Allan Ginsburg (Daniel Radcliffe)

I am not going to talk about how an ivy league education is wasted on a bunch of privileged boys who are so bored out of their minds that their only recourse is tearing up a library of classics. Nor am I going to salivate over this group who is considered to have ushered in a most celebrated time in literary history: The Beat Poets. In John Krokidas’s film Kill Your Darlings, they are not literary rebels; rather, they are reckless, if not, wayward hollow wannabees who are angst ridden over their sexuality, momma and poppa, and their wealth. They’re just … there.

I will ask a question, however: Just where is the beat in Kill Your Darlings?

Set in 1944 and moving between Paterson, New Jersey, Harlem, and Manhattan, Krokidas closes in on the early life of men who defined the Beat generation: Lucien Carr (played by Dane DeHaan), Allan Ginsberg (played by Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston). They are not very interesting young men, and you wonder how they could carry on a conversation; rather, Krokidas dramatizes them as students in search of some kind of purpose while others are fighting for equality in America and are across the pond fighting for democracy.

Ginsberg and Kerouac (Jack Huston) in New York

Ginsberg lives in Paterson, New Jersey with his mentally unstable mother and his father Louis Ginsberg, a published poet. He leaves for Columbia University, and there, he meets Carr, Burroughs, Kerouac, and more exposure to anti-semitism. Radcliffe carries well the existential load in this movie, and his Ginsberg is bookish and awkward but a young man who burrows his way through this bohemian world filled with drugs, sex, liquor, and, of course, school suspensions.

Let me answer my own question, Where’s the Beat? The Beat is in the murder of David Kammerer, Lucien Carr’s longtime lover. Michael C. Hall—you remember him from HBO’s Six Feet Under)– wonderfully fleshes out Kammerer, the jilted lover whose desperation for the young Carr leads to a fatal struggle between the two. The Kammerer-Carr affair, murder, and trial are the pulses of film and complement its title: Kammerer indeed is the darling that is killed.

Oh, by the way, Kill the Darlings, a command for writers to do away with ‘extraneous ornament’, is largely attributed to the novelist William Faulkner; but research reveals the command belongs to British Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, who, in his 1914 Cambridge lecture “On Style,” said, ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings!’

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The Look of Freedom
Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler), Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Margaret (Quvanzhané Wallis), and Anne (Kelsey Scott) Northup in New York

Freedom. It never is given without a fight. Even if you were born as a free person of color moving and having your being in the United States of America, that birthright could be ripped from you at a moment’s notice, and from thenceforth, you had to work to take it back. 12 Years A Slave delves into this very real fact of life during antebellum slavery. Directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave is a poignant quest. The film is based on the slave narrative of the same name written by Solomon Northup in 1853.

Bondage

Needless to say, the story is brutal as it courses through the vein of the innocuous plantation regime. The film exposes the time wherein people salivated over the ownership of African flesh not only for labor and economic gain; also, McQueen draws out the psychological and emotional pleasure plantation owners enjoyed in having full possession of and the rights and title to the African body. Some easily judge this as insanity; but I strongly maintain that this practice is a part of sanity no human being should ever want to touch […] again.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars, and his portrayal of Northup marks clearly his burden of representation. Yes, Northup is front-and-center but it is quite obvious in Ejiofor’s furrowed brow that he is telling the story of thousands who labored within that plantation system—some for life.

Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) pleads with Northup to end her life.

All of the usual suspects are dramatized to the fullest extent: capture and kidnap; rape of slave women; slave chains; the slave ship; the auction block; the separation of families; the ubiquitous crack of the overseer’s whip, and death. In each instance, McQueen dares us to look away.

12 Years a Slave plays through November 28 at the Ross in Lincoln.

Listen to review of 12 Years a Slave on NET’s Friday Live! @ 45:56

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K2, The Summit

K2. The Summit. We all know of the majesty of Mount Everest. It is the highest mountain on earth. K2, its sibling is the second highest mountain on earth. It is located in the Baltistan region of Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan and the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang, China. It is a jagged, steep slope with a wall of ice called a serac, that would make you beg for its mercy as you climb. Yes, K2 demands respect, even reverence, but this mountain claims one in four mountain climbers who attempt to scale its walls. On August 1, 2008, K2 claimed the lives of eleven ambitious and experienced mountain climbers when an avalanche up rooted the fixed ropes installed to lead climbers as they descended the summit. Documentary filmmaker Nick Ryan explores the cause of these deaths in The Summit, his documentary about what is called the “deadliest day on the world’s most dangerous mountain.” The Summit is a terrifying reenactment of this expedition.

Gerard McDonnell, one of the casualties of The Summit

Ryan evokes a harrowing vulnerability within a frigid universe that is out there in the white of snow that hugs tightly to black mountains. Mountaineers whose bodies are packed into down parkas and other gear sleep—sleep?–in tents as a snow storm rages against the mountain; and it is night. Someone’s tent and all of his gear have been swept down the slope. He is open to the elements. Who will take him in? The rule is to “walk on by” climbers who are injured or on the brink of death. To help means not only a missed opportunity to reach the summit or the next camp base in time; to reach out and touch anybody on the trek could mean your own death.

The Summit is an excellent re-telling of events, and it is heartbreaking as each bio-sketch unfolds about the 11 courageous men who did not make it.

The Summit plays through November 7 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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“It is forbidden to kill and therefore all murderers are punished. Unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” I would like to add to Voltaire’s quote, “and to get away with murder and live to tell it regardless of circumstance surely will kill any and all feelings of remorse.” The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s arresting documentary features members of a killing machine in 1968 Indonesia, when its government was overthrown. The threat of communism followed, and executioners Anwar Congo–the dashing star of this cinematic jaunt–Herman Koto and their comrades killed more than 1,000 Chinese suspected of communism. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer appeals to Anwar Congo’s love of action film stars such as John Wayne and James Bond to recreate on camera those very acts of killing. The behind-the-scenes collaborations and discussions and the casting call are distressful; even more wearing on the spirit is the joie-de-vivre the executioners demonstrate as they talk about why each carried out the murders and reproduce with abandon how they did them. They are national heroes. Their communities welcome them and celebrate their pasts. They carry on the ordinary of everyday. They shop with their families. They dance. They sing. They tell bawdy jokes. More troubling, they smile and they smile and they smile. For the full 159 minutes, the camera, along with the audience, searches for grand gestures of sorrow or guilt. Even Anwar Congo hunts among his friends for a way to handle his sleepless nights that are filled with nightmares. Yet, all the camera can marshal is a glimmer of regret from him, but it is too little too late.