During last night’s Golden Globes monologue, Amy Poehler said the following: “After 12 years A Slave, I will never look at slavery the same way again.” At first I was confused, and then I deciphered her meaning. What she was saying (I think) is that Steve McQueen‘s movie is redundant — that we all know that slavery is and was evil, and so who needs to sit through an artful, brutally frank recreation of what Solomon Northup went through 160 years ago? That’s what I was thinking before I saw it at Telluride. Who needs it? And then it began and I was reminded what knockout movie art can sometimes feel like. Watching 12 Years A Slave awoke me to a reality that I’ve been aware of all my life, but which I hadn’t really felt. I never let it in. And now I have. But Amy Poehler didn’t. Okay, she might have but the joke definitely sucked.