Black Panther (2018), dir Ryan Coogler

Apparently no separate thread for this one yet. So, poster:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DB4dYS1WsAIN7ro.jpg:large

First teaser broadcasts tonight during the NBA finals.

(And if the image didn't show up for any reason:

Witness the legend. The new poster for @MarvelStudios' #BlackPanther is here. Watch Game 4 tonight for the premiere of the teaser trailer. pic.twitter.com/Pzj9LqIJ6x

— Disney (@Disney) June 9, 2017

Yay, etc.)

that is one fugly poster

dammit thought this was gonna be a Donald Nielson biopic

really looking forward to this

this stands the best chance of being the first not-boring Marvel movie

I hope not, as Marvel movies are the only proven palliative for my insomnia. Because they're so boring, do u see.

movie posters are so bad now

photoshop must be real hard because no-one who makes movie posters seems to be able to use it well

"set phasers on 'smoulder'"

Sometimes, when I think back to my youthful vehement opposition toward the notion of graphic design becoming a licensed professional organization, I understand how people become conservatives.

I have high hopes for this movie. Every coworker I've talked to about Black Panther's first appearance in the Captain America movie agreed that he was the best character in that one -- it helped he was the only one who got a real plot arc

Wow...didn't notice that till now pic.twitter.com/7O976veAZf

— Black Girl Nerds (@BlackGirlNerds) June 9, 2017

ran across this on Twitter and now regret my joke

It can be both

god when is this going to end

When you stop complaining about it, so, never.

haha

Is there a photoshop setting that will fix man-spreading?

The avatar makes me read that Disney tweet in Mickey's voice.

Okay, we are live...

HERO. LEGEND. KING. Watch the teaser trailer now. #BlackPanther pic.twitter.com/2d0lGExv81

— Black Panther (@theblackpanther) June 10, 2017

well that looks good

Caught a glimpse of Ramonda and Everett Ross. Looks like a mashup of Priest and Coates runs.

Good use of Run The Jewels for trailer music

Scene by scene breakdown, should you want one

http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/what-we-learned-from-marvels-first-black-panther-trailer.html

Could this be the first Hollywood movie to include the word "tricknology" in dialogue?

Seriously who writes like that? People who get paid for it, I guess.

Referring to the vulture thing Ned linked.

That poster image could too easily double for the film's inevitable gay porn parody.

It's a Hewi Newton reference

http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2.31-Stapp_Huey_JJ_60D_02312.jpg

oh someone already pointed that out

shakey why do you hate-read these threads? you're turning into morbius

Lots of photos and things and stuff these last couple of days, etc. etc.

http://ew.com/movies/black-panther-marvel-portraits/black-panther/

I feel like this one is going to be light on jokes.

I'm still bothered by the bit in the trailer where he takes off in his cool hoverplane but there is absolutely no sign of downforce on the water beneath. YOU CANT HEAR ECKTHPLOZUNS IN SPAAAACE

Wakandan tech can overcome Newtonian physics duh

these movies could stand to have a few fewer jokes anyway

or better jokes

And have a new poster.

Check out the new @theblackpanther San Diego Comic-Con poster that just debuted in Hall H! #BlackPanther pic.twitter.com/pxEGB5b7bV

— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) July 23, 2017

New poster...

Bringing a brand new #BlackPanther poster to you 1st! We hit theaters Feb 16, but you can check out the new trailer from @marvelstudios NOW. pic.twitter.com/KFbA9A9cG8

— Chadwick Boseman (@chadwickboseman) October 16, 2017

And new trailer.

Long live the king. Watch the new trailer for Marvel Studios' #BlackPanther. In theaters February 16! pic.twitter.com/fs1UKzjiqN

— Black Panther (@theblackpanther) October 16, 2017

shut up and take my money

^^^
Yep

gil scott heron! too much!

I'm team Killmonger now

I am Team Killmonger's Barber

understandable

I'm finally watching Get On Up and it's not as if I didn't love Boseman already but omg I cannot wait for this movie

also, I am now disappointed that there wasn't a deleted scene from the battle royale in Civil War where T'Challa pauses and think to himself "Dammit, I'm in the middle of a honky hoedown"

http://franklinmena.tumblr.com/post/166555017700/amisakadarthana

http://78.media.tumblr.com/56aa96ee26f4d5c4b801871ece09a9a3/tumblr_oy1s6quxvD1qkxt2yo1_500.jpg

trying not to get too hype for this after being mildly let down by ragnarok but it’s not working tbh

XP justifies those Hobbit movies imo

New international trailer...

#ブラックパンサー が守る＜超文明国・ワカンダ＞の秘密とは…⁉️

クールな音楽にノったド迫力アクション満載の予告編解禁✨

ビルの壁を駆け抜ける！車の上に跳び乗る！ブラックパンサーのアクションシーンにも注目‼ https://t.co/cohLlcVGkz #ブラパン pic.twitter.com/cAghnCZGOu

— 『アベンジャーズ』［公式］ (@AVG_JP) December 11, 2017

Am I the only one not really into the look of this one? Shame because BP is one of my absolute favorite Marvel characters and this looks like 75% candy colored CGI and bad line deliveries.

now is not the time to not be excited abt Black Panther

cmon man

What? I can't feel 'meh' about something I was expecting to be 'wow!!'? C'mon (wo)man

NO

EXCITEMENT ONLY

WAKANDA!!!

Tickets on sale...

http://media.comicbook.com/2018/01/black-panther-pin-1072701.jpeg

I assume that serves a similar purpose to the black stuff white athletes put under their eyes

this movie is gonna rule

is this really gonna be 4 hours long?

Once Upon a Time in Wakanda

is this really gonna be 4 hours long?

Part of me wants to get opening Thursday night tix at the Uptown 1, but frankly I would rather enjoy this in the company of my favorite lady at a matinee so I’m waiting

i just can't take how long movies are now, Peter Jackson really has a lot to answer for

all I heard is that the "first cut" was 4 hours, which let's be real, this thing will probably wind up 2.25 or 2.5 like all of the superhero films do.

IIRC it said 132 minutes when I got my tickets, so a little over 2 hours.

i'm good w/ that

good to hear it's normal length

still not good, but ongoing o_O

Sorry for any confusion the previous photo may have caused. It was unaltered, but shot under a bright light at the pin store and may have caused differences in color. We are constantly posting all of the many new pin releases and sometimes make mistakes. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/05r8xELEk6

— Disney Pins Blog (@DisneyPinsBlog) January 8, 2018

disney pins blog, stop caping

gee maybe social media sucks

Or maybe it’s true Disney secretly put down millions of dollars to cast a superhero movie entirely with black people (and Andy Serkis) so that they could secretly reveal that the Black Panther is... Jimmy Garoppolo

Anyway, one last trailer or ad or whatever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJBmeqpw3DY

yep, day one

While we gear up, good interview/profile of Christopher Priest here

http://www.vulture.com/2018/01/christopher-priest-made-black-panther-cool-then-disappeared.html

kind of amazing to think about what was going on with the black panther party forty-five years ago and now this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIKnmVqCFO4

https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-black-panther-toy-commercial-is-more-important-tha-1821802836

Good read

https://theundefeated.com/features/behind-the-scenes-marvel-black-panther/

fairly muted reaction so far

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2018/01/30/black-panther-first-reactions-declare-film-astonishing-iconic-and-save-blockbusters/1077768001/

Good for Coogler, thank goodness DuVernay didn't do this.

this seems... encouraging

I mean you can never trust the early twitter reactions but it's cool that people are so excited

I can already sense every stage of the hype/thinkpiece/backlash cycle and I just want to end earth

You're in luck, it's likely to end quite soon

Be good to hear about the movie but lookit

the reviews are like OMG

Why is this coming out in February? Just curious as I thought January and February were used as studio dumping grounds for shit they expected to bomb. Has that trend changed?

that trend has changed a bit, but it is also Black History Month

Ah, good point.

also since marvel moved to three movies a year i think the surefire blockbusters get the summer/autumn slots and the 'experimental' one gets the early-doors slot

also Ms Marvel is scheduled for March (2019), so...

just to spell out what Marvel et al. think makes something "experimental"

kind of surprised by that metric that Ant Man came out in the summer

must have been an off year

Nobody likes ants

So that they can get to Infinity War by May

shit just give us a second Infinity War this year, two for the price of one

if you buy a ticket to an infinity war shouldn't it be good forever?

infinity war never changes

we had tickets to friday AM showing but had to cancel bcz I had a job-interview-kinda lunch and being newly unemployed the lunch had to be priority WAHHH but hopefully we'll hit it up this weekend or Monday AM.

This weekend? ;-) (Good luck with the job hunt!)

just to spell out what Marvel et al. think makes something "experimental"

female hero, not spider-man: experiment!

If the Captain Marvel movie comes with a soundtrack by Sonic Youth feat. Whale, I fear I will be officially unsurprised but also, without fear, unofficially very stoked

Seriously though it’s going to be weird and good not bad

sonic youth, what fucking year is this

imo that whole gif is retroactively defunct from both the past and future, some nice albums and gigs in the decreasing space

dearest mh shall we just have ourselves a Captain Marvel thread

RAGGETT

Please start it up I’m on Zing and in east coast time

I can't because someone someday will figure out my "hornie for brie larson" quotient and indict me on thread creation

many xposts uugh i’m so dumb, i totally thought it opened this week! well yay - next friday’s tickets reinstated

xpost -- you people. Well hold on here.

Never say I don't do anything for you.

Captain Marvel (2019), dir. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

I'd never say that!

disapprove of M B Jordan's haircut; was that devised for the film or is it CANON?

it’s beautiful

yeah wtf that hair is awesome

he looks dope af

Have you studied the known facts of the Captain Marvel movie
― El Tomboto, Tuesday, February 6, 2018 9:05 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry, I was being a little opaque. My point was that BP is coming out during Black History Month, and CM is coming out during Women's History Month. That timing rubs me the wrong way given how irritating it is that it took like 17 movies to get to one whose lead isn't a white man. I think it calls attention to the single-digit-ness of these films within the franchise while kinda also patting themselves on the back for being brave (hence their status as "experimental" in bg's rubric), but I guess it's not objectively offensive and hell I don't work there, it could be a coincidence.

Personally, my only problem with these two movies is that Marvel waited so long to make them that my enthusiasm has waned after a couple total duds and a growing fatigue with the genre.

yeah that’s kinda what i was aiming at with scare-quotes ‘experimental’ but v otm

OST curated by Kendrick is out !
https://pitchfork.com/news/listen-to-kendrick-lamars-black-panther-album-with-sza-weeknd-vince-staples-more/

Three or four keepers; everyone got paid, at least.

4 pics

Have all these people somehow seen this movie already? This reminds me of when David Edelstein did a negative review of Dark Knight years ago and was attacked for a week by people who hadn’t even seen it yet pic.twitter.com/alfPgIUgVC

— Ace Deucey (@RickyRawls) February 9, 2018

Personally, my only problem with these two movies is that Marvel waited so long to make them that my enthusiasm has waned after a couple total duds and a growing fatigue with the genre.

also would really like to read more discussion on the kirby/lee roots of the character seeing as it's still roughly the same formulation at the heart of the current presentation
two white ny jews named a black african superhero "Black Panther"a few months before Seale and Newton formed the Black Panther party? can that possibly be right?
*lights the sic signal*

let's see if this links from the root
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--_zfhoZUF--/c_fit%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_80%2Cw_636/sdpshb0mwth5vjzxtpjy.jpg

TIL the panther is a leopard

a MINOR point, at best

People's interest in the purity of a Rotten Tomatoes score is, like, life's greatest puzzle to me

people have given up on the real world and funnel their spare energies into culture wars.

soundtrack is fucking great, it's kind of a crew TDE album with some well selected guest stars

I like the 2 Chainz/Q, Khalid, Vince, and Mozzy tracks. I can live without the rest (on first listen).

Personally, my only problem with these two movies is that Marvel waited so long to make them that my enthusiasm has waned after a couple total duds and a growing fatigue with the genre.

for real for real. i am sorry i ever read a comic book in the first place.
― Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out. (ulysses), Friday, February 9, 2018 1:08 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this totally...like i just...can't watch fucking comic book movies anymore, i last tried w/wonder woman but just lost interest a quarter way through (and it's probably a fine movie)

That’s why I liked Thor: Ragnarok so much as Taika Waititi seems to have deliberately put stuff into the film just to fuck with the standard presentation(casting Jeff Goldblum to be Jeff Goldblum, deliberately writing a Kirby-CGI rock monster part for himself with his native accent, the “shoulda brought more pamphlets” bits, etc)

remember back when we didn't really have a "standard presentation" for these things

...no?

I mean, on a basic level for Marvel junk the answer is "before they made Iron Man" because their productions have a somewhat enforced consistency in tone. DC has slightly different problems.

The big comic movie thing that made it clear to me that there's been a big shift in formula over the years was WB thinking Bryan Singer's attempt to seamlessly reboot Superman from the past franchise, when comic book movies were not really using that template, fell flat.

at this point we're yet another decade past and a Christopher Reeve style of Superman would probably seem fresh and intriguing

pointless (BUT INTRIGUING!) question: is Michael B Jordan the first actor to cross over from a non-canonical Marvel movie into a Cinematic Marvel Universe film as a different character?

Not entirely if you think about Josh Brolin's upcoming May here.

xp: Chris Evans did it too, and also crossed over from playing Human Torch in a non-MCU Fantstic Four movie.

oh yeah, i forgot about evans as the human torch... also jordan as human torch!
xp I know Brolin is Cable... who was he in the noncanonical films?

Well what's the definition of noncanonical? MCU = Thanos; Fox/Marvel = Cable.

i guess i thought deadpool was canonical. didn't realize it wasn't... except now it is! wheeeeeeee

it's maybe canonical in the Fox mutantverse

which still has absolutely nothing to do with the Avengers

so they still have to kinda flip a switch and say deadpool is part of disney? that's presumably the plot of deadpool 3: the canonsolidation

it’s really doubtful they’ll combine their projects, it’d be a soft or full reboot, or right before both ventures die in a fire, they’ll combine everything for no reason

they pushed back the new mutants movie until next year (??) so maybe they’re considering cutting all the fox x-men references out, doing minor reshoots, and making that the first marvel movie universe one

Priest's review from the premiere, with reference to McGregor.

Entirely unsurprising news: this is great.

Two days to go! For me at least.

thanks for that Priest link; fun to see his takes!

No spoilers but... Michael B Jordan is a distractingly good-looking villain.

Also the best MCU villain so far, with apologies to another Michael (Keaton).

this was dope

"DUDE, IT'S A BUGATTI SPACESHIP!"

seeing this midday tomorrow cannot waaaaaaait

Andy Serkis was p funny

So damn good.

so so so good

ps wales is now the wakanda* of the UK (see flag on far right of picture)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DWHjvvlX0AExsFf.jpg

*small, hides itself away, will one day rule the world

In a lot of trouble when mining stops.

Ha

this is great. wonder woman great. christopher nolan batman movies great. letitia wright is phenomenal

wonder woman great. christopher nolan batman movies great.

so it's... not great?

it's great. flash gordon great. superman ii great

now you're fuckin talking

was already psyched to see this, glad to see folks here are feeling positive about it

The running time, as usual for superhero movies, gives me pause.

as an inordinately impatient flibbertygibbet of a gemini i have to say i didn't feel the length at all

never mind the length, feel the width

length only drags at the beginning, in the slower moments when they're not in wakanda. otherwise, i was sucked in and completely unaware of time

Yeah, I am amazed that it's that long, it feels a half-hour shorter.

this is great. wonder woman great. christopher nolan batman movies great.

― reggie (qualmsley), Friday, 16 February 2018 12:03 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah good.
Wait what?
Wait, what?

yeah sorry reggie that's madness

I'm w Alfred on the running times is comic movies. every movie is sooooo long for no reason.

also I'll just assume the last 20 is a big pointless CG battle

wakanda's mythic grandeur feels authentic like the greek accents in themyscira

I'm w Alfred on the running times is comic movies. every movie is sooooo long for no reason.

yeah, Wilson was an hour forty, could have been an hour twenty-nine easy

I don't care for superhero movies, but I adore Lupita N'yongo - is it a big role?

Yes, although Danai Gurira steals the film.

Unlike other overstuffed superhero movies I've seen, I didn't mind the running time because I wanted to keep seeing more of the world they created.

Yes, although Danai Gurira steals the film.

I was already ready for her to steal the film and she did, so for me the REAL film-stealer was Letitia Wright.

Tempted to check this out, although I'm usually disappointed by the hyped superhero movies. But this one looks more stylish than usual.

Anyway yes there's formula at work of course -- Christopher Priest rightly pointed that out in his otherwise wall to wall rave -- but the comparatively focused Big (Intercut) Battle Sequence at the end works well precisely because of how smallish in scale it is. There's a big group battle but not armies, for instance. The wider implications of what happens if Black Panther and company lose lends it all heft without having to demonstrate it in full.

(And I have to say 'Black Panther and company' rather than the 'good guys' because man do Coogler and company do a hell of a job in setting up Erik Killmonger as damaged product of a society who also has more than one damn good point to make throughout the film.)

Anyway, getting back to Wright, her Q Branch scene alone was top notch. Hell, she should be the next Q if Ben W. wants to do something else.

all bond films are bad so no

plus the Q scenes are always the ones that should be cut first (followed by every other scene)

the REAL film-stealer was Letitia Wright

best Q ever (ready for jodie whittaker's Dr W!)

plus the Q scenes are always the ones that should be cut first (followed by every other scene)

The shade of Desmond Llewelyn is sad!

Tbh most bonds would be most improved by completely eliminating the supervillains

Bond operating in this world of middle management politics and never even sure if it's anything but shadow boxing all emanating from Whitehall

The namesh shmiley, georsh shmiley

the car chase sequence was badass. no fucks given about property damage

all bond films are bad so no

wrong, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is good

Letitia Wright and Lupita Nyango and Danai Gurira >>>> everybody else

Also I love Michael B. Jordan, but his demeanor and the backstory did NOT work for me. In the second part of the film, his MIT educated, special forces thing disappeared into something... less interesting.

Would disagree. I found that to be helpful backstory that made the character and Jordan's portrayal of same more complex. You can only do so much in a two hour film.

I loved the contradiction of him being this man with amazing potential living as a raw nerve. All of the power with absolutely no love for or faith in anything. It made it clear that Wakanda needed to move forward with patience, control, and understanding — all the things he never had

This has to be the only time I’ve known exactly what the credits scenes would be, not because I’d heard in advance what they were but because it was well telegraphed exactly what would have to happen, and they both really worked with the film. Both the one providing a coda to the film’s themes and the one linking the movie to Marvel universe dan service fit really well.

fan service, that is
any dans can weigh in as to their level of service

Marvel universe dan service

Enjoyed the hell out of this
Michael B Anthony thirst is real my god he was mesmerizing 😍

Is this a spoilers thread now asking for a me

spoiler: Susan B Jordan is sexxy in this film

2 xy for Mike thirst

FUCK i meant michael b jordan
my brain fucks up his name all the time & it sucks bcz i have loved him forever

michael b *jordan* thirst is real

holy shit @ Susan b Jordan

Are you

koogin yr jords

would u say xp

the scene between him & sterling k brown killed me, so good

Danai Gurira flying around kicking ass in that red dress in the casino was stellar. So many great women in this movie!! Ugh. Heaven.

sidebar: my coworker was college roommates with exec producer Nate Moore

theater was packed at our noon showing which was awesome

HUGE cheer for the “Oakland 1992” title card

Yeah when that happened and Too Short started playing, you kinda felt the theater click into place.

yeah that was the cherry on top for sure

This has to be the only time I’ve known exactly what the credits scenes would be, not because I’d heard in advance what they were but because it was well telegraphed exactly what would have to happen...

― mh, Friday, February 16, 2018

yeah the setup for the second stinger in particular was very nicely done

Took the kids tonight, we all had a fine time. At one point the (African-American) woman sitting next to me turned to her companion and said, "This is some groundbreaking shit." Really felt like it too -- as familiar as all the superhero trappings are, it makes a big difference to a.) set it mostly in mythical Africa and b.) have pretty much everybody on screen except Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis be black. Loved Wakanda, it's totally the realization of 50 years of Afrofuturism. Great cast, and Ryan Coogler sure knows what he's doing.

i loved when they'd wake up after drinking the flower juice and they were in herbie hancock album covers. that was dope.

I want Danai Gurira to beat me up.

"This is some groundbreaking shit." Really felt like it too -- as familiar as all the superhero trappings are, it makes a big difference to a.) set it mostly in mythical Africa and b.) have pretty much everybody on screen except Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis be black. Loved Wakanda, it's totally the realization of 50 years of Afrofuturism.

based on comics from 46 years ago

the breakthrough is when sun ra's band switched from fezzes to egyptian headgear

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5_it5HlEe6Q/Uy5yahccQNI/AAAAAAAACBY/aiofmgzVTV4/s1600/Sun-Ra-fez.jpg

In my twitter I have mostly seen negative takes, mostly of the this is US imperialism variety.

This is in that mode, and was one of the more convincing:

Black Panther is a deeply evil film. It dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints that as villainous, then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the earth slaughtering each other to protect whites. That shit turned my stomach.

— L. (@leslieleeiii) February 17, 2018

Yeah there are obvious limits to the radicalism of corporate superhero movies. (And with the movie playing out a cartoon version of Martin vs Malcolm, there’s never any question about its sympathies.) But anti-spectacle lefties tend to underestimate the value of representation.

A reason I warmed to what he was saying is that he also likes Blade

the notion that blade has better politics seems… strained

sorry ur twitter peeps didn’t get the Inglorious Panther they were expecting

the point twitter is trying to make is undercut a bit by the fact that the on-screen characters come to the same conclusion

ie, they realize they're fighting their own community due to manipulation by their new king and immediately stand down.

based on comics from 46 years ago

Which were groundbreaking too. But obv there's an enormous gulf between a comic aimed at a subset of superhero readers -- a niche of a niche -- and a big-bash Hollywood spectacular that has probably already been seen by more people than have read a Black Panther comic in the past 50 years.

I mean, it’s never clearly spelled out but the implication is that Killmonger’s plan isn’t about justice at all, and is purely about revenge and power, is there. And he pretty much acknowledges he doesn’t care how Wakanda or any country ends up, he just wants to destroy the current world

yeah, the multitude of governments he destabilized elsewhere weren't really done in the name of liberation

the more I think about this take the more garbage it is.

bloody revolution isn’t painted as villainous - it’s painted as sympathetic, even justified, and deeply self-destructive

nobody slaughters anyone in the 3rd act bunfight - somehow with all those edged weapons flashing around not a drop of blood is shed, all downed vehicles seem to be piloted by remote, and the fight literally stops short on a sloppy tongue kiss.

If there’s a case to be made that Black Panther is a deeply evil film (and I sympathize with the tweeter’s distress while yes laughing my balls off at the hyperbole) we could look at its explicit valorization of American-style economic and cultural imperialism

lol xpost coulda just said Neanderthal otm

i do think we're obviously meant to sympathize with Killmonger. he was left fatherless in Oakland in a year that was particularly volatile regarding race relations. some of what he says inspires T'Chaka to change his nations non-interventionist politics.

Killmonger's heel turn isn't him wanting to free the oppressed, it's that he let his politics get muddy along the way. he acts more like an autocrat than a liberator, destroying all of the vibranium plant to ensure he'd never be overthrown in a challenge (since now there would be no Black Panther reward).

he also sows division among his own people and inspires the natives into civil war.

*T'Challa

while we’re on the topic of imperialism and revolution, in a weird way I think the museum scene is my favorite thing in this movie

i want to see the welsh exhibit, where all the weapons are made of LEEKS

just got out of this

fucking loved it holy shit

rank it alongside the nolan batmans

i mean it’s no dark knight rises obv

so many performances of nuclear-grade charisma from actors we’d only usually see rationed out to supporting performances here and there

just a delight from start to finish, with a totally compelling central conflict

Flagging whoever mentions Nolan.

they did kinda have incepted dreams

BG otm but also so many worthwhile roles. no one is stock, no one is rote. the care and the *sweat* that went into making each speaking part *worthwhile* for the actor who would play it shames most of the big popcorners of the past idk, 20 years?

Alfred also otm gtfo with nolan

so many great roles for women too, and they play a key role in wrapping up the conflict

yeah the gender politics are as central as the racial, just not stated as explicitly

so the guys at breitbart like this one

i dislike all superhero movies and am only interested in seeing this for kendrick soundtrack in a theater, haven't seen anyone mention it itt. anything?

it's there, but seldom takes center stage

my prediction that it'd barely be in the film was luckily wrong, it's in there! the symphonic score is pretty well-placed, too

so many performances of nuclear-grade charisma from actors we’d only usually see rationed out to supporting performances here and there

Totally otm, loved this.

Also loved hearing a bit of Mozzy's "Sleepwalkin" towards the end. And loved basically everything else

the soundtrack is barely present. Disappointingly so, I thought

I thought this was...fine. It was fun to see all the cast getting stuck into these roles (and I thought Michael B. Jordan's last scene was genuinely moving) but as a film qua film I thought it was just above Marvel standard

the rhinos were a misstep

It made sense as a choice for the soundtrack to be more prominent in the outside world, but give way to the score in isolated Wakanda

rhinos are an hommage to "the travels of babar" iirc

you know what bugged me most about this was it starts a week after the events of civil war but chadwick boseman’s beard is at least a couple of weeks’ worth of growth longer than it was in that movie

unforgivably sloppy imo

it's no batman begins

Good review

after we saw this my wife said that all the way through she was genuinely worried that nakia or okoye would end up dying at some point

once the credits were rolling and they were both still kicking (uh spoilers i guess) she realised that it might have been cuz movies have kinda conditioned audiences to expect horrible things to happen to sidekicks/women/black people

it's no batman begins

also: final fight involves a monorail

once the credits were rolling and they were both still kicking (uh spoilers i guess) she realised that it might have been cuz movies have kinda conditioned audiences to expect horrible things to happen to sidekicks/women/black people

― albondigas con gas (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, February 17, 2018

and it's deeply disappointing that nothing horrible happens to martin freeman. every minute he's given in the third act made me crazy lol. (not his fault - he's great, just the part is completely unnecessary other than as a defensive placement to counter #notallcolonizers)

his presence was legit the worst thing about this movie cuz every time he showed up all i could think was ‘this is what this shithead believes irl’

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8FVWPpCAAIiWKf?format=jpg&name=medium

jesus

"I really liked hip-hop until the gangsta rap took over. I come from a time when not every rap record was 'nigga' this and 'nigga' that; an earlier socially and morally conscious hip-hop sensibility, when it was, 'Don't call people nigga'."

"But now it's nigga, nigga, nigga, and it's not funny or interesting politically, artistically or socially. I really don't like it.

typical fkn hobbit

haven't seen this yet but was caught by the straight-facedness of this headline

https://shadowandact.com/erik-killmonger-forgotten-wakanda/?utm_content=buffer05587&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

?utm_content=buffer05587&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

oh man now shadowandact.com is going to know we clicked on that link on facebook using a link promoted via the buffer tool :(

we didn't tho

help stet make ad $ again

David Brothers:

The black cast and...ambiance (for lack of a better) is tight. But treating this as a civil rights victory or the first time we’ve been here feels like erasure to me. It’s a Marvel movie with a cool cultural hook after actual decades of lip service. Let it be what it is.

— brothers before others, LLC (@hermanos) February 16, 2018

(part of a small thread)

also, his and Tucker Stone's analysis of Panther's Rage by McGregor & Graham & al got compiled and republished this week :Fear Of A Black Panther

great stuff. thanks for sharing the link.

Film crit hulk had an interesting take : https://filmcrithulk.blog/2018/02/17/black-panthers-right-thing/

yeah that’s a good piece

this part resonated in particular:

Wakanda’s very existence posits that what actually stopped Africa’s development was the theft of Africa itself. From the theft of resources, to the theft of their bodies, to the theft of their very personhood.

In blunt business terms this is fully rampaging:

https://deadline.com/2018/02/black-panther-thursday-night-preview-box-office-1202291093/

Disney is reporting Sunday estimates of $192M over 3-days for Black Panther and $218M over four, however, Black Panther domination is far from over. Industry estimates indicating a $195M three-day for Marvel’s Black Panther and a $225M 4-day. That four-day is a wild number, some have it as low as $218M and others well north of $230M.

As someone noted on Twitter, if you want a bit of hilarity -- if it does in fact hit $230 million, then it will surpass Justice League....'s entire domestic run. ($228 million.)

martin freeman seems to be yet another of these fucking awful wite-pod-people grown from cuttings from the wellerian-wiggins genus. what a fucking cunt.

Meantime, enjoyed this reflection on the movie greatly:

https://theglowup.theroot.com/dont-play-with-our-emotions-black-panther-and-queer-re-1823022917

he's been in a Weller video xpost

there's a surprise!

*thinks up wildwood/mirkwood joke*
*deletes account/brain*

Freeman is hardline leftist Labour iirc, he was one of the early celebrity Corbyn supporters in the leadership election and has been in at least one Lab PPB since.

He also voted and campaigned for Scargill's breakaway Labour party in 2001 because he could never dream of voting for a right wing sell-out like Blair who he's talked about ruining Labour.

he still seems like a complete twat in that old Mail piece.

calzino are there any British people who have been on camera that you don’t hate

mrs slocombe obv

just ignore me, celebz r gr8.

it’s long been established on britisher ilx that martin freeman is bad not good iirc

god almighty have we worked for nothing?

Ye have been disregarded as fringe lunatics long since

Sure many of ye tolerate dr who ffs

gj film crit hulk

thanks for sharing that. I gave up on him over the schtick so long ago and I would have completely missed it and I’m glad I didn’t. that’s the movie I saw, and that’s the way I read it.

it’s a larger issue and it’s the reason artists are always first against the wall but the inability of both woke and racist twitter to tolerate the least ambiguity is maddening.

I thought this was pretty good, though perhaps not as great as it's been made out to be. As per the usual, I doubt I'd be able to sit through it again. Loved the actors, though Freeman was totally unnecessary and Whitaker, as usual as of late, teeters on the brink of terrible.

The only thing that bugged me at all (and it's a minor thing, which I suppose is doubly impressive) is the notion that Martin Freeman's character would be impressed by Wakanda tech in a world with Iron Man and his tech, space aliens, flying fortresses, killer robots, the Vision, Hulks, Thors etc. The bar is set pretty high. Like, "wow, you have hover trains?" Don't pretend to be impressed, Martin Freeman.

It's because he's racist

Wow, thanks for the Film Hulk tip upthread, I forgot he existed, too, but that essay was great.

i wanted to love this but i kinda didn't. everyone looked amazing though. i just wanted to see lupita and danai and black panther go out into the wider world and kick ass for two hours. but the set-up took so long and all you got was the guy from friday night lights being all pissed off. so the korea part was my fave part i guess. the rhino battle just wasn't that amazing. i wish their enemy had been the c.i.a.

also they should have left that c.i.a. guy to die. who wants to see him be a hero? he was dumb.

the rhino battle just wasn't that amazing. i wish their enemy had been the c.i.a.

Ha ha, I agree!

I thought it was pretty obvious that Freeman is supposed to be the white audience surrogate and that his reaction to the whole underground Wakanda setup is genuine, and from essentially the same context as a person who has seen all the preceding terrestrial Marvel movies. He’s also there as a setup for a lot of decent gags. Basically, he is Agent Everett K. Ross, but with a less pathetic back story than the comic book version. I don’t see why people have such a problem except the general hatred of Freeman that seems to pervade the ilxosphere.

My wife asked if this Ross was related to Thunderbolt Ross and I didn't know the answer.

1. How do the suits know when to drop the face mask part? Does that just happen whenever the wearer starts talking or emoting?

2. Why didn’t Shuri make better armor for Nakia and herself? I mean all the vibranium is right there

3. Michael B. Jordan will always be Wallace.

4. Wakanda living appears to be hard on men. Between 1992 and whatever year it is in “present day” MCU, T’Chaka and Zuri both appear to have packed in an extra decade somewhere.

5. I think I like the score the most of about any MCU entry, but I’m a sucker for odd time signatures and syncopation.

6. Oh and the line outside before our showing was as long around the block as it was when I saw The Force Awakens at the same place three years ago.

I thought this was...fine.

Thanks, I've translated that and I figured as much.

So many awesome and it beautiful gems in this. I really didn't expect to care for this since I don't like the Marvel movies, but I'm so glad I was wrong. Shuri should get her own movie, btw.

Michael B. Jordan will always be Wallace.

i get where you're coming from with this since wallace is such an brilliantly-written, indelibly-performed part but he's more than proved himself enough since to put distance between himself and wallace

i really liked the way killmonger's pain and vulnerability is always visible underneath his anger and aggression - it really is another great performance

5. I think I like the score the most of about any MCU entry, but I’m a sucker for odd time signatures and syncopation.

my classically-trained percussionist wife was really impressed fwiw

I didn’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that I can’t help but see Wallace when he’s on, and/or Wallace informs everything he does, but I can’t tell which is going on. Especially in a role like this. He was great of course, I mostly agree with everyone saying he’s the best villain in the MCU so far. To veer off into fanfic territory for a minute, I feel like he and Loki could have had some good conversations.

7. N’Dajaka / Killmonger’s MO isn’t the only thing rooted in his time with the black ops JSOC whatchamajig. His outlook and his stated goals are all a projection of American Exceptionalism and neoconservative interventionism onto Wakanda and the African diaspora. He doesn’t even want to start on the continent, he wants to disrupt world capitals in Europe, Asia and North America first - classic USA.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a President make a speech as good as T’Challa’s in the mid-credits, though.

A...black president?

Cmon man

His outlook and his stated goals are all a projection of American Exceptionalism and neoconservative interventionism onto Wakanda and the African diaspora.

yeah despite all the handwringing over having a white cia guy help save the day i think it's worth noting that ross explicitly says at one point that killmonger's plan is based on the training the cia gave him - there is a lot more explicit criticism of imperialism than critics are giving it credit for

He's also their monster, in a sense. He was abandoned by his African family and raised by the US military, which adds another layer of complexity to the character.

The Attack The Block essay in the 'see also' links under the Film Crit Hulk is very very see also, though it is in Film Crit Hulk voice.

Also a lot of the time, the bits where Erik's pain and vulnerability come through _are_ the bits where he's most Wallace to my eyes - I don't know if that's a specific choice on MBJ's part or if that's just what he looks like when he's in that register.

That’s a better way of putting it, thanks AF.

yeah, i'd def agree with that

Also uncanny likeness

yeah despite all the handwringing over having a white cia guy help save the day i think it's worth noting that ross explicitly says at one point that killmonger's plan is based on the training the cia gave him - there is a lot more explicit criticism of imperialism than critics are giving it credit for

totally agree with this. calling t'challa "a cia-backed monarch," as I've seen, erases the deep world-building and history that the movie works so hard to establish.

then again, i don't think the purpose of watching a film is to vigorously scan for aspects of the film's ideology that i disagree with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

having said that it would have been fun to have shuri pilot the plane instead and send ross up to the surface to get turned into jam by a heavily-armoured attack rhino

i just hope they go into space in the next film and take that afro-futurism to the next level.

Shuri for Nova Prime

i'll bet they could make their entire nation a spaceship...just sayin'....

Re: the ost, it’s very cohesive and makes a great album to listen to.
And « All the Stars » has a classic 80s soundtrack main song feel. Love it. And I haven’t even seen the film !

it was a little disappointing that they didn't manage to fit in a few more tracks from the score, but as mentioned upthread, the score was plenty evocative. Was nice to catch a bit of Mozzy in that final Oakland scene though

I had a moment of fridge logic about a half hour after leaving the movie when I realized the "tell me a story" bit at the very beginning was Eric and his father, not T'Challa and T'Chaka. Also that whole opening was fucking cool as hell, as good as if not better than the similar bit in Wonder Woman.

Oh that is a good point.

Also: piloting a spaceship by meditating - awesome or completely awesome?

I thought that was more "meditating while the autopilot is on"

The meditation-as-rocketship idea has strong Afrofuturist sanction:
https://cdn.albumoftheyear.org/album/20906-om.jpg

(ok lol i can't find my copy of more brilliant than the sun to back this claim up)

I love how they refer to the guards at the start as "these two Grace Jones looking chicks."

I couldn't not think of Willie D saying "YOU REMIND ME OF THAT MONKEY LOOKIN BITCH GRACE JONES"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sWfk1H6ZpE

I wonder if the Coog is a Geto Boys fan considering he got a Too $hort song and two Public Enemy posters in here, much respect

Loved the music in this btw! Baaba Maal!

Would have been neat if they got the Bomb Squad to do some of the score, but the music in this was a nice change of pace, especially for a Marvel movie.

Yeah, however, you gotta remember that the lefty political stuff of Huey P Newton poster/Public Enemy poster represented the bad guy(!!) and the more personal Kendrick stuff represented the good guy, so it makes sense that it was Sounwave

It's kind of wild to think about how the Killmonger ethos of "seize the means of production and weaponize the oppressed" would have fit right in on ca. 1992 Bay Area rap records like 2Pac, Paris and the Coup; and now something being universally praised as one of the most radical movies of all time treats that like an throwback for a bad guy's origin story

Dammmnnnnnn

well in the nineties, the oppressed hadn't weaponized our own passenger planes against us, and we hadn't responded by occupying two countries on bullshit assumptions and pretense

I didn't get that. T'Chaka's brother who was embedded in Oakland as a spy was violating their non-intervention rules by trying to introduce Wakandan technology, even hiring someone to break into Wakanda to steal it at great cost to his own people. It wasn't that they weren't willing to help people outside Wakanda, it was they refused to tip their hand and provide material resources.

Would have been neat if they got the Bomb Squad to do some of the score,

the Bomb Squad split up 25 years ago (almost 28 for the proper lineup!) so nah

I know, I meant reunited in some regard.

Fun observations: Killmonger's "Hey, Auntie" brought the house down in my theater, as did Danai Gurira taking off her wig and throwing it in a guy's face.

oh yeah that was a great line

my favourite gurira moment was her sly little grin and wink to shuri when t’challa arrives in wakanda for the first time - just a lovely little character touch that perfectly punctures the cool detachment we’ve seen from her up to that point

I know, I meant reunited in some regard.

yeah but my point is that they'd suck now if they did

Biggest reactions in my theater were to "hey, auntie," and maybe Killmonger going "'S'up." Driest joke maybe the "sneakers" joke. Lil' sis got a lot of good lines. No one laughed at the soundcloud/mixtape joke.

yeah, all the WHAT ARE THOSE MY SOUNDCLOUD MIXTAPE I MADE IT RAIN jokes were super cringey and I was thinking, "What do these guys think we're teenagers or something?" and then it's like ... "Oh... oh yeah."

i did enjoy ‘what are thoooooose’ because i still miss vine

but those jokes in the hands of the white dudes were maybe intentionally cringey?

they should have had a button on the hologram ship that just said NUT

xpost that is a very generous reading imo, but not out of the realm of possibility

veg otm

and as someone said upthread klaw’s whole thing is stealing black culture literally and figuratively, it kinda makes sense he’d have a mixtape and be embarrassingly enthusiastic about it

it still doesn't explain away "what are thoooooooose"

"what are those" was the biggest laugh by far when I saw it

‘what are those’ might not age well tbf but it made me lol, suck it whiney

when the joke doesn't age well but i keep succin

what are those may have a short shelf life (or not!) but it got a big reaction both times i saw it and it gets Shuri's character across about as efficiently as i can imagine.

Black Panther was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end the Black Panther turned to the camera & said "i am communist now" & then specified hes the exact kind of communist i am

— TORMABLAIEFDHZSJKLNBDSFEJKL PICKASDFJKLFDSNMKOFDSJ (@Tormny_Pickeals) February 19, 2018

(I haven't seen the movie. I don't watch superhero movies anymore. The last one I saw was Captain America: Winter Soldier.)

lol

haha

i can't imagine a less fun crowd to follow than lefty film twitter

For years now I've envied the people who get to do production and costume design for epic films of this sort. This movie just set some pretty high standards in those departments.

there was a piece on The Cut arguing that this should be nominated for oscars in costume design and makeup & hairstyling

wau what an achievement

Holy hell: #BlackPanther with the 5th biggest opening of all time pic.twitter.com/UjIBFJmCdt

— Chris Scott (@iamchrisscott) February 19, 2018

lol

#s 3 and 4 are giving me brain palpitations.

"WHAT ARE THOSE" absolutely killed in my theater.

the costume design was so beautiful i can’t contain my love for the textures & fabrics & cuts & aaaaah

this interview with Ruth E Carter is great
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/2/15/17012262/black-panther-costume-design-ruth-e-carter-interview-ryan-coogler-michael-b-jordan

Okoye's gown during the car chase
Shuri recording T'Challa kicking the armor for science reasons
Shuri and T'Challa's handshake
"... I'm going to feed you to my kids... lol jks we're vegtarians"

Lots of great performances, I've been thinking a lot about Winston Duke as M'Baku, the way he subverted expectations with that line in particular.

the "we're vegetarians" line.

i can't imagine a less fun crowd to follow than lefty film twitter

I can; there must be Marvel Twitter.

"What shall I choose as my online handle, that communicates my status as the arbiter of what is fun? Perhaps... 'Dr Morbius.' Yes, that's it."

j/k MCU twitter is probably tied with the rest of twitter and arbitrating fun is everybody's shared responsibility

i can't imagine a less fun crowd to follow than lefty film twitter

I can; there must be Marvel Twitter.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Monday, February 19, 2018 7:34 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh, i could've expanded my statement to just say "film twitter" in general

except Matt Zoller Seitz, that guy's cool

srsly, everyone's entitled to their own fun. I freely admit I haven't enjoyed any (contemporary) pop culture that's trying to be "fun" in years if not decades.

except Matt Zoller Seitz, that guy's cool

Nah, he's become a Peter Travers clone; the fucker likes everything, especially megabudget multiplex crap.

good enough at twitter, though

The way T'challa glides into the throne room, vs the way Killmonger struts in full of impertinent American swag.
Their fight in free fall.
M'baku vs Killmonger: the former gets set up as the antagonist, but compared to Erik's accession, we appreciate how much he operates within Wakandan hierarchical institutions: he throws his challenge down at the traditional moment, he passes up the chance to imbibe the heart shaped herb because the rightful ruler is still alive, and of course provides military assistance (albeit melodramatically) to defend his sovereign, despite saying that since he saved T'challa's life and thereby no longer being in his debt.

tbh, i could've expanded my statement to just say "film twitter" in general

― T'Chadwick (voodoo chili), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 00:49 (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I still think there's some fat there look again

Their fight in free fall.

This was actually my least favourite bit, it looked 100% lousy CGI up until they actually hit the train.

Chris Scott is having some fun with you, it's Force Awakens / The Last Jedi / Jurassic World / Avengers / Black Panther. I keep forgetting that Jurassic World is that huge, the same way I keep forgetting that Tim Burton's first Alice movie grossed a billion dollars.

This has to be the only time I’ve known exactly what the credits scenes would be, not because I’d heard in advance what they were but because it was well telegraphed exactly what would have to happen, and they both really worked with the film

I'm not sure what the telegraphing of the final one was, other than possibly Shuri asking if T'Challa has brought her 'another broken white boy'?

Their fight in general was a CGI-heavy muddle. I couldn't even tell what T'Challa did to win. The aftermath was great though

A flashy move which ended with him stabbing Erik where the trainline dampeners had temporarily disabled the vibranium, I think.

Tim Burton's first Alice movie grossed a billion dollars

this is the worst movie i've actually in the cinema in service of research for a published piece i'm pleased with (abt the history of the cinematic treatment of alice)

(upside: will self was sat miserably in front of me next to a kid -- i assume his -- with a face painted like an animal: they kid may well have loved the film it but will did NOT lol)

*enters a realm of wonderful ambiguity*

i'm gonna choose to believe that will self had his face painted like an animal during a screening of tim burton's alice

A friend of mine wrote this review.

Now, before we proceed with the ugly part, let’s make a few things clear: no superhero movie needs to have good politics. In fact, none of them have, and probably none of them ever will, because the superhero genre does not lend itself to them easily. Vigilante action, power fantasy, and the idea that some people are just inherently superior are baked right into the recipe and extracted only with great effort and self-analysis; comics have attempted it only rarely and movies never. Furthermore, nobody ought to go into Black Panther — a multi-million-dollar product released by a mega-billion-dollar corporation — expecting it to be progressive, or woke, or even politically aware. That would be terribly naïve, and nobody should have done it; not before the movie was released, and not now.

And that’s good, because, folks, the politics of Black Panther are pretty goddamn terrible. I’m not the first person to point this out — I especially recommend Ricky Rawls and Leslie Lee’s Twitter posts — but the plot of the movie essentially involves a heredity monarchy built on ritual combat monopolizing a natural resource to maintain a nationalist, isolationist system. When a legitimate heir to the throne appears and decides to use that resource to arm and equip oppressed people of color all over the world, he instantly becomes the villain. Rather than participate in anti-imperialist revolution, the country’s leaders opt for a violent civil war; the revolutionary figure (who, to boot, is portrayed like a mad-dog ghetto thug straight out of a paranoid NRA fantasy) is killed and the newly aware monarch settles for teaching inner city kids to code. As Lee puts it, Black Panther “dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints it as villainous, and then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the Earth slaughtering each other to protect whites.”

There’s all sorts of other problems with the movie politically. The presence of the Martin Freeman character, a CIA agent who literally blows black people out of the sky to prevent them from aiding the struggle against people exactly like him, is a huge mistake, particularly in light of the real CIA’s real history with real African leaders. The movie also tries to have its cake and eat it too, in an obvious dodge swallowed whole by way too many Marvel stans, by implying that the problem with Killmonger isn’t his revolutionary intentions, but his violent means.

First of all, I have bad news for you, folks: the question ‘Is violence bad?’ is deeply and profoundly dumb and boring. Yes, violence is bad. So is cancer. The question is what we’re supposed to do about it. A much more interesting question is ‘Is violence effective?’; another is ‘When is violence justified?’ But Black Panther isn’t very interested in those questions, so we’re left to somehow accept that it’s bad for Killmonger to use violence to overthrow oppressive governments that exploit entire countries and wipe out entire populations, but it’s fine for T’Challa and his people to use violence to beat Killmonger — or, for that matter, to fuck around with slavers and child soldiers in neighboring countries, as long as the people they kill are other Africans.

It’s a complete ducking of the issue, made even more absurd by the fact that it takes place in the context of a superhero movie, where the whole genre is built in the idea that it’s fine to use violence against bad people. Do you remember any other Marvel or DC movie that did so much hand-wringing over the concept of violence? Apparently it’s only a concern when the violence might be targeted at the ruling classes. Beyond all that, as Rawls argues, the whole notion is bogus from the premise up: Wakanda has had incredible technology for a thousand years that puts them light-years beyond any other country on Earth, but it’s never even occurred to them to have a system of government slightly more responsive to human needs than a bloodline monarchy predicated on whoever is the best at beating the shit out of people? These aren’t inherent qualities of the narrative. These are choices made by writers, and they’re bad ones.

Lol

Furthermore, nobody ought to go into Black Panther — a multi-million-dollar product released by a mega-billion-dollar corporation — expecting it to be progressive, or woke, or even politically aware. That would be terribly naïve, and nobody should have done it; not before the movie was released, and not now.

having said that, let me tell you why it is bad not good

this movie is like a political rorschach test

That third paragraph is pretty impressively incoherent and point-missing.

Next time just link or embed like most people do?

I can't imagine watching the movie and thinking that it doesn't have sympathy for Killmonger and his ideas.

I also can't imagine judging a movie by how much I agree with it, but whatever

I also can't imagine watching the movie and thinking that it's uninterested in the question of when violence is justified.

Next time just link or embed like most people do?

The first sentence is a link.

worth pointing out that the full review does also have some positive things to say about the movie too

Yeah, I had no problem with that review, in context. (And it's not the first to point out the weirdness of an advanced peaceful nation that is nonetheless something of a benign dictatorship with hereditary bloodline rule whose disputes are settled with traditional bare-chested waterfall beat-downs).

Killmonger and the Vulture might be the best Marvel movie villains. At the least, they want to do more than take over the world.

tbf queen elizabeth ii only ascended to the throne of great britain after triumphing in a famously brutal 110-minute cage-match against princess anne in trafalgar square

the chair leg which she used to finally subdue her upstart sister, still caked in dried blood and clumps of hair, is on display in the british museum

“You can’t have an advanced techno-tribal utopia without democracy” is the new “if you can just hyperspace kamikaze things why don’t they do it all the time” is the new “you can’t hear explosions in space”

princess anne was only 2 when E2R ascended the throne, which makes the 110 mins required all the more puzzling

she was a fucking badass toddler - this is basic british history ffs

elizabeth was of course hobbled by a catastrophic attack of diarrhea minutes into the battle - suspicions remain, of course, that a partisan footman spiked her pre-combat breakfast of larks' tongues

the image of her caked in shit and blood, holding her unconscious young sister aloft by one of her feet, remains one of the most cherished images of 20th-century britain

Trafalgar Square also has a time-warping force field so that 4 minutes inside is actually 110 minutes outside. Plus there were several trailers and a post-bout sequence

Lasagnegate I am wounded wounded it will never truly heal

wait anne is her sister? my basic british history is even further off than i knew

It's the big reveal at the end of empire

one of us was clearly born in an alternate universe but i refuse to be drawn on my suspicions as to which one

that's why they called the darkest hour tbf, no one could tell who was who for weeks

either way the royals are so inbred that we're in a real sister/daughter chinatown situation whenever we try to draw up a family tree imo

forget it jake it's sandringham

Anyway back to Wakanda analogues, wouldn’t it have been dope if George VI had been a spy? “Oh, you’re the King’s brother? Espionage school for you”

It's the big reveal at the end of empire

― DUMPKINS! (darraghmac), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 14:38 (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Guys

needy imo, nagl

Sometimes we have to allow that our inner lj is in fact otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNHc2PxY8lY

do we tho would be my q xp

that video looks great, thx phil

Before I saw it I read a review that said the fight scenes were kind of incoherent, especially from the director of Creed, but I didn't have any problems with the fight scenes (besides, like, why an armored rhino is a bigger advantage than flying spaceships with lasers and shit). However, I thought the foley effects (at least as they sounded in my theatre) were weird. Like, totally '80s action movie punches.

“You can’t have an advanced techno-tribal utopia without democracy” is the new “if you can just hyperspace kamikaze things why don’t they do it all the time” is the new “you can’t hear explosions in space”

To be fair, this entire movie was literally about the handwringing that comes with being an advanced civilization, yet what felt like half of the run time was shirtless people punching each other over a waterfall.

Dod they no longer have any magic blue flowers? She only saved that one ...

man I love Ryan Coogler's Oakland accent

yes i was bothered about the last blue flower -- in the pub afterwards we decided it would be fairly easy to hide some as killmonger did not seem especially detail-orientated tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9VYzNUXGDA

ryan coogler is 31 btw

gonna sit awhile and quietly contemplate my mortality

xp I dunno, he seemed to hang about to check their work.

So either:

"The right/rite of challenge has been regrettably postponed indefinitely"

OR

"As Wakanda's protector, I am happy to swear in M'Baku as the first president of the Republic of Wakanda"

michael b. jordan will always be haddie braverman's troubled boyfriend alex to me.

speaking of bad panther, why did he even need that...uh, i don't know where klaw is supposed to be from...guy with the accent to help him steal that artifact? seemed like a waste of time. oh wait he needed his dead body to use as a calling card i guess...nevermind.

just dawned on me that the only white people in the movie were gollum and bilbo...

I'm sure there's some lesson in responsibility about a more technologically advanced nation not unilaterally deciding to arm people in less-developed nations in order to bring about regime change, but I just can't quite put my finger on it

Less-developed here includes the US tbf.

Less-developed here includes the US tbf.

You must have heard the pun scott

xp that's kind of the buried lede

i don't know where klaw is supposed to be from...guy with the accent

surely he was meant to be south african?

just dawned on me that the only white people in the movie were gollum and bilbo...

lol yes, i mentioned that to the people i came with during their interrogation scene. no riddles, though.

klaw's accent was (roughly) south african, yes

(i think his full marvel lineage is more complicated than that) (ie his dad was a nazi?)

I like the light continuity of him just being some south african mercenary that, we now know, entered the story when he was contracted by a rogue Wakandan

so he's a villain, but it's refreshing when the actual antagonist wastes him partway into the movie

the part in the museum where Killmonger observes that security has been watching him like a hawk since he arrived but haven't been watching what she's been putting in her mouth was a good one. basically racism got them all killed.

Before I saw it I read a review that said the fight scenes were kind of incoherent, especially from the director of Creed...

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, February 20, 2018

The fight scenes in Creed were kind of incoherent too! Creed is not a very good movie!

i know i said it already but the museum scene is my favorite thing in the movie. i could "unpack" it but i almost don't want to disturb it...

but yeah, it's not just racism that bites our Africa Expert, it's the consequences of what she's been ingesting all this time...

the beat at the end of the scene, where killmonger reappropriates the mask not bc its vibranium, or even wakandan, but bc he's just feelin it... i could watch that over and over

And what color is coffee? Black!

I liked Creed.

Klaw (at least in this movie) is from South Africa. He even makes a reference to returning to Jo' Burg.

Killmonger's final monologue would have been incredibly heavy-handed in so many movies but I feel like it worked here? My jaw dropped in the the theater

xpost well sure i like some crap movies too but that doesn't make them good

how many of the rhinos did Andy Serkis play

The final monologue was indeed all that.

Final business end update:

http://deadline.com/2018/02/black-panther-thursday-night-preview-box-office-1202291093/

Disney has just confirmed what we saw earlier: Marvel’s Black Panther is the second-biggest 4-day opener of all-time at the domestic B.O. with $241.96M, after Force Awakens ($288M) and beating Star Wars: Last Jedi ($241.6M). Monday also marked an all-time record with $40.167M, beating Force Awakens‘ $40.11M (Dec. 21, 2015). Black Panther also posted the second best Sunday ever at the domestic B.O. with $60.096M behind Force Awakens ($60.5M).

"He even makes a reference to returning to Jo' Burg."

forgot about this. yes. maybe Die Antwoord can avenge his death in the next movie.

I was thrown off by the heaviness of the monologue set against what looked like a backdrop for the (currently filming!) CGI The Lion King.

Ooof though when T'Challa takes the herb the second time and is yelling at his dad, the mystical land of the ancestors looks like a matte painting 3 feet behind his head.

I wonder if that boils down to the distance you're sitting from the screen. We were up in the second tier and none of the CGI took me out of the film at all.

Interesting detail here to keep in mind, building on the much noted fact that Coogler is only 31 -- we've been so steeped in the 'filmmakers recalling the 80s' wider culture that we're missing other kinds of referents and acceleration, combined with the fact that ten years really is a long time:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/theres-more-going-on-in-black-panthers-end-credit-scene-1823050309

“I saw Iron Man the first day it opened,” Coogler told io9. “I was at film school the day it came out. I was in Los Angeles. Iron Man is the first movie I saw at the Arclight, which is like my favorite theater in Los Angeles."

As a friend said on Twitter: "a bit like when rock & roll starts being played by people who grew up listening to it"

https://donmclean.files.wordpress.com/2003/02/leg1.jpg

many xposts omg Creed is a legit great movie
so help me I will fight u rogermexico 🥊

I swear the site has been purposefully blocking me from posting to this thread

Oh cool, now that I’m in I’d mainly like to tell everyone who called Killmonger a villain instead of an antagonist to shut the fuck up

would like to have myself entered in the record as having aligned with that point previously

My local cinema does not appear to be showing this what the actual fuck

DJP otm

VG MBJ alone is not enough to save a movie. See F4 if you want to test that theory lol.

many xposts omg Creed is a legit great movie
so help me I will fight u rogermexico 🥊

yeah haven't seen this yet but creed is v good

Creed is good and it really should have been crap idk if that makes it great but it sure gets the director plenty of credit

Oh cool, now that I’m in I’d mainly like to tell everyone who called Killmonger a villain instead of an antagonist to shut the fuck up

― Embalming is a flirty business (DJP), Tuesday, February 20, 2018 5:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

sorry for creed digression but i gotta defend my movie

my love for Creed isnt just bcz mbj is great
i legit love it as a movie on its own but i love it especially as a rocky movie & how deftly it hooks onto the back of the existing mythology
i love that it covered familiar “rocky” story beats but in a new way
adonis has a girlfriend but she’s successful too! and she’s all for him fighting! there’s no “voice of reason” like every other female partner in a boxing movie
it gave you fan service in organic ways that were not cheesy but earned
it filled in subtle story gaps in ways that were interesting & made sense, like rock hadnt talked to mary anne since apollo’s funeral
at the beginning when adonis stands in front of the youtube video of apollo & you think he’s going to shadow box as apollo but he shadowboxes AGAINST him & it’s like oh shit movie alright let’s go
and it makes me cry like 5 times every time I watch it & i have seen it 10 times easy

would you believe I agree with almost all of that?

when I posted earlier I almost added what makes Creed interesting isn’t that it’s good (bc it’s at best a fight scenario) but that Coogler found a rocky story worth telling at all. and as with Bo the attention to detail is really evident. This is not a guy who’s comfortable painting by numbers ever and that is fkn rare I will see anything he shoots.

I’d mainly like to tell everyone who called Killmonger a villain instead of an antagonist to shut the fuck up

I get it, and allow me to provide everyone with some large salts in granulated form, but isn't "villain" kind of a genre jargon term for whomever the "hero" faces off against?

i went back & watched fruitvale & creed in the last few days & Coogler is so good at small, uber-personal & tightly focused stories cradled within these fairly huge settings/backdrops. his emotional beats are so good & so real that in being *so* personal and *so* focused that while speaking so beautifully to his & so many ppl’s specifically black experience, it’s unintentionally, or just naturally inclusive rather than isolating - because on some level, complicated unfiltered raw emotion, hurt, anger, loss, is relatably human as well.

* i heard an interview the other day & i didn’t realize til then that he has a speech impediment. which only makes me love him more. my dad has a stutter so i always feel solidarity w ppl who are trying to overcome that.

Really enjoyed this piece

https://www.theroot.com/audiences-across-africa-hail-black-panther-for-humanizi-1823155921

He's a guy who does bad things who needs to be stopped by the hero. That doesn't make him a villain? Is it just because he's angry and motivated?

smdh

Xp, is it a speech impediment? I thought it was just a very pronounced version of the NorCal/Oakland accent, a la Marshawn Lynch: https://youtu.be/IBMCZN9TYbM

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/villain

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/antagonist

xpost that for sure but Coogler definitely has a speech impediment on top of all that - he's obviously worked on it but it's there. he gets 'stuck' sometimes at the beginning of a sentence, where he'll repeat a sentence fragment a few times before he moves through the whole thing, definitely noticeable in situations where he's nervous.

killmonger did nothing wrong, everything he did was consistent with his sympathetic, yet contrary and violent, relatable views

t’challa opposed him philosophically and definitely opposed his course of action but remained sympathetic throughout — his bad acts were in the service of a goal that was disagreed with, but was understandable. being the king means taking blame for your nation, and his nation fucked up

what about when he killed his girlfriend

what movie did you watch

didn't he kill that co-conspirator lady he was smooching with?

and also the guards killed in the museum, they were killed in service of ... ?

I mean, he's a complex villain, with sympathetic views and motivation, but still a villain. not every antagonist is a villain, but every villain is an antagonist.

Killmonger was a big Speed fan iirc

well, then as the head of state, black panther is responsible for the ills of his people, including withholding technology and support from millions of people -- which was exactly killmonger's point

this is exactly the idea behind the claim that seeing one murder changes you for life, hearing about the deaths of thousands evokes mere sympathy

every person killed on screen is absolutely nothing in the grand stakes erik's fighting for! even if his methods are ultimately pretty fucked up. this is, ultimately, war. he's proposing a righteous worldwide conflict and we're tearing up over a handful of people

Killmonger and Nakia had nearly identical goals for Wakanda. Nakia just had the additional benefit of, you know, not having her father murdered by her uncle and being abandoned in America right around the time of the LA Riots then trained by the CIA to be a killing machine.

^^^

i.e. Killmonger is not the anti-T'Challa, he's the shadow Nakia.

In dramaturgical terms, isn't the essential function of an antagonist is to serve as an opposition force to the protagonist? as I understand it, this opposition can take the form of a villain (which is to say a character/characters with evil or malicious motives). but opposition to the protagonist doesn't always come in villainous terms. in a survival story, the antagonist is the environment – but it isn't a villain. in a classical sense, there's an argument that killmonger isn't necessarily a villain.

except nakia makes a point of not killing innocents

also killmonger sets all of the sacred herbs on fire, clearly a bad person

i get that he’s no worse than, say, the imperialist west, but that just makes the imperialist west a villain, it doesn’t make him not a villain

and he killed forrest whittaker ffs

Killed him for being the person black Panther's father saved from being killed by his father.

exactly

I would like to nominate "nearly" for several medals and ribbons and memberships in elite adverb clubs for all of the work it is doing in Phil's first sentence up there.

#WakandaForever pic.twitter.com/CmJySoHFjB

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) February 21, 2018

Reading this great interview with Winston Duke, who plays M'Baku (who, btw, has the best lair in the movie, the interior decorating is insane, never mind the gorilla-supported cantilever the throne room is in), I need to know if DJP is okay with the fact that half of the cast went to Yale.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/02/winston-duke-black-panther-mbaku-interview

I mean, Yale has a bomb acting department. If I’d realized this in high school, I would have tried to go there.

Another good interview with Duke

https://www.gq.com/story/black-panther-winston-duke-interview

WARNING -- he says nice things about martin freeman

SO WEIRD.

So excellent. Just hit so many bullseyes from the start through to the end. My favorite Marvel film to date and just a damn good movie. It didn't hurt that I was part of an enthusiastic audience. Biggest applause came when T'Challa pointed out his real estate investments ( rhino hitting the brakes was the next biggest lol).

Kind of surprised nobody has pointed out that T’Challa is being another example of an overseas rich person snapping up urban US real estate and turning desperately needed affordable housing into what amounts to a massive consulate building. and in the Bay Area no less.

That is a spicy take

Searing

Am gonna check if raggett has retweeted it yet

From the Root article:

Would they use that generic African accent overused in Hollywood films?

It isn't actually answered in the article, but a friend who saw it in Addis Ababa said there was laughter the first time that T'Challa opened his mouth, as it's a mix of East and West African accents.

If we sat through Kevin Spacey in ordinary decent criminal (NB we didn't) then it's bearable

I had to look it up, but I guess the African dialect they sometimes speak is real, one of South Africa's many, and specifically the language Nelson Mandela spoke. I had just figured they made it up.

Yeah, "nearly" was a bad choice of wording, I was on my phone and had just finished donating blood platelets, sue me.

This is a good piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/black-panther-erik-killmonger/553805/

N’Jobu is killed by T’Challa’s father T’Chaka for his insubordinate attempt to end the centuries of isolation that have kept Wakanda safe.

This is an odd thing to get wrong, tho.

(in that replacing 'killed' by 'silenced' or 'nullified' would not have affected the rest of the excellent article)

i didn't really enjoy this at all. it's not particularly bad, a kids movie that didn't do much for me. i haven't seen any recent marvel movies so maybe my bar wasn't sufficiently lowered (+ expectations raised by hype)

Give it time. In the week since I saw it, it's only gone up in my estimation. It's a grower, not a shower.

The only one of these Marvel movies of the last couple years I've wanted to see a second time might be the most recent Spider-Man, and perhaps Thor Ragnarok.

Am gonna check if raggett has retweeted it yet

Tsk.

But I will share this, which rules.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-internet-s-favorite-black-panther-fans-talk-about-f-1823190395

It's all <3 but I have considered blocking u for a month maybe

Patience. I'll be talking more about Drag Race soon enough. (Like tomorrow.)

Two months, maybe

I've not seen this yet, am not even sure I will see it anytime soon, but it's been a long time a film resulted in so many interesting written pieces.

This is an interesting counterpiece to all the praise, from AfricaIsACountry.

Where all these takes lose me is that they start off with the idea that any meaningful iterations of Pan-Africanism can even exist alongside the concept of Wakanda, which by necessity must erase the reality of "Africa" even as it amalgamates and emulates it.

Black Panther comics, for that matter, have never been about the African experience - at least not to an African. Hasn’t stopped me loving them over the years but, that is loving them with an understanding of how limited the premise is as a vehicle for broad, political and cultural allegory.

https://qz.com/1210704/black-panthers-african-cultures-and-influences/

How does it erase the reality of Africa?

I'd guess in the same way that Captain America boils my country down to one tall, built, blond dude, supposedly from Brooklyn, but with no discernible accent or stereotypical Big Apple provincialism.

The triumph and tragedy of its central conceit is that it has no plausible way of interfacing with the colonial experience, i.e. that which shaped African lives and experiences more than anything else over the past century.

xp

i was looking up black comic book characters on google for future cool franchise ideas and i think i found the worst superhero name of all time: Doorman!

https://pm1.narvii.com/6327/7c196e0841012083a22ce592914a2bcdf15cfa4e_hq.jpg

Coal Tiger pretty bad too though.

http://worldofblackheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/coal-tiger1.jpg

Doorman is worse than Arm-Fall-Off Boy as a serious superhero name?

xp iirc he's solar energy tiger now

Clean Coal Tiger

This video of Coogler, Nyong’o, Boseman & Jordan with Eric Nam in Seoul karaokeing “All My Life” is kiiiind of life affirming imo

https://instagram.com/p/Bfg0AizjOWl/

$400 million domestic by the end of the day; I’m presuming it will become Marvel’s biggest standalone success here by the end of its run; even with adjustments for inflation only the original Avengers film will beat it out once BP hits $500 million domestic, and I’m guessing it will do that by next weekend or so. (Original Avengers earned $635 mil, $700 mil adjusted.)

saw this again. in addition to the rich characters and story, it's so damn beautiful to look at. especially the final sunset.

i saw this today (don't see most marvel films but this looked interesting). it had a lot going for it - mostly the scene-setting. kind of reminded me of prester john on krypton (though i guess most people don't know about the prester john myth these days? probably for the best that they avoided specifically mentioning it because it's problematic). just a gorgeous, gorgeous film. pacing wasn't perfect - the third act was just a series of fight scenes, pretty much gave up on any narrative momentum the film had up to that point, and worse i didn't think there was a lot of visual pop to them - the climactic fight between black panther and killmonger just gave me flashbacks to "streets of rage 3". everything leading up to that final fight scene was pretty top-notch, though.

Saw the film yesterday.
Really enjoyed it.
Wondered if there was a canonical history of Wakanda anywhere around cos I wasn't clear on how far ahead of the west they were. & would like a comparative timeline. Or is it intentionally vague.

I hear its supposed to be in East Africa so petty close to where my dad comes from. Nice.

Is that haircut on Killmonger the black equivalent of what is being called Meet Me At McDonalds now that it's been revived by teen hoodies after the same thing denoting Heavenly/Sarah fans like 30 years ago?

Does this map onto existing Black panther comics arcs or is it all new. I know the character for years but haven't read a load of his comic appearances.

Is there a bit in thsi film where people can hear each other speak when they shouldn't be able to or did I misshear a technical explanation given earlier.

https://sunjaguar.tumblr.com/post/171301708712/he-finally-took-her-to-coachella

I thought the description of how vibranium was transported by train involved a device that prevented vibration. Did I hear that right.
Thought it was supposed to be pretty much all inclusive. So does it not include sound.
Need to see that bit again after later events.

Something about not being stable in its native state. So look forward to that in Infinity War

https://gizmodo.com/can-black-panthers-vibranium-ever-be-real-1823226602

vibranium appears to absorb energy transmitted to it via particles much better than it deals with energy from waves, so presumably the sonic pressure waves around the maglev tracks are there to nullify the vibranium ores' more dangerous properties, which has the side effect of also making the black panther armor semi-useless. It's the same principle as noise cancelling headphones, but comic books.

i loved this movie and when i showed my students a clip from Bird tonight in class, I said "this is the same guy from Black Panther!" and it reminded me how much I love Forrest Whitaker.
Loved pretty much everything about this movie (and I know literally nothing about comic books or comic book movies aside from "there is DC and Marvel and they are different")

thing 1): most comic books do not have superheros in them

thing 2): every time someone on ilx says "comic books" when referring to the superhero sub-genre rather than the medium, sic will be there, like when the Cryptkeeper lights up the Archie-signal in comic book "The Walking Dead".

i knew thing one, did not know thing 2 apols for the incorrect terminology. i am not trying to be annoying, i am just this way naturally.

A few stray thoughts on the film, and I wasn't familiar with the comic.

I only said bcz LL noted that she doesn't know anything!

and she lives basically around the corner from Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti and Eddie Campbell and Jeffrey Brown and Jessica Campbell and Conor Stechschulte and Emil Ferris and Anya Davidson and Lucy Knisley and Perfectly Acceptable, could avoid some accidental awkwardness in a coffee shop

i just used the wrong terminology - i wasn't thinking about it very much when i posted. i meant superhero themed movies based on comics or whatever i was supposed to say. (i wouldn't recognize any of those people tbh, i do know who chris ware is)

My point was directed at sic more than LL - most people know what you mean when you write "comic books". However, I just learned that that Eddie Campbell doesn't live in Brisbane anymore (may have been the case for years, I haven't kept up), so good job everyone.

I need another look at the film in general I think but couple of things stuck in my mind. The vehicle interface thing looked like it was set up around existing chairs in both cases which they made a point of not being there when the ride was over. Am I seeing that wrong & the seats were just the first semi solid object that the technologyy manifested?

Boseman on sympathizing with Killmonger

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/28/17063218/chadwick-boseman-tchalla-enemy-black-panther

Love T'Challa's accent

without sounding too spoilery, Killmonger would have been better written if he once acknowledged other benefits of Wakanda technology besides the one thing

This thread went full spoiler a while ago

oh, i just read 10 posts back

i never thought i would make an effort to see another marvel movie but felt like i'd be missing *a moment* if i didn't catch this in the theater. for something so thoroughly predictable i enjoyed it, mostly b/c the world-building and look felt new and interesting and the cast was engaging. i think the movie was pretty on-point when it came to reckoning w/the fact that wakanda is founded on a lie (made literal w/the orphaning of killmonger). that the solution to that is a liberal outreach program really shouldn't be a big deal, i'll reluctantly lol @ twitter leftists who forgot that this is a fantasy and/or want to see a lot of human beings die.

a liberal outreach program with a spy as founding director!

How many times did this yute watch Black Panther because this accuracy has finished me this evening sjsjsjjsjsjsjsjs 😂😂😭 pic.twitter.com/sxAA6g7Aaf

— manda (@Comanda_x) March 5, 2018

OMG dying

As is my wont, I got in on this too late to say anything as-yet-unsaid in this thread. Except maybe a quick + seemingly non-sequitur challop that occurred to me as I left the theater: that was waaay better than The Last Jedi.

And that video is everything.

The Last Jedi is doing different things though - Black Panther doesn't have 40 years of history to deal with, and the tradition it is in (superhero films), it's a perfectly standard example of (everything angle other than "a superhero film", it's 110% on)

not a challop imo

Black Panther has some layers the Last Jedi doesn't, but the Last Jedi is better at doing action movie stuff in a fresh way. Both have better sci-fi villains than the norm, though.

Both have the antagonist kill off the trite villain somewhere in the second act, too.

Black Panther doesn't have 40 years of history to deal with

Created in 1966! Though of course since general audiences don't know/care it can take its history as inspiration to pick and choose from, while with SW it's a weight it has to carry.

maybe a quick + seemingly non-sequitur challop that occurred to me as I left the theater: that was waaay better than The Last Jedi.

― I'm not meltdown. (Old Lunch), Wednesday, March 7, 2018

examines post closely for challops, finds nothing

just out

wasnt great at all

may not even have been good tbh

now that’s how you do challops itt

deems, later: "in fact it didn't exist, and neither do movies"

i loved everyone in it and dim gonna read thread to see if theres been any dissensus cos three week old repetition aint no good

then ill be back

also its a better use of my time than ilx maleness

Now, before we proceed with the ugly part, let’s make a few things clear: no superhero movie needs to have good politics. In fact, none of them have, and probably none of them ever will, because the superhero genre does not lend itself to them easily. Vigilante action, power fantasy, and the idea that some people are just inherently superior are baked right into the recipe and extracted only with great effort and self-analysis; comics have attempted it only rarely and movies never. Furthermore, nobody ought to go into Black Panther — a multi-million-dollar product released by a mega-billion-dollar corporation — expecting it to be progressive, or woke, or even politically aware. That would be terribly naïve, and nobody should have done it; not before the movie was released, and not now.
And that’s good, because, folks, the politics of Black Panther are pretty goddamn terrible. I’m not the first person to point this out — I especially recommend Ricky Rawls and Leslie Lee’s Twitter posts — but the plot of the movie essentially involves a heredity monarchy built on ritual combat monopolizing a natural resource to maintain a nationalist, isolationist system. When a legitimate heir to the throne appears and decides to use that resource to arm and equip oppressed people of color all over the world, he instantly becomes the villain. Rather than participate in anti-imperialist revolution, the country’s leaders opt for a violent civil war; the revolutionary figure (who, to boot, is portrayed like a mad-dog ghetto thug straight out of a paranoid NRA fantasy) is killed and the newly aware monarch settles for teaching inner city kids to code. As Lee puts it, Black Panther “dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints it as villainous, and then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the Earth slaughtering each other to protect whites.”

There’s all sorts of other problems with the movie politically. The presence of the Martin Freeman character, a CIA agent who literally blows black people out of the sky to prevent them from aiding the struggle against people exactly like him, is a huge mistake, particularly in light of the real CIA’s real history with real African leaders. The movie also tries to have its cake and eat it too, in an obvious dodge swallowed whole by way too many Marvel stans, by implying that the problem with Killmonger isn’t his revolutionary intentions, but his violent means.

First of all, I have bad news for you, folks: the question ‘Is violence bad?’ is deeply and profoundly dumb and boring. Yes, violence is bad. So is cancer. The question is what we’re supposed to do about it. A much more interesting question is ‘Is violence effective?’; another is ‘When is violence justified?’ But Black Panther isn’t very interested in those questions, so we’re left to somehow accept that it’s bad for Killmonger to use violence to overthrow oppressive governments that exploit entire countries and wipe out entire populations, but it’s fine for T’Challa and his people to use violence to beat Killmonger — or, for that matter, to fuck around with slavers and child soldiers in neighboring countries, as long as the people they kill are other Africans.

It’s a complete ducking of the issue, made even more absurd by the fact that it takes place in the context of a superhero movie, where the whole genre is built in the idea that it’s fine to use violence against bad people. Do you remember any other Marvel or DC movie that did so much hand-wringing over the concept of violence? Apparently it’s only a concern when the violence might be targeted at the ruling classes. Beyond all that, as Rawls argues, the whole notion is bogus from the premise up: Wakanda has had incredible technology for a thousand years that puts them light-years beyond any other country on Earth, but it’s never even occurred to them to have a system of government slightly more responsive to human needs than a bloodline monarchy predicated on whoever is the best at beating the shit out of people? These aren’t inherent qualities of the narrative. These are choices made by writers, and they’re bad ones.

― grawlix (unperson), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 13:00 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol

― DUMPKINS! (darraghmac), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 13:11 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol indeed because having watched it this screed is 100% correct

also the cgi was eye jarringly bad at times.

also his mate with the rhinos turned on him so quick and so terribly that it was woeful

also all the fight scenes were impossible to follow, just a mess

i wanted it to work, it was very cool, as ive said the entire cast was great, but guys this was not good.

o ok

if it was not good ... why did i enjoy it so much

the pathologizing of killmonger (even in his name) is so evident it thumbs the scales, they have to make him crazy even though his entire plan is at one level completely rational

Hey guyz, Boseman himself thinks Black Panther is the villain of the piece. There's room for multiple readings. Also 'Killmonger' is 40-year-old Marvel IP not some new thang they whipped up to stigmatize the antagonist. Just be thankful they refrained from calling M'Baku 'Man-Ape'.

I don't really get ppl casting Killmonger as some sort of valid depiction of black radicalism or whatever: dude's main motivation is revenge, and his objective is world domination (non-white parts of the world included). That he's also a victim of racism adds depth to the character but it doesn't make him a good stand-in for any kind of political thought, at the end of the day he's a comic book super villain.

also his mate with the rhinos turned on him so quick and so terribly that it was woeful

Eh, it was telegraphed from the begining, dude made it pretty clear his loyalty was contingent on T'Challa adopting a new strategy of govt.

he turned in ten secs after first failed attempt of that clear strategy it was weak

He already mistrusted T'Challa before this and the failure just confirmed his missgivings - it's not like the movie plays his betrayal as a great reveal or anything,

yea he made comments about T'Chaka's failures insinuating long-standing frustration with his family's rule. and then a stranger shows up with a dead Klaue who T'Challa couldn't deliver.

what's so difficult about this

nothing difficult at all it was pish

lots of it was pish tbh

glad yall thpught it was great, genuinely.

Anecdotally, I appreciated seeing this in a theater where the only white folks within my field of vision at a given moment were my gf and Martin Freeman. And even three weeks in, it was as packed as any movie I've been to in recent years.

has now grossed over $1 billion worldwide

9th highest domestic gross of all time. 9th. Of all time. This thing hasn't even been out a month.

man, imagine the numbers if it had been woke in the right way

Imagine a world where people are critiquing a movie without concern for the box office bottom line because that’s how normal people interact with film

I don't really get ppl casting Killmonger as some sort of valid depiction of black radicalism or whatever: dude's main motivation is revenge, and his objective is world domination (non-white parts of the world included). That he's also a victim of racism adds depth to the character but it doesn't make him a good stand-in for any kind of political thought, at the end of the day he's a comic book super villain.

Of course his character’s methodology and end game are awful but ... that’s what I mean about thumbing the scales. It sets up an unfair status quo and conflates revolutionary response with world domination, as if the only alternative to “foreign aid” style liberalism was being “just as bad but in reverse”; pathologizes the diasporic revolutionary as somehow “damaged” & irrational (due to the home country’s original sin, sure, but still pathologized) when his mo for most of the film (if not his stated end game) was entirely rational. The film took the safe route, making the hero an Obama type figure instead of a revolutionary, suggesting the revolutionary was while important as a tool for getting the country to open up to the outside world, too radical to be taken seriously.

It’s not that the movie is “wrong” as much as “lacks the imagination to envision a world in which things were truly different”

9th highest domestic gross of all time. 9th. Of all time.

unless you adjust for ticket prices, of course, which exposes the ESPN-style thing of "all time" beginning in 1998

The film took the safe route, making the hero an Obama type figure instead of a revolutionary, suggesting the revolutionary was while important as a tool for getting the country to open up to the outside world, too radical to be taken seriously.

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, March 10, 2018 11:16 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is a nice summation. i think there are ways that a bp movie could really dig into these complexities but hey this is marvel studios, i'm going to take "script was vaguely aware of current geopolitical climate" as a success.

Thank u for lifting the scales of unadjusted gross from mine eyes, Morbs. Colors are brighter, food tastes richer, etc.

Apologies, all: Black Panther still has a ways to go before it clears the unassailably-adjusted heights of The Bank Dick (which I believe did about $78 trillion in 2018 dollars).

It's Gone with the wind, it's always Gone with the Wind.

(though adjusted Black Panther is about 13 places behind 1945's The Bells of St Mary's which I understand is a short film about the correct use of apostrophes)

It’s not that the movie is “wrong” as much as “lacks the imagination to envision a world in which things were truly different”

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Sunday, March 11, 2018 4:17 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could turn turn that around and say its a failure on the part of those pushing this view, to imagine what it would actually mean for there to be a nation of black people untouched by white supremacy.

So much of the joy that people talked about on leaving the cinema came simply from having experienced a version of our history where blackness isn't reified through the prism of whiteness. Think about how truly rare that is for a second and understand why so few of the rules and tropes we're used to playing with don't make any sense here.

It's so telling how eager these critical takes have been to frame the conflict in the movie as a fight to protect whites, because it's completely counterintuitive to imagine blackness outside that dialectic. But what relevance do CIA machinations have to an African country that exists in isolation? What does a black revolutionary mean to a nation of black people that haven't experienced oppression? And what relevance can a Wakanda that didn't heed Nkrumah, didn't read Fanon and didn't meet Malcolm, have to the broader black struggle?

And for that matter it's not ok that the notion of black revolution and what that means isn't being interrogated here. Why is it taken for granted that such a nebulous impulse has genuine currency amongst black people and should be taken at face value, while what bloodthirsty leaders and internal conflict has actually meant for so many African countries over the last 60 years is ignored?

Those are some really great points. It's easy to forget that the issues of race we've experienced are not inherent and inevitable and that race itself is a spurious construct. Questions of what a truly aracial civilization might look like and how that civilization might respond when faced with the impact of race on the larger world are not really anything I expect a Marvel movie to parse in depth. I think they took a pretty solid swipe at it.

To be clear, I’m not saying the film was inherently bad or disposable for taking the path it did, and as a white person I’m certainly not suggesting I know the “right” way to portray an African revolutionary cause on screen ... in many ways i felt like this is one of the only action films in recent memeory which seems engaged with relevant issues in the real world and don’t mean to undercut that

but tsrobodo, wasn’t there something a little...underwhelming about that conclusion, a kind of vague, generalized “outreach” ? Did that not feel just a little emotionally pat?

I do agree that there’s something American-myopic about the revolutionary focus maybe but the film itself doesn’t seem super tied up in African politics today

Tbc I’m not trying to argue for the movie being good or bad as much as I am interested in unpacking the ideology arguments it makes or doesn’t make, looking at where the limits of its imagination are w/r/t that ideology

It already has to try and explain vibranium’s paradoxical relationship with infrasound — the explanation of pan-African politics, America’s disgusting post-Reconstruction record, our “soft empire” and exceptionalist / interventionist foreign policy approaches ended up on the cutting room floor.

but tsrobodo, wasn’t there something a little...underwhelming about that conclusion, a kind of vague, generalized “outreach” ? Did that not feel just a little emotionally pat?

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Sunday, March 11, 2018 5:21 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Honestly? Not really.

It's entirely consistent with the specifics of the plot:

Black Panther father kills brother, abandoning nephew to discover his cold corpse.
Black Panther son seeks to atone by reaching out to those who grew up like his cousin, starting at the place of original sin.

Trite? probably, but I don't see what more you could reasonably expect.

Black Panther comics, for that matter, have never been about the African experience - at least not to an African. Hasn’t stopped me loving them over the years but, that is loving them with an understanding of how limited the premise is as a vehicle for broad, political and cultural allegory.

― tsrobodo, Friday, February 23, 2018 12:27 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I go back to this because in fairness they do really skirt the line here. The movie incorporates concepts and ideas that the scope of the story is not equal to but rather than these passes constituting a genuine argument I see it as grounding the movie in our lived realities so that its emotional beats hit harder.

People forget that Wakanda is no less mystical and fantastical than Thor's Asgard, but because 'Africa' as anything other than a place where children starve, wildlife rules and terrorists kidnap schoolgirls is completely absent from the public imagination, Wakanda in all its allure and visual glory functions as a stand-in and ends up being afforded a realism that it can't possibly live up to. I have to imagine any disappointment with the direction taken stems in part from that.

Best Coogler decision was to kill Killmonger so that other marvel productions don't ruin him.

comix killmonger has died more than once iirc

so i just got back from visiting my family on vacation

my mom spent most of my visit with her complaining that "black panther" was monarchist propaganda

my mom hasn't seen this movie and, as if it need be said, isn't particularly much of a comics reader

i offer this information in the hopes that it may provides some amelioriation, or at least sympathetic backdrop, to my own frequently-expressed uninformed crackpot theories

two hours of propaganda for Big Vibranium imo

to be the first film released in saudi arabia in 35 years

https://shadowandact.com/black-panther-breaks-saudi-arabia-cinema-ban

When does this open in the US?

it's banned in the contiguous united states iirc, gotta get yrself to alaska and/or hawaii to see it

Will Moviepass cover plane tickets?

i dunno dude, i think you’ll need to contact their customer service desk

this is gold guys

honestly feeling so attacked rn

Here we go...

https://io9.gizmodo.com/black-panther-is-coming-home-in-may-complete-with-dele-1825147215

Director’s Intro
From Page to Screen: A Roundtable Discussion - Delve into the film’s making
Crowning of a New King – Explore the world of Black Panther in all its color and complexity
The Warriors Within – Get to know Wakanda’s women and the actors who portray them
The Hidden Kingdom Revealed – Wakanda’s diverse people
Wakanda Revealed: Exploring the Technology
Gag Reel
Exclusive Sneak Peek at Ant-Man and The Wasp
Marvel Studios the First Ten Years: Connecting the Universe
Director’s Commentary

Then the deleted scenes:

U.N. Meet and Greet
Okoye And W’Kabi Discuss the Future of Wakanda
T’Challa Remembers His Father
Voices from the Past

so this has topped the most recent Star Wars for worldwide box office

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/

seeing that news prompted me to finally watch this. 30 mins in and im already loving it. so many questions already, so many different ways you can look at this, all the conflicting motivations, etc. visually it is super stunning with lots of things that it feels like i have never seen before. love that the conflict of isolationism y/n of Wakanda is one of the film's central themes. also that first scene in the museum was brilliant.

not that yr takes aren't predictably wrong/awful but lets hold of on judgement until youve seen the entire mess

thought the cgi was notably awful in this btw

spoilers for adam ahead --

as undercooked as the climax of this is (viz vagueness of the "threat" actually driving the action) at this point the only thing that really bugs me about it is how everything hinges on BP giving his friends and government the vaguest possible description of what happened with klaw in Busan. iirc it's just like "he got away" which is almost at the level of the pronouncements made by the doctor on arrested development. he really doesn't think it's worth informing anybody that klaw has a wakandan collaborator? this is a crucial new clue and something everybody needs to be on the lookout for. at the very least you'd think he'd want to exonerate himself a little. it's a small line but it's really forced plotting.

Did they know Killmonger was Wakandan at that point? I thought everyone was laboring under the assumption that he was African American.

didn't he show off the tattoo? i mean I'd still let them know anyway. it's valuable klaw intelligence.

movie was p cool anyway tho, I had a post about this but I lost it. maybe later.

man that was amazing. i almost teared up at 2 or 3 spots. Killmonger indeed one of the most sympathetic villains ever. for months i have been hearing arguments about who is the real villain and who is the real hero. personally i liked both of them and thought the film did a good job of letting the viewer decide.

i like the symmetry of the challenge, having them first fight without BP power and then at the end both of them have BP power when they fight again. i thought the concept of the challenge was good because the king's authority wasn't derived from a magical plant.

fwiw i was not bothered by the CGI at all. i loved the blacklight world stuff. i loved the gadgets too, it was almost like a James Bond at points. it is a really well-written movie that just flew by! there was a lot of drama but also some good comedic moments to lighten it up. great film, easily one of the best comic films.

(viz vagueness of the "threat" actually driving the action)

yeah the movie maybe could have had some establishing shots of warlords around the world getting ready for weapons shipments or something but then again that would have put more importance on Martin Freeman's heroic turn when the movie really isn't about him. tbh i was afraid the ending would have them handing over tech to the CIA (tho i guess that is still a plot thread, it would have been a massively bummer ending)

so this has topped the most recent Star Wars for worldwide box office

seeing that news prompted me to finally watch this

game over

Imagining that in Denzel Virtuosity voice

Rewatched it last night & still love it

Yeah this, Ragnarok and Infinity Wars ( and Himecoming) have been a wonderful streak of totally entertaining, supreme comic book films that actually feel like the comics. Just when I was getting bored...

the things i like the most are the things I like abt Coogler in general
- the story’s heart is sons & fathers
- there’s depth & humanity in the characters, you see backstory in the most subtle interactions
- the humor that pops up in the most unexpected & delightful places

Shuri is a very necessary addition to the MCU if for no other reason than somebody has to be female, a genius, AND be able to make jokes. This became very apparent to me after Infinity War.

In that vein, I am suddenly hoping very hard for a Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur movie. When a tree and a raccoon rabbit become megastars, no weird idea is outside the realm of possibility.

WHAT ARE THOOOOOOSE still makes me lol so hard

and when Shuri puts her hand up like she wants to battle him but is actually just complaining that her corset is too tight & can we plz go now <3

looking forward to Coogler's commentary on the movie

RABBIT! is somehow my favorite bit from A:IW

And the best part about it is that, while Rocket gets snappish towards pretty much everyone who comments on or speculates about his specieshood, he totally just rolls with Thor calling him a rabbit.

Wrong thread but whatevs. All these peeps are at last joined together.

WHAT ARE THOOOOOOSE still makes me lol so hard

yes i laughed out loud at this! also "I call them sneakers".

Shuri was VIP at the jokes wo taking you completely out of it or detracting from the heavy moments. in fact it felt more like a regular/non-superhero person would react, which kind of made it all the more real. here's hoping she is in many Marvel films to come.

also i enjoyed the visual gag of the car disintegrating around Nakia and having her clutching the steering wheel like in an old cartoon. in a way it felt like a comedic pay-off to the awesome spectacle of the vibranium spear stopping that SUV like it had hit a brick wall.

so yeah i dug this movie! a $200 million popcorn flick with a nearly all-black cast, who get to play interesting and complex characters, where "colonizer" is said multiple times, where in the first five minutes a black leader in oakland points out (if you want to hear it) that the real-life black panthers were marginalized and murdered by the state, where the whole thing is devoted to a fantastic what-if of an uncolonized africa... ok sure martin freeman's character is terrible and the space given to a meddling CIA spook shooting down black revolutionaries (!) should have been given over to making killmonger's plan (and bp's objection to it) just slightly clearer, or doing some street-level wakandan world-building (the palace drama setting kinda makes the place feel unreal, undercutting the protect-our-way-of-life stuff).... but whatever!!! all the action scenes were actually interesting and exciting and you didn't know how they would end, the design work was awesome, the supporting cast was awesome, the jokes were actually funny and built the characters, michael b killllllllled it from that museum scene on, and even miniboss serkis as neocolonial resource extractor was miles more interesting than the main baddies of most of these films. though i do wish he had gotten turned into living sound and started rhyming brainlessly at killmonger like he does with doctor doom in secret wars, oh well. having him be a wannabe rapper was a nice way of alluding to that while also cementing his rep as cultural appropriator.

also there was just something about seeing a big movie that felt like a real event, bigger than star wars in terms of the general public giving a shit about it. the lines going into every screening of this were NUTS in nyc. i got a little teary thinking about little kids who have not one but like five new awesome black characters to identify with, have toys of, daydream about. and to know that those characters are actually super popular with the public as a whole and not some underbudgeted side thing. how great is that? and it's an actual conversation starter. even if you ultimately kind of think killmonger is right and that BP's little community outreach program seems reeeeeal weak, you get to argue about that afterwards! the movie is about actual things, it has unresolved questions on its mind beyond whether the heroes will believe in themselves and stop somebody with a big blue laser that's going to turn everybody into panthers or whatever. whatever its flaws, that alone puts most of this genre to shame.

^^^I'm doing this because we're not on FB and thus I can't heart your post, DC.

I finally saw this on Netflix and am wondering if perhaps all the supposedly good parts were edited out? Killmonger had like 10 lines in the movie.

But every one of them formed a band.

it played really differently on the big screen in a way that i can't define. some of killmonger's best stuff, like the museum scene, felt suddenly like low-budget marvel TV watching on a computer monitor.