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black panther
May. 10th, 2018 07:36 pmOK, so we finally saw "Black Panther", the night before last. There were three other people in the theater, so we're not quite the last people in NYC to see it.
It is, as a NY Times columnist wrote recently, another pretty good Marvel movie. Not a great movie, but pretty good. Not as witty as the first "Ironman", but that's OK: it's trying to accomplish different things.
It's very cool to see more than two black characters in the same movie, playing distinctly different roles so they're not plot-interchangeable. And it's very cool to see a black-woman kick-ass scientist/engineer, and a lot of black-woman kick-ass fighters (and yes, they talk to one another, occasionally about something other than the male lead). And it's very cool to see a non-white culture that's technologically sophisticated, but not enslaved to its technology: they still have handmade baskets and Kente cloth in the marketplace, because they're pretty and useful and vibranium wouldn't make them any more so. I was a little less convinced that all the body-mods -- the plates in lips and earlobes, the neck-stretching rings, the ritual scarification -- make sense in a technological society, but I guess they're not much weirder than I see on the street in Manhattan. A lot of the dialogue is spoken in exaggerated-African-accented English, I guess to remind us that these characters really are African, but it also often makes them sound non-fluent and wooden.
The plot centers around conflicts among several characters, which in turn are based on a three-sided difference in political philosophy. To retreat from the world and hide behind a wall of isolationism, to bully the world into submission by vengeful force, or to help the rest of the world peacefully? Obviously, the right answer is (c), but just the fact that there are more than two answers to a question, with major characters seriously arguing each of the three, is something of a breakthrough among Hollywood blockbusters. I presume the movie-makers had in mind the current Presidential administration, which is passionately if inconsistently devoted to both (a) and (b) (although that administration wasn't elected until the movie was underway).
According to IMDB, there have been 19 films in the recent Marvel flurry, of which I think I've seen seven. I guess I'm doomed to be a cultural illiterate....
It is, as a NY Times columnist wrote recently, another pretty good Marvel movie. Not a great movie, but pretty good. Not as witty as the first "Ironman", but that's OK: it's trying to accomplish different things.
It's very cool to see more than two black characters in the same movie, playing distinctly different roles so they're not plot-interchangeable. And it's very cool to see a black-woman kick-ass scientist/engineer, and a lot of black-woman kick-ass fighters (and yes, they talk to one another, occasionally about something other than the male lead). And it's very cool to see a non-white culture that's technologically sophisticated, but not enslaved to its technology: they still have handmade baskets and Kente cloth in the marketplace, because they're pretty and useful and vibranium wouldn't make them any more so. I was a little less convinced that all the body-mods -- the plates in lips and earlobes, the neck-stretching rings, the ritual scarification -- make sense in a technological society, but I guess they're not much weirder than I see on the street in Manhattan. A lot of the dialogue is spoken in exaggerated-African-accented English, I guess to remind us that these characters really are African, but it also often makes them sound non-fluent and wooden.
The plot centers around conflicts among several characters, which in turn are based on a three-sided difference in political philosophy. To retreat from the world and hide behind a wall of isolationism, to bully the world into submission by vengeful force, or to help the rest of the world peacefully? Obviously, the right answer is (c), but just the fact that there are more than two answers to a question, with major characters seriously arguing each of the three, is something of a breakthrough among Hollywood blockbusters. I presume the movie-makers had in mind the current Presidential administration, which is passionately if inconsistently devoted to both (a) and (b) (although that administration wasn't elected until the movie was underway).
According to IMDB, there have been 19 films in the recent Marvel flurry, of which I think I've seen seven. I guess I'm doomed to be a cultural illiterate....
