Black Panther review

“Black Panther” finds itself in a middle of an explosion of black-oriented superhero content. In 2016 Netflix released the first season of their Marvel series Luke Cage, featuring a black urban superhero and a soundtrack by New York hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest, and there's a second season set for release later this year. In response, the CW released the first season of the DC hero Black Lightning, which premiered January 2018. On the heels of this new hunger for racially diverse representation, Marvel released “Black Panther,” co-written and directed by black director Ryan Coogler and featuring a predominately black cast, with the hopes of still attracting the widest possible global audience.

This story imagines a free country in the heart of Africa known as Wakanda, which has been hidden and protected from colonists, war, famine, disease, or any of the other factors that have devastated much of the known continent. Through the abundance of a powerful alien ore known as Vibranium, Wakanda has become the most technologically advanced nation the world has never known, and by avoiding conflicts with other world governments, the area has been able to thrive in secret. Chadwick Boseman plays T’Challa, the young heir to the Wakandan throne after his father, the previous Black Panther, was killed in the political bombings featured in "Captain America: Civil War."

T’Challa is alerted to action by an Oakland-based young freedom fighter known as Eric Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who wishes to challenge the African leader for the technology Wakanda is hoarding from the rest of the world’s black society. It’s then up to Black Panther to keep his land protected from any outside threat, whilst the nation itself is arguing whether or not they should risk exposing their power through defensive battle abroad. Along for the ride is the three women in T'Challa's life that help protect the hero in different ways; his warrior bodyguard Okoye (Danai Gurira), his little sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), who works as a weapons specialist, and his politically active and ideologically driven partner Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o).  

This incredible ensemble also includes Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Angela Basset, Forest Whitaker and Andy Serkis.  

Coogler’s first foray into large-scale, effects-driven action filmmaking features an exciting cast, wildly colorful production design, overt science-fiction premises and charged political points of view, and by most accounts, this mainstream Marvel release manages to hit most of its targets as the plot unfolds, but not without a few stumbles along the way.

Coogler’s cinematic training in independent film is a bit narrow and his camera placement is oddly closed-in. Much of film is done in traditional coverage, containing a lot of close-ups and mid-shots, which underutilizes the movie’s grand Afrofuturist production design and reveals just how much of the movie is actually spent on conversation set-pieces and walk and talks. Because the movie—to its credit--is more interested in battles of ideology rather than blockbuster action scenes, the few action pillars that hold up the longer dialogue driven sequences are open to harsher critique and don’t always satisfy the audience’s patience.  The best action moment in the film takes place at a casino in Busan, South Korea and it concludes with an exciting car chase. The ritualistic hand to hand challenges for the throne that take place on a Wakandan waterfall contains fewer effects but they have an emotional grounding in the story. In contrast, the concluding battle sequence as well as the final fight between Black Panther and Killmonger safely puts the movie on autopilot and concludes without surprises.

Despite my grievances with some of the technical elements of the film and the lack of sustained dramatic tension when it comes to the relationship between the hero and the villain—the script is often stretched too thin, trying to cover all its bases—I fully acknowledge that the reasons a person of color might be excited by this film are far more interesting than the reasons I might find fault with it. It’s not a perfect piece of genre filmmaking but it’s certainly unique and is working through a lot of bigger ideas, and if a Marvel superhero film can get teenagers to start talking about passivism, globalism, and post-colonialism without it feeling like homework, then I can forgive the pacing issues and the unintentional camp.

Grade: B-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2018

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about Black Panther. 

Creed review

Ryan Coogler’s unlikely “Rocky” spin-off “Creed” is an uncompromisingly traditional sports drama that works as a piece of pop-entertainment because of its commitment to emotional storytelling. Much like the director’s approach to his debut indie about police violence “Fruitvale Station,” Coogler spends a lot of time getting inside the heads of his characters and building a tangible, and believable world for them to inhabit. The big sports movie moments are present and the familiar beats of the genre are eventually paid off, but Coogler informs these moments with care and precision when it comes to the plight of the characters and the strength of the film’s performances.

This story picks up decades after the death of Rocky mentor and adversary Apollo Creed. Outside of the margins of the sequel’s cannon, it is learned that Creed had an illegitimate son named Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) with a women outside of his marriage. When the young boy’s mother dies and he is left orphaned Creed’s true wife Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) finds him in a juvenile detention center for boys and decides to bring him to her home in Los Angeles and raise the child like her own. After he’s grown, though she would like him to focus on his career as a business man, Johnson has a yearning to be a great fighter like the father he never met, secretly training in Mexico and building his natural talent as a boxer.  Soon enough, Adonis decides to quit his suit and tie job and move to Philadelphia to train with the aged and broken Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Cinematically “Creed” distinguishes itself from the other “Rocky” movies with a quiet and grounded sensibility. There’s a loose, handheld style used throughout and a much more somber tone than is usually expressed in the rest of the movies of this franchise. Coogler directs the film as if the other movies were a mythologized version of a real-life figure that we’re meeting for the first time in this iteration. Of course this isn’t the case, but the grit of this movie world is an effective tone-setter and Coogler informs the mentor-mentee clichés of the plot with a documentary style realism that helps the film’s urban setting feel properly lived-in.

The camera work also allows for longer lasting cuts that boarder on virtuoso filmmaking without ever announcing a flashy movie-moment or any post-Scorsese directorial muscle-flexing. Instead, much like the performances, these longer cuts are used to open the scenes up and allows the visual language to breath, especially during the climactic fight sequences.

Michael B. Jordan is terrific here as the young Adonis Johnson. I won’t say that he’s written with a ton of depth or complexity, but Jordan’s interiority and natural screen presence fills in the blanks left of the page. When young Creed moves to Philadelphia he meets a neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, a musician with progressive hearing-loss. This relationship never feels like a superfluous B-plot, mostly because of the real chemistry that exists between the performers and because the attention payed toward the film’s themes of living in the moment before opportunity eventually fades. Stallone is also allowed to play his iconic character with more vulnerability than we have seen from him in some time.

“Creed” is a movie that we’ve seen before. The tropes of the boxing-genre are inescapable and just about every one of those boxes are checked in this somewhat pedestrian screenplay. But cinema should also exist off the page, and that is where Coogler finds his strength as a storyteller, often better at expressing how a scene should feel rather than what it tells.  

Grade - B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Creed" and "Room" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.