Tag: Michael B. Jordan

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: Shazam to Sansón

Grace Caroline Currey, Zachary Levi, and Meagan Good in Shazam! Fury of the Gods. 2023. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

Whether you wear the cape or you’re sick of watching people in super suits, there’s something for you in theaters this weekend.

When young Billy Batson (Asher Angel) says the magic words, he becomes Shazam (Zachary Levi), one of the OG superheroes who, many lawsuits ago, used to be called Captain Marvel. Now, he’s the star of the DC property that is the most fun, and we’ve got Memphis screenwriter Henry Gayden to thank for that. In Shazam! Fury of the Gods, Batson and his super-team take on the Daughters of Atlas, a sinister girl-god gang with Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu. 

Wes Craven’s meta-horror Scream just won’t die — the sixth installment made more money on opening weekend than any of the previous five, which means we’ll be screaming for the indefinite future. They can thank spooky teen sensation Jenna Ortega for that one. 

Willem Dafoe is an art thief who gets in way over his head when he accidentally locks himself Inside a high-security New York penthouse. As he tries to get out with the art intact, things go from weird to bad to extremely weird.

Jonathan Majors hits hard as Adonis Creed’s rival in Michael B. Jordan’s directorial debut, Creed III. The actor/director steps into Stallone’s boots to create a minor classic of the sports movie genre. Watch for the anime-inspired climax! 

On Wednesday, March 22nd, Indie Memphis presents Sansón and Me. When filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes was working as a courtroom interpreter in California, he witnessed a trial where a young man named Sansón was sentenced to life in prison. Over the next decade, he corresponded with Sansón in prison and created a hybrid documentary film based on his life. The screening at 7 p.m. at Malco’s Studio on the Square is presented in partnership with Just City Memphis.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Creed III

Michael B. Jordan takes to the ring once again as Adonis Creed to face off with Jonathan Majors, playing his wronged friend from the past.

Boxing has always been good fodder for filmmakers. The sport plays to the strengths of the form, offering compelling characters, clear conflict, and visceral violence. None did it better than Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Rocky, the 1976 Best Picture winner directed by John G. Avildsen, but forever associated with its writer and star, Sylvester Stallone. They are both working-class stories about driven men overcoming long odds, but they have very different takes on what being a sports hero really means. For Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, the championship is an empty prize. For Rocky, the search for glory becomes less important than personal integrity.

In 2015, Ryan Coogler rebooted the Rocky story with Michael B. Jordan starring as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, the son of Stallone’s frenemy, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). The Black Panther helmer is one of the greatest genre directors of our age, and his skills fit perfectly with the needs of the boxing picture. For Creed III, Jordan followed in the footsteps of Stallone by directing the film he’s starring in. And whaddaya know, the guy’s got chops!

The film begins in flashback, where a 15-year-old Donnie (played by Thaddeus J. Mixson) sneaks out of his mom’s house to go to a Golden Gloves boxing match with his buddy Damian “Dame” Anderson (Spence Moore II). Dame wins big, but while they’re on their way home, Donnie gets into an altercation in front of a package store. Dame pulls a gun to get his friend out of trouble, but he’s the one who gets busted when the cops show up.

Fifteen years later, Donnie is fighting to unify the heavyweight championship. He retires a champ and is settling in with his wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), when he gets a visit from an old friend. Dame, now played by Jonathan Majors, is out of prison and wants to get back into the fight game. After all this time, he thinks he’s still got “a little gas left in the tank.” Donnie feels more than a little guilty that it was Dame who paid the price when he started the fight all those years ago, so he offers to help train him at his appropriately Greek-branded Delphi Gym.

Dame’s got a lot of aggression to work out, but he’s a ferocious fighter. Donnie, who is trying his hand as a manager, is trying to arrange a title bout for his protégé, Felix Chavez (José Benavidez Jr., an actual professional boxer.). When his would-be opponent is mysteriously assaulted at a party, Donnie recommends Chavez fight Dame instead. After all, it was great publicity when Apollo Creed gave Rocky a title fight. “Everybody loves an underdog.” But Donnie’s plan backfires, and you better believe that the two former friends are headed for a final showdown in the ring.

During his press junket for Creed, Jordan has talked a lot about how his anime obsession shaped the way he approached his first outing as director. You can see it in his bold compositions, particularly in the fight scenes. The first match plays out in sweeping Steadicam close-ups that are more Scorsese than Watanabe. But during the final showdown in Dodger Stadium, the fans melt away, and the two titans slug it out like gundams. Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau shoots the fights in a high frame rate, allowing Jordan and editor Tyler Nelson to speed up and slow down the action as needed.

Jordan’s performance is fearless. The key to the Rocky stories has always been just the right combination of strength and vulnerability. Jordan is not afraid to cry in an extended double close-up with Tessa Thompson or wear a frog onesie to a tea party with his hearing-impaired daughter. Majors is a perfect foil to Jordan, delivering a nuanced performance that, like Jordan in Black Panther, is not, strictly speaking, villainous. Creed III can go toe-to-toe with the heaviest hitters of boxing cinema.

Creed III
Now playing
Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing in Memphis: From Boxing to Bunuel

Michael B. Jordan directs and stars in Creed III.

With Creed III, Michael B. Jordan makes his directorial debut in the third installment of the boxing franchise that made him a superstar. Adonis Creed is on top of the world, until his old buddy from the neighborhood Dame Anderson (Jonathan Majors) gets out of prison. Back when they were both budding boxing prodigies, Dame took a rap for Donne, and now he wants the title he was denied. Now Donnie Creed is in for the fight of his life. 

Guy Ritchie does spies in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. Jason Statham is the smooth operator Orson Fortune who is hired by the British government to retrieve a weapon called The Handle. Aubrey Plaza co-stars as Fortune’s rival Sarah Fidel, who also wants to get a handle on things — or her things on The Handle. Josh Hartnett, Cary Elwes, and Hugh Grant are also along for the action comedy ride. 

Still feeling a big rush from last weekend’s box office results is Cocaine Bear. Elizabeth Banks’ ursinesploitation flick came on hard like … well, like a bear on cocaine. Don’t call it a guilty pleasure, because I don’t feel guilty about it.

It’s December 1941 in war-torn Europe. Czech freedom fighter Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) are fleeing the Nazi juggernaut. They land in the North African port city of Casablanca, where they must enlist the help of American bar owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). But Rick and Ilsa have a history Victor doesn’t know about. Will they choose love or duty? If you’ve never seen one of the greatest films of all times with an audience, don’t pass up your chance to check out Casablanca this Sunday afternoon at the Paradiso. “We’ll always have Paris.”

Long before Ralph Fiennes served his murderous meal in The Menu, another cinematic dinner party went hilariously badly. Four decades after Louis Bunuel became film’s first surrealist (watch his Salvador Dali collaboration “An Andalusian Dog” if you dare), he put a group of entitled diners through the ringer with 1973’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Crosstown Arts is serving it up on Thursday, March 9th.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Letitia Wright is the new Black Panther in Wakanda Forever.

In December, 2016, Carrie Fisher died of a heart attack shortly after finishing her final scenes for The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s film turned out to be the best Star Wars title in thirty years, but the franchise had a big problem. The final film, Duel of the Fates, was to have focused on Leia as the last surviving member of the original trilogy’s band of heroes. With Fisher deceased, the script was scrapped, and the director fired. J.J. Abrams was brought in to guide the saga to a safe landing. Instead, he crashed the ship. The Last Jedi remains controversial, but The Rise of Skywalker is universally acknowledged as an epic fiasco. 

In August, 2020, another Disney department faced tragedy. Chadwick Boseman, the beloved star of Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43. Director Ryan Coogler, having made the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was faced with nothing but bad choices. Do you recast T’Challa, and assume the hero of millions of Black kids worldwide is, like James Bond, just a brand name fillable by semi-disposable himbos? Or do you try to write around the disappearance of one of twenty-first-century cinema’s brightest lights? 

Coogler chose option B. He immediately announced that Boseman would not be replaced. That meant Wakanda Forever was written with the difficulty settings on “high.” Normally in the second film of a superhero franchise, we have dispensed with the origin story, and the hero really comes into their own. Instead, Coogler and writer Joe Robert Cole had to account for their hero’s offscreen death, deal with all of the resulting character and plot fallout, and shift the focus to a new protagonist, all while introducing a new antagonist and delivering all the super powered thrills and chills the audience expects. 

It’s an impossible assignment. Coogler and Cole come very close to pulling it off by leaning heavily on the excellent ensemble they assembled for Black Panther. We open with the skeptic Shuri (Letitia Wright) praying to the cat god Bast as she races to find a cure for the mystery illness afflicting her brother T’Challa. She suspects the solution is related to the heart herb which gives the Panthers their power, but pretender to the Wakandan throne Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) destroyed the garden where the herb grew, so now she must try to create a synthetic version. She’s still struggling with the problem when her mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), tells her it’s too late. 

Tenoch Huerta Mejía as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

All this drama, and the moving, slow-mo funeral sequence, takes place before the opening credits. Flash forward a year, and the Queen is trying to help Shuri to come to terms with T’Challa’s death. Wakanda is still struggling with the same question that has always hung over the secret Afrofuturist society—should they engage with the world that has always been so hostile to Black people, or hide behind their vast technological advantage and huge supply of the alien wonder material vibranium? Stung by the trauma of her husband’s and son’s deaths, and the West’s quest to steal Wakandan resources, Ramonda is leaning back towards isolationism. Her political calculations are upended when a new variable presents itself in the person of Namor the Sub Mariner (Tenoch Huerta Mejía). He’s the king of the underwater realm of Talokan, which has their own independent supply of vibranium. Since Namor is a 400-year-old super powered mutant son of the Mayan civilization, he’s also suspicious of representatives of “Western civilization” looking for resources in his territory. It would seem the two civilizations’ interests would align, but instead they spiral into war as Wakanda searches for a new protector. 

Coogler is the best director working in the comic book space. His deep knowledge of classic genre films makes him uniquely suited to this novelistic storytelling. He flawlessly executes a tension-building Zulu sequence leading to the film’s first set piece, a three-way, air, ground, and water chase through Boston. Basset carries the early acts on her sculpted shoulders, before passing the baton to Lupita Nyong’o’s super spy Nakia and Winston Duke’s grumpy warlord M’Baku for their own bravado scenes. 

T’Challa was the moral center of the Marvel heroes, the one who best represented Stan Lee’s dictum “With great power comes great responsibility.” When Shuri takes up the mantle of the Black Panther, she faces the Wakandan conundrum of conquest or peace? T’Challa made the Solomonic choice to split the difference. Shuri’s choices, like the film itself, turn out much messier. Wakanda Forever tries very hard, but Chadwick Boseman is just too tough an act to follow. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

2018: The Year In Film

If there is a common theme among the best films of 2018, it’s wrenching order from chaos. From Regina Hall trying to hold both a restaurant and a marriage together to Lakeith Stanfield navigating the surreal moral minefields of late-stage capitalism, the best heroes positioned themselves as the last sane people in a world gone mad.

Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Freed

Worst Picture: Fifty Shades Freed

In her epic deconstruction of the final installment of everyone’s least favorite BDSM erotica trilogy, Eileen Townsend called Fifty Shades Freed a “sequence of intentionally crafted visual stimuli” that “bears coincidental aesthetic similarity to a movie … But I believe Fifty Shades Freed is nonetheless not a movie at all, but something far more pure — a pristine document of the market economy, a kind of visual after-image created as an incidental side effect of the exchange of large sums of capital…We literally cannot perceive the truest form of Fifty Shades Freed, because to do so, we would have to be money ourselves.”

Sunrise over the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Best Moviegoing Experience: 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX

The Malco Paradiso’s IMAX screen, which opened last December, has quickly earned the reputation as the best theater in the city. During the late-summer lull, a new digital transfer of 2001: A Space Odyssey got a week’s run to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Even if you’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s film a dozen times, seeing it the size it was intended to be seen is a revelation. Also, all lengthy blockbusters should come with an intermission.

Chuck, the canine star of Alpha

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Chuck, Alpha

Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a sleeper gem of 2018. The star of the story of how humans first domesticated dogs is a Czech Wolfhound named Chuck, who dominates the screen with a Lassie-level performance. Chuck and his co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, spend large parts of the movie silently navigating the hazards of Paleolithic Eurasia, and the dog nails both stunts and the occasional comedy bits. Chuck is a movie star.

KiKi Layne and Stephan James in If Beale Street Could Talk

Best Scene: The Family Meeting, If Beale Street Could Talk

Most of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel is an intimate, tragic love story between Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) and Fonny Hunt (Stephan James). But for about 10 minutes, it becomes an ensemble dramedy, when Tish has to tell, first, her parents that she’s pregnant out of wedlock with a man who has just been arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, then his parents. If you pulled this scene out of the film, it would be the best short of 2018.

Rukus

Best Memphis Movie: Rukus

Brett Hanover’s documentary hybrid had been in production for more than a decade by the time it made its Mid South debut at Indie Memphis 2018. What started as a tribute to a friend who had committed suicide slowly evolved into a mystery story, an exploration into a secretive subculture, and a diary of growing up and accepting yourself.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Best Screenplay: First Reformed

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader penned and directed this piercing drama about a small town priest, played by Ethan Hawk, who undergoes a crisis of faith when a man he is counseling commits suicide. 72-year-old Schrader is unafraid to ask the big questions: Why are we here? Is it all worth it? His elegantly constructed story ultimately looks to love for the answers, but the journey there is harrowing.

Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther

MVP: Michael B. Jordan

Michael B. Jordan played a book-burning fireman with a conscience in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451 adaptation and the heavyweight champion of the world in Creed II. But it was his turn as Killmonger in Black Panther that elevated the year’s biggest hit film to the realm of greatness. Director Ryan Coogler knew what he was doing when he put his frequent collaborator in the the villain slot opposite Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, making their personal rivalry into a battle for the soul of Wakanda.

Regina Hall in Support The Girls

Best Performance: (tie) Regina Hall, Support the Girls and Elsie Fisher, Eighth Grade

In a year full of great performances, two really stood out. In Support the Girls, Regina Hall plays Lisa, a breastaurant manager having the worst day of her life, with a breathtaking combination of technique and empathy. We agonize with her over every difficult decision she has to make just to get through the day.

Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade

Elsie Fisher started work on Eighth Grade the week after the 13-year-old actually finished eighth grade. She carries the movie with one of the most raw, unaffected comic performances you will ever see.

Emma Stone takes aim in The Favourite.

Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous efforts has been bracing, self-written satires, but he really came into his own with this kinda true story written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara. Everything clicks neatly into place in The Favourite. The central troika of Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as backstabbing cousins vying for her favor are all stunning. The editing, sound mix, and costume design are superb, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a particular lens choice for weeks.

Daniel Tiger (left) and Fred Rogers, star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood

Best Documentary: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Once in a while, a movie comes along that fills a hole in your heart you didn’t know you had. Morgan Neville’s biography of Fred Rogers appears as effortlessly pure as the man himself. Mr. Rogers’ radical compassion is the exact opposite of Donald Trump’s performative cruelty, and Neville frames his subject as a kind of national surrogate father figure, urging us to remember the better angels of our nature.

Sorry To Bother You

Best Picture: Sorry to Bother You

Boots Riley’s debut film is something of a bookend to my best picture choice from last year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. They’re both absurdist social satires aimed at American racism set in a slightly skewed version of the real word. But where Get Out is a finely tuned scare machine, Sorry to Bother You is a street riot of ideas and images. When his vision occasionally outruns his reach, Riley pulls it off through sheer audacity. No one better captured the Kafkaesque chaos, anger, and confusion of living in 2018.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Creed II

In this age of sequels, prequels, reboots, sequels to prequels, and reboots of the prequel sequel, film criticism can wander into the realm of sports writing. Is Shazam 14: The Shazaminator Returns better than Shazam 12: The Dark Zam Rises? Does Robert Downey Jr. still have what it takes? Which do you like better, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, or a kick to the head?

Spoiler alert: All the Shazam movies are going to be the same, Bobby Jr. checked out two Avengers movies ago, and I’ll take the kick to the head. Which brings us to Creed II: At Least He’s Not a Superhero.

Sylvester Stallone (left) and Michael B. Jordan star in Creed II, the new Rocky movie.

I made that last bit up. The Rocky movies, beginning with the 1976 Best Picture Winner and continuing for five iterations over 14 years, never used subtitles. In a way, that’s a more honest approach than Thor: The Dark World. Yes, this is the same movie, but this time, Rocky fights Mr. T.!

After a false start in 2005 with Rocky Balboa, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone (“Sly didn’t have what it takes for a comeback!” says the sportswriter), the franchise (there’s another sports term) was rebooted in 2015 by Ryan Coogler with Creed. Coogler cast Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the director’s debut Fruitvale Station, as Adonis “Donny” Johnson, son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. Like his father, Donny wants to be the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, so he recruits Rocky to be his trainer, effectively casting Sylvester Stallone as Burgess Meredith. Maybe it took fresh eyes and a fresh ethnicity to breathe new life into the Rocky formula, but it clearly worked. Coogler subsequently got called up to the Big Show, directing Black Panther, where he cast Jordan as Killmonger, who is probably the best villain the MCU ever had.

With Coogler too expensive (industry rumors have him rebooting Space Jam with LeBron James) and Stallone reasserting his position as producer and writer, the team hired a new coach: Steven Caple Jr. As a result, Creed II is like the best parts of Rocky II-V hot glued together.

Donny, now going by Adonis, has achieved his dream of living up to his absent father by winning the heavyweight boxing championship with Rocky as his corner man. But there are a pair of visitors to the statue of Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art who are inspired in a different way than most tourists: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) and his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu). If you will recall, in 1985’s Rocky IV, Soviet superman Ivan Drago killed Apollo Creed in the ring, so Rocky had to undertake the mother of all training montages to seek revenge and win the Cold War. Ivan was so disgraced that his wife (played by Stallone’s real-life ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen) left him. So now, he seeks revenge by pitting his son against Rocky’s son-figure.

The Rocky formula goes something like this: 50 percent soapy family drama, 20 percent training montages, 10 percent Zulu sequences (the anticipation of the fight, in which tension is ramped up slowly, named for Michael Caine’s 1964 film debut), and 20 percent men pummeling each other. To its credit, Creed II does vary from the formula by ramping up the training montage content to at least 30 percent. That’s really what the audience is hungry for, right? Rocky‘s training montage, set to the No. 1 hit “Gonna Fly Now,” was so compelling Philadelphia erected a statue to it.

The thing Rocky II-V were about was Stallone’s star power. In the 1980s, people just couldn’t get enough of the guy, whether he was training to defeat the Soviets in Rambo II-III, or training to defeat arm wrestlers in Over the Top. Stallone’s still staggering around like a drunk in Creed II, but it’s Jordan who is flexing. From his superhuman physique, I assume Jordan is doing crunches on a pile of money right now. He can hold the screen as well as any man alive in 2018, and when he gets a chance — such as when he’s in a hospital bed after getting the crap knocked out of him on national television — he can act, too. Tessa Thompson is back as his love interest, the deaf musician Bianca, even though she has little to do but moon after him.

But that’s okay, because this is a man’s story about a man proving his manhood by beating another man into submission. This is a movie unafraid to use the Eiffel Tower as a phallic symbol. The Rocky ur-narrative is patriarchal capitalism propaganda par excellence, and obviously it still works for some people, even if Creed II struggles to go the distance.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Ten Things About Ten Years Of Marvel Movies

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Black Panther

One of the most remarkable things about Black Panther is how unremarkable it is. To beat a dead sports metaphor, Ryan Coogler is a player who gets the fundamentals right.

Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther

Creating a successful action-adventure movie has been a solved problem for at least 70 years. Black Panther features some stunning visual moments. Coogler and Rachel Morrison (who just became the first woman to be nominated by the Academy for Best Cinematographer for her work in Mudbound) create some of the freest camera movements in recent memory. Industrial Light and Magic’s technical wizardry is on point, as usual. But the storytelling and characterization techniques that really make Black Panther tick were known to Michael Curtiz when he made The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938, and The Sea Hawk in 1940.

This is not meant as a left handed compliment towards Coogler and his crew. Quite the opposite. Look at all the directors who have been handed the infinite resources that 21st-century corporate filmmaking can supply, but were unable to craft a compelling product. Michael Bay, I’m looking at you. You too, Zach Snyder. And yet, these men’s failures were rewarded time and time again, while the most financially successful black filmmaker was Tyler Perry, operating outside the Hollywood system. Why do you think that is?

Curtiz had Errol Flynn, a man of exceptional physique and deceptively subtle acting acumen. Coogler has Chadwick Boseman, who comes into his own as a heroic movie star in the Flynn tradition. Boseman’s T’Challa is superheroicaly strong, but he’s also vulnerable, empathetic, and occasionally self-deprecating. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of Wakanda, but from the first scene with his on-again, off-again love interest Nakia (Lupita Noyong’o) he is also a person with recognizable human problems. Not to belabor a point, but compare Boseman’s performance with Henry Cavil’s turgid Superman in Man of Steel.

Better than Superman. Am I right?

Speaking of Noyong’o, Black Panther shows how criminally underutilized she has been, even while having a nominally successful acting career. Nakia could have been a throwaway character like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts from Iron Man, but instead she’s a crack Wakandan spy with a life of her own beyond her royal boyfriend. Noyong’o threads the needle, taking the material seriously but putting just enough comic book flamboyance into her performance to make it fun to watch.

In fact, the army of women is Black Panther’s most surprising element. From Latitia Wright’s Shuri, T’Challa’s 16-year-old sister who provides the mandatory hacker character, Danai Gurira as Okoye, T’Challa’s fierce bodyguard, and Angela Basset as T’Challa’s mother Ramonda, this film is a parade of perfect bone structure. But the women all get something meaningful to do besides look good. The film’s most Shakespearean moment comes in a confrontation between Nakia and Okoye, when the spy and soldier must each choose between personal loyalty to T’Challa and the oaths they swore to the throne of Wakanda.

Dani Gurira (left) and Lupita Noyong’o (center)

Superhero movies only work when they have a great villain, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker or James Spader’s Ultron. Curtiz had Claude Rains. Coogler has Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the director’s debut Fruitvale Station. The construction of Killmonger gets to the soul of Black Panther. He’s of the same royal lineage as T’Challa, but he has come to some very different conclusions about Wakanda’s place in the world. The advanced civilization has remained hidden for thousands of years to protect itself against man’s savagery, and keep its advanced weapons out of the hands of bad actors. Killmonger asks, if Wakanda is so powerful, why didn’t they step in and stop the horrors of slavery and colonialism?

Like Holocaust survivor Magneto in the early X-Men films, he’s got a valid point, and comes to the same conclusion. We, the oppressed, should rule. We’ll get it right, and the fact of our oppression and the righteousness of our cause makes whatever means we use morally irrelevant. Killmonger, like Magneto, is as blind to the corrupting influence of power, as he is blinded by his righteous hatred.

Michael B. Jordan

Black Panther synthesizes many influences, but the most unlikely one is Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Wakanda’s mix of soaring skyscrapers and natural elements invokes Naboo. The final confrontation between Black Panther and Killmonger uses visual and rhythmic elements from Phantom Menace’s climactic lightsaber duel. Perhaps Coogler saw what George Lucas had attempted — make a swashbuckling action-adventure movie against a backdrop of grown-up political intrigue and gray moral choices—and took what worked while discarding the rest. That Phantom Menace sank into a confusing morass, while Black Panther soars is a testament to the vision of Coogler and the talent of his team.