like i was waiting all movie for this and it just came and went in a few minutes

 

[MikelArteta]

I'm not really a fan of slave movies etc., but anytime I watch one. I just stop and think and i'm like damn. I'm really compalaining over traffic on the road to work, or that's it cold outside, or that work is boring and slap myself. Even though life or the world isn't perfect we are blessed to be born in this generation.

Just imagine growing up as slaves, seeing your mom, sister being called to the big house and coming back after she was raped by a cac and you could do nothing, seeing your dad whipped, your siblings sold off, working hard from morning to night and this was the only life you knew.

Just makes me wish there was a time machine i could go back with semi automatic and 300 trained black navy seal commandos and merk all these cacs.

that teeth scene and force feeding i had to look down , when dude was being whipped , when his wife was gang raped, these white savages .

As i said before I'm not really a fan of slave movies, but let us not forget how truly demonic these cacs were. To all my black brehs and brehettes who were abused, sold into slavey, raped, killed never got to experience freedom. the day of retribution will come one day in ths generation or the next we will never forget you!!!

 

[Dr. Narcisse]

Going back to read some of these articles. Man some people really overreacted to some of the changes in this movie.

When The Birth of a Nation premiered at the Sundance film festival in January, it was met with a warm reception. And when I say met, I really mean it. The first standing ovation came before the opening credits.

Small wonder: rarely was such a movie so required. A few days before its premiere, the Oscars So White controversy again exploded, as no actors of colour were nominated for the second year running. Beyond that bubble, the Black Lives Matter movement gathered anger, anticipating a horrific year. Both inside and outside Hollywood, there was a keen appetite for films that gave big roles to non-white actors and told stories of emancipation previously suppressed or directed by white people.

Nate Parker’s biopic of Nat Turner deliberately takes the title of the notorious 1915 Ku Klux Klan propaganda film directed by DW Griffith. [Spoiler alert] The new movie recounts the story of the leader of an 1831 slave revolt in Virginia which led to the deaths of 60 white people and then about 200 black people.

It is direct and frank and stirring in aim as well as its aesthetic. It simmers for 90 minutes, as its hero suffers and witnesses the suffering of others, before unleashing almighty revenge.

Hence the ecstatic ovation that also closed the Sundance premiere. And hence its speedy sale to Fox Searchlight for $17.5m (£14m) – a record-breaking sum. And an incredible bid of confidence, particularly given that the film it most obviously emulates, Steve McQueen’s best picture winner 12 Years a Slave, underperformed at the US box office, taking less than a third of its global total there.


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‘In the lengthy, undisputed testimony read out at his trial, Turner explained that he was prompted by religious visions and messages.’ Photograph: Fox/Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock
But perhaps The Birth of a Nation would be different. After all, it delivers where McQueen’s more composed work – whose hero endures torture and servitude without bloody rebellion – does not. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (which took five times what 12 Years a Slave did in America), it offers catharsis, as Turner and compatriots pick up their axes – acts which, the final shots suggest, helped secure an end to slavery.

So here is a movie absolutely of the moment, precisely right for our times. Except that it isn’t. Or, at least, not really. Parker has co-opted Turner’s tale into something suited to the febrile atmosphere around race and violence. Yet Nat Turner’s true story is just as topical.

In the lengthy, undisputed testimony read out at his real-life trial, Turner explained that he was prompted by religious visions and messages. How signs from God made it plain to him that “the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgment was at hand” – and that he was the one to execute God’s will. The contemporary relevance of a killer driven by fundamentalism, even jihad, hardly needs stating.

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The Birth of a Nation: Official HD Trailer
Turner’s status as a slave of course informs his entire life. But while the film fully foregrounds this, his actual testimony didn’t really mention it. The movie massages the facts beyond recognition. The man himself stated that his owner was “a kind master, [who] placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me”.

The film thinks otherwise, making one particular instance of cruelty the tipping point. It also adds a couple of white-on-black rapes, plus Turner being galvanised by the terrible conditions of other slaves, witnessed while touring local plantations as a preacher.

Much is made up, other moments – Turner going back to kill a baby initially forgotten in the slaughter of a family, for instance – omitted. The real circumstances of his capture are less flattering than the film suggests.


The Birth of a Nation: how Nate Parker failed to remake history
Read more
But most crucial is the altering of his motivation. We see a cob of corn appear to fill with blood in Turner’s hands, which he takes as a sign to attack. But we don’t see him then discovering “on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters and numbers with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens”. Might knowing this was his prompt muddy our admiration?

Parker is not the first person to have appropriated someone’s biography for their own propaganda – no matter how justified the cause may be. He’s not even the first person to have done it with Nat Turner. TR Gray, a slave owner who interviewed Turner in jail and who transcribed his statement, frames its written version within his own dubious declarations. In 1967, William Styron wrote a novel imagining Turner’s life story. It won the Pulitzer prize, but many objected to its portrayal of the slaves as dim, Turner as bumbling and prone to sexual violence and the slave owners as sweet if naive.

Fiction films are not documentaries, but playing fast and loose with key real figures, while claiming the authority that history gives, is irresponsible. It is also unnecessary. 12 Years a Slave was remarkably faithful to its source. Its one major change was to downplay the endless false hope towards the end of Solomon Northup’s incarceration.

That film succeeded not just because it told us that slavery was bad, as Parker’s does; likewise, to take another example, Suffragette did more than inform us that women ought to have had the vote. Both showed us what it was really like for those who had to cope in such appalling situations, what motivated them to keep living, as well as what drove those whose views we now think abhorrent. To lay it on thick is forgivable. Painting such a false portrait is not.

 

[teacher]

This movie is not what you think it is....It covertly wants blacks to not be rebels and be good little negroes or else be punished by the whiteman....the only good thing the movie did was show how whites used Christianity to justify what they were doing and to make black subservient by default.

 

[CinnaSlim]

retorts? i didnt see the movie. I just wanna hear opinions.

 

[Birnin Zana]

retorts? i didnt see the movie. I just wanna hear opinions.

Disagree with the video.

-The notion that Elizabeth Turner was some benevolent individual is not taking into account the context of the time. Slaves weren't allowed to read, unless their masters taught them. That Nat was taught to read because of her isn't surprising at all.

Not to mention, she wasn't benevolent nor was she a white savior: she took young Nat away from his family, which was a painful moment for Nat's mother to deal with. She showed zero remorse for that whatsoever, believing its her right to do so. Then she only teaches him to read the bible, saying that other books are not for him.

-The girl in the vid didn't like that Sam Turner was apparently portrayed as a man who did what he did because he was broke. The reality is, slavery was not only evil, it was a lucrative business. There's a reason why it lasted as long as it did in the south: the southern economy was highly dependent on it.

All that being said, that's not even the point of the film or of Sam Turner being in the film. The point is, Sam Turner had an opportunity NOT to do what he did, yet he not only did it anyway, he pulled rank on Nat and the others in his plantation, reminded them that he is the master and they are the slaves and that they should remember that. Hence why Sam met his fate by the end of his film.

-The Christianity subplot was going on throughout the entire movie, to say it was barely touched on is not accurate, imho. The movie also explained Nat's reasoning as well as his plan. One can argue that the plan itself was streamlined a bit, but I guess she wanted some super-complex plan, which isn't necessary when a straightforward (and logical) approach was available.

-She just seems to have an issue with Nate's interpretation of slavery. In her mind, all slave masters were evil to their core and super oppressors. Meanwhile, Nate showed that some slaves masters were pieces of shyt, some were downright evil, and some (Sam Turner) did it because that simply was how things were back then. That it took Nat leaving his plantation to see just how messed up slavery was makes a lot of sense. After all, wasn't it Harriet Tubman who said that she could've freed a lot more slaves, but said slaves didn't even know or acknowledge their situation?

-She said that there was no black women in the film that had no opinion or intelligence of her own volition. Completely disagree with that.

It was Nat grandmother who kept the family together from the beginning of the film onward. We see Nat's mother trying to protect her son and even try deftly to get him back, only for Elizabeth Turner to firmly deny her requests.

Cherry Turner especially play a major role in the plot in two key instances:

Spoiler

After Cherry was assaulted by slave patrols, Nat went to were she was recovering, begging her to tell her who did it to her. Cherry refused, instead reciting scripture and telling him to leave it to God. Being that Nat is very close to his faith and the words come from Cherry, he lets it go. If the opposite were to happen, Nat would've tried to find the slave patrolled would've very likely be killed or be on the run, thus the rebellion doesn't happen.

Later in the movie, the rebellion is about to begin. Before it starts, Nat visits Cherry who is still recovering. He tells her his plans. Cherry's views evolved: rather than telling him to leave it to god like before, she not only approves, she even goes as far as to tell him to do it for her and those in the plantation. Whatever doubts Nat had about his actions were gone after that.

The black women of the movie were very crucial to the plot.

-She also said that--paraphrasing--that Nat Turner was written as the only slave of note and that everyone was lesser, so to speak, and interprets it as a reflection of Nate's hubris as far as the film is concerned.

Few things on that:

=The movie focused mostly on Nat Turner, and there is nothing wrong with that. He is the central character of the film and the one who sparked the rebellion and got it going.

=I felt the supporting cast were great, across the board, including the slaves. I did not interpret them as lesser; rather they are like many people back then and now: few people want to rock the boat, thus no major move happens. I do think it would've been cool if we got to know more about the other slaves that rebelled, but again, that wasn't necessary, as this was a Nat Turner film, focused on Nat Turner.

-She complained about the lack of gore and scope concerning the rebellion--which is a fair complaint--but its simply a matter of budget constraints. The current rebellion on film almost didn't happen as well, they had neither the time or budget to make a bigger rebellion happen.

Plently of other stuff I disagreed with, but it is what it is. @CinnaSlim, I'd strongly recommend that you see the movie for yourself at some point and judge accordingly from there. You may end up agreeing with most, if not all, of that vid's points, but there is a good chance that you'll disagree with a lot of it. Only you can determine that by watching the film for yourself.

 

[Captain Crunch]

Since my thread in TLR flopped, I'll post my reaction from seeing it today

First off this is mandatory viewing for all children 10 and up.

Second I'm pretty emotionless but, I felt something in my soul and my heart was racing the first 20-40 minutes. Nate did this movie with the spirit of the ancestors

So many things in this movie can be said the same today, so it's foolish to say black people have progressed so much.

1. Black people breaking their backs to make white people rich.

2. How the dominant society takes a special one(young Nat), molds him/her in their making so they won't do anything for their people.

3. The plantation had slaves having fun, but at the end of the day they're still dominated by whites.

4. Preachers being used to pacify black people.

5. When Nat's wife said some blacks were killed just for their blackness

6. Just because a white person is nice to you, doesn't mean they practice white supremacy(ex Nat's master)

7. c00ns who try to stifle black progress(the James Earl Jones looking dude who was shook that they killed massa)

8. White supremacists despise blacks who try to get freedom.

I get bored easily with most forms of media, but BoN gripped me() from start to finish.

The cinematography; acting, and directing were top notch.

Nate should but won't get an Oscar for this.

The only things I was iffy on was them playing joyful/tear jerking music when young Nat was playing with that white boy and them shouting out Mel Gibson in the credits

 

[Birnin Zana]

BOAN will be the first movie featured in the African International Film Festival.



Dope poster