Because Everybody Else Has One

Even putting aside Green Lantern, it's a pretty interesting week for films with a couple of comedies being particularly pleasant surprises. I Am Slave is this week's harrowing art film. This time the laugh-a-minute subject is modern day human slavery - specifically an 18 year old North African enslaved by an Arab family in London. That, in a nutshell, is the plot. And therein kind of lies the problem. The film's greatest strength by far is just how emotionally draining it is and if its sole intention was to really put the audience through the grinder as it educates them about the reality of slavery in modern England, then it is nothing less than an unequivocal success.           As a piece of storytelling, though, it is rather less impressive. It it somewhat heavy handed and the characterization is fairly shallow but, more than anything, its greatest failing in my eyes is the fact that I started to lose patience with it fairly quickly. While the acting an...