Free Republic

If you believe press reports, Twelve Years a Slave is undeniably one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- film of 2013. Not due to any skill in filmmaking, which remains to be seen, or audience response -- the film was only released last weekend. But solely because Slave (directed by Steve McQueen, not the dead one with the motorcycle, I'm pretty sure), is this year's PC film, one made for the single purpose of preaching a very contemporary and meticulously constructed racial message. In this it joins a number of other recent pictures such as The Help and...

Culture: Slavery's stain on American history cannot and should not be whitewashed. But neither should it be portrayed as worse than it was to serve a political agenda. And yet this is what Hollywood is doing with its slate of horror films about slavery and its legacy. "The Butler" — which claims to be "based on a true story" — opens with a stomach-turning scene of white cruelty. A boy picking cotton on a Georgia plantation watches his mother dragged off to a shack where she's raped by a white landowner, who not long after the assault coldly walks up...