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I'm curious if the critics who took a massive crap on this movie back in the day really knew anything about the history of slavery (looking at you, Ebert). One would think they would've applauded how real and unvarnished the writing/story is. Did they think that Onstott and Norman Wexler just invented forced breeding and pseudoscientific racism for the sake of shock? Also, this was a popular novel for years before the movie was made. What were all the nay-sayers expecting? Surely they kind of knew what they were getting into when they sat down to watch it.

I'll allow that a few things don't hold up well today: the acting is a little bit over the top sometimes (Susan George can be downright unbearable in some scenes), there's not really any historical evidence of Mandingo fighting, and I find the notion of any real "romance" between an enslaver and the enslaved to be more than a little stomach-churning. But pretty much everything else about this movie was accurate. If it makes you feel gross and horrified and outraged, maybe it's because - SHOCKER - slavery was gross and horrifying and outraging. How are you gonna trash the movie for showing you exactly what it said it was gonna show you? It's like going to see Star Wars and being pissed off that there's so much space travel going on.

As far as I know, with the exception of Goodbye Uncle Tom (talk about sleaze), this was the first time that the real, twisted logic of plantation life was ever shown on the screen. It wasn't watered down, it wasn't explained away, and we don't get to walk away with some happy ending to make us feel all warm and fuzzy. I figure the people who made this probably weren't primarily interested in showing the horrible realities of slavery, but whatever their motives, that's what they ended up doing, and they deserve credit for that.

Lastly, I have to tip my hat to whoever decided to get Muddy Waters for that theme song. It's hands-down the best part of the whole movie in my opinion.

Let me just go ahead and say what everyone else is thinking: what's wrong with just making an honest, unvarnished biopic about the Beatles? They're the biggest band of all time. They're the 20th Century in a nutshell. Doesn't that make their story worth telling on its own, without making us all wade through some distracting, artsy-fartsy angle? "Birth of The Beatles" tried to do it, but it looks like crap now, and they got too much of their info from Pete Best, who has the personality of cardboard and the brains of a bowl of oatmeal. "Nowhere Boy" was pretty good, but again, can't just make a movie about John Lennon getting into music, can we? Better throw in the old busted Oedipal legends for some extra flavor!

I get it. Most people going to the movies are not total rock music geeks, nor total dorks about The Beatles. Filmmakers and studios probably don't want your average Joe to get bored and walk out. But aren't The Beatles worth an honest examination?

Let's state some facts:

When the Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960, they were a bunch of dorky, green, naïve suburbanite kids with garbage equipment who had no idea what they were doing. They sucked.

Part of why they sucked was that their "genius" leader John Lennon decided they should have a bass player that didn't know how to play at all, just because he was a good-looking, pseudo-beatnik painter, and Lennon wanted his band to look artsy.

They got good because they played for hours, and hours, and hours in front of people. They learned how to perform, not just to play, but to entertain people. It was an old-school, vaudevillian, total immersion in showbusiness and stagecraft that most musicians today can't fathom. That experience is what transformed them from a bunch of moronic teenagers into the greatest rock band of all time, and seeing that education, that transformation unfold on screen could be magical.

But no, what seems to be more important is conjuring up this myth that Astrid Kirchherr and Stu Sutcliffe, who in reality were footnotes to the Beatles' story, drove an apparently sexually confused and perpetually pissed off John Lennon (and no one else, who was that other guy, "Paul" something?) to create the greatest musical act of the 60's because he was so bitter that he couldn't be as cool as/sleep with either of them.

Look, this Hamburg period in the Beatles' story is super-important. There's not a lot of tangible remnants of that period, it wasn't very well-documented. A lot of it has just passed into legend. And now, thanks to the dudes that made "Backbeat," this mythical, too-cool-for-school Beat Martyr Stu Sutcliffe is the focal point of the story, instead of Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. That's not fair, and I hope one day that someone makes a movie about this subject and actually tells the truth. After all the hours those guys put in on those tiny, crappy stages, they deserve it.

I really like this movie a lot, if for no other reason than it shows how dark and paranoid alcoholism gets. I love the Beats, especially Kerouac, but it's a turbo-bummer how his life ended up, and "Big Sur" really nails how awful it is. Kerouac's story is a reminder that you only have ONE life. You only have ONE body and mind. For the most part, you only get ONE shot at relationships. You don't need to be plastered to be yourself.

If you can sift through the drunken self-hatred, there's still some good Beat nuggets in there: the Buddhist explorations, the meditation, the zest for life. It's a nice juxtaposition to Kerouac's paranoid state.

Big Sur is the Beat Dream gone bad.