Guns... So Primitive

Year: 2018

Director: Ryan Coogler

Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o 

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

For a huge corporation dominating the box office, Marvel sure does manage to take some risks. Let's not pretend that these risks aren't carefully calculated and demographically analyzed within a nanometer of their lives to be as safe and sure as possible, but they're risks nonetheless. 

They hand movies to indie auteurs with only a few low budget gems under their belt (Taika Waititi earned his way to Thor: Ragnarok with Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and James Gunn nabbed Guardians of the Galaxy with Super, a film that had literally 1% of that Marvel flick's budget), they adapt low-performing properties into mega-blockbusters (the aforementioned Guardians had two brief runs, and hadn't had a comic published in at least four years when the movie came out), and though all their movies have the same general sheen, they aren't afraid of changing up the tone and even genre of individual entries (from the paranoid political thriller of The Winter Soldier to the frothy heist antics of Ant-Man, there's a pretty wide range of material at this point). When you really take a look at the way they've gone at least a teensy bit out of their way to make sure their mass-market product is guided by interesting, dynamic people, it's pretty, well, marvelous.

Black Panther is a combination of all of these things, and way more. The character of Black Panther is a Marvel B-side, though he's right on the cusp of being a household name, at least in nerdier families. The director, Ryan Coogler, only had two films under his belt, though admittedly one of them was Creed, already a successful, critically acclaimed franchise extension. But most importantly, this is the biggest budget film ever to have a predominantly black cast, a black director, all while being the first Marvel film with a female cinematographer to boot. These are all very wonderful, and yes, capital-I Important things. While I personally wouldn't consider this kind of casting and hiring particularly risky (because I live in the real world, and am aware that all kinds of people can make all kinds of art), Hollywood has a tendency to view anything non-whitewashed as a potential financial loss. In the eyes of Hollywood, the near-future careers of many hard-working, diverse crew members depends on the success of  the mega-multi-million dollar Black Panther, as does the continuation of the box office juggernaut Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's what I'd call a risk, and a very Important one.

Of course, the movie also has to be good in addition to important, but would Marvel take a risk on something that wasn't good?

Well, you got me there.

Spoiler alert: It's good. But first, the plot, which is blissfully as insular as it can possibly be from the greater orchestrations of the Marvel universe. After the events of Captain America: Civil War, which saw the death of T'Chaka (John Kani), King of the African nation of Wakanda, the throne has been passed to his son T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman, who is finally free from playing every significant historical African-American figure the country to offer). Wakanda, though it seems to be a third world farming country from the outside, is secretly a high-tech utopia thanks to its vast deposits of vibranium, a magical compound that does, I dunno, comic book stuff. It's magic.

Unfortunately, not everyone in Wakanda is as pleased with T'Challa being crowned King as his mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and tech-genius sister Shuri (Letitia Wright). The five tribes of Wakanda slowly begin to splinter according to their various allegiances, but the real breaking point comes in the form of two villains: the chav-bro arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis, using his actual god-given face) and his partner in crime Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, who is three for three on Ryan Coogler films at this point), an Oakland native who has mysterious ties to the Wakandan War Dog tribe.

Everything swiftly descends into what you might just call a "game of thrones" involving every major Wakandan figure, including General Okoye (Danai Gurira), leader of the bald, entirely female royal guard; W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya, currently an Oscar nominee for Get Out), a friend of T'Challa whose overwhelming hatred of Klaue makes him unpredictable; Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), T'Challa's former flame and an international spy who wants to use Wakandan technology to help those in need out in the world; and also Zuri (Forest Whitaker), but I'm honestly not really sure what he does. 

He mainly just delivers exposition and takes care of flowers.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Black Panther how very political it is. It's necessarily about political engagement and the responsibility of upper-class minorities to reach out and help the oppressed (which honestly isn't as far from the general theme of superhero movies as you'd think, although it is much more fervently expressed here). Occasionally the movie gets a little didactic, especially in a clunky monologue it shoves onto Michael B. Jordan's shoulders midway through, but otherwise it's soaked with an urgency and vitality that's startling for a film with this corporate pedigree.

But that's yet another thing about what makes it Important, and I'm a little sick of dwelling on that for the time being. Because Black Panther is fun, and it doesn't serve the movie to forget that. A tremendous cast is delivering crackling dialogue here, with just enough of a snappy edge to remind you that you're watching a Marvel project, but still shedding the vestiges of Joss Whedon flop sweat and finding its own personality in the process.

I mean, there's no way you can deny how awe-inspiring it is to look at that cast list. These people are all from different genres, mediums, and levels of fame, but they come together to create something spectacular. Everyone is having fun here, even Lupita Nyong'o, who is saddled with a tragically generic love interest role. A bright spot here is certainly Letitia Wright (whose biggest credit up to this point has been the odious British TV series Cucumber/Banana, which I regretfully watched all of in my capacity as a recapper at The Backlot) as the eager younger sister, whose energy and vivacity light up the screen like a thousand gigawatt bulb, but sometimes it's hard to look anywhere but the villains.

Marvel has notoriously had a problem with crafting solid antagonists, and that issue is cracked wide open here. Klaue is maybe not the best example, but the anarchistic glee with which Andy Serkis digs into the role is immensely satisfying. Killmonger, however, in spite of the ridiculous name, is a force to be reckoned with. Michael B. Jordan takes a role that we've seen in every Marvel origin story from the beginning of time (a villain who is a dark mirror-image of the main hero's costume and power set) and tosses in about a dozen extra layers of prickly emotion, charismatic intimidation, and moral ambiguity. He's not just a one note slab of eeeeevil, but rather a complex, satisfying character who serves up the themes of the movie on a silver platter. And not for nothing, he's so good-looking it almost hurts. Part of being a movie star is drawing the eye like an electromagnet, and he's at full charge.

Dude knows how to rock a vest, what can I say?

On top of all that, Black Panther is probably the best looking Marvel film to date, although - to be fair - only recently has it seemed like they've been trying to create any sort of visual beauty in their movies. But it also inhabits a wholly unique space in the American cinema sphere, bringing the traditions and aesthetics of Afrofuturism to the grandest scale they've ever seen. From the costumes to the sets to the sweeping cinematography of Rachel Morrison, Black Panther fully invests in the color, patterns, and majesty of Africa to create an arresting visual schema that dares you to look away for even a second.

There aren't nearly enough high quality screenshots of the film yet for my liking, but here's a quick taste of some of what it has to offer:

In the future, we don't question that women are badasses.

Western clothing patterns can go f**k themselves.

Oh yeah, did I mention Martin Freeman is in this movie? Should I have? Eh, probably not.

Sometimes set designers just get it.

The bottom line is that Black Panther is spectacular, and it makes itself so by utilizing a perspective that's been long absent from modern cinema. The heavy drums that propel the soundtrack straight through your skull, the elegant simplicity of the sci-fi gadgetry that blends old traditions with hyper-futuristic tech, and the eye-searing color scheme that doesn't remotely feel 80's in the way that most bold color palettes have gone recently, none of it could have come from Western culture, and the fact that it has been given such a platform is a blissfully new, visually entrancing experience.

What does come from Western culture, however, is the plot structure, and it's nothing we haven't seen before. Marvel falls back on a lot of their favorite tropes and plot devices, so nothing in the plot itself is going to particularly shock you. And while the action sequences are fun (especially a trawl through the streets of Busan, a South Korean burg we should all know very well, and a fight on the edge of a waterfall), none of them are blow-the-roof-off unique, especially the too-busy, dizzying CGI-fest that closes the third act.

The reasons to watch this movie are ample, but the parts where it fails are exactly the elements that mark it as a Marvel project. It's not Black Panther's fault that a formula we've seen 18 times before is getting a wee bit stale, but this is one in a long line of movies that are doing something unique and memorable, but I probably never need to see again. And it's a shame, because the act of seeing Black Panther is exactly what makes it so incredibly satisfying. 

It's a triumph of aesthetic, world-building, character-creation, and political urgency, and I highly recommend it. But it's still a Marvel movie, y'know? Thank heavens they're taking risks, but they're never going to make something one hundred percent new. There's no shame in that, but there's also no   longevity.

TL;DR: Black Panther contains a lot of material we've seen before, but it's presented with a vision that we certainly haven't.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1767
Reviews In This Series
Captain America: Civil War (Russo & Russo, 2016)
Black Panther (Coogler, 2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (Russo & Russo, 2018)
Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Cravin' Wes

As we approach the end of my long-running quest to watch every film ever directed by Wes Craven (only 4 TV movies to go!), let’s explore two interesting little scraps of his career: the final theatrical film I had yet to see, and the one porn film we’re pretty much 100% certain he directed, during his time working in New York in the sleazy 70’s.

Vampire in Brooklyn

Year: 1995

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Angela Bassett, Allen Payne 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An ancient Caribbean vampire arrives in modern New York City to seduce a lovely cop on the mean streets of Brooklyn.

1995 found Wes Craven in a very strange place. Just a year earlier he had created his latest masterpiece, New Nightmare, to very little fanfare. As much as that film proved he still had the capacity for intelligent, engaging horror, he was still chafing against he constraints of the genre, which hadn’t afforded him a truly sizeable hit in over a decade. So when he learned that superstar funnyman Eddie Murphy wanted to work with him, he leapt at the opportunity. Unfortunately, as it often happened for Craven, he found himself in yet another behind-the-scenes straitjacket.

While Craven assumed he’d be making a comedy, Murphy insisted he wanted to make a straight horror picture. Both men wanted to break free from their typecast genre, but the star’s wishes carried more weight with the studio. Thus we get another film that feels like a tug of war between two entirely opposite sensibilities. However, unlike the equally uneven Deadly Friend, Vampire in Brooklyn pulls together into something more or less amusing, even if it makes next to no sense as it goes along (something which is patently not improved by Murphy’s Blade Runner voiceover that runs through the whole thing like a rusty monorail).

The horror elements are passable, but they’re attempting to resurrect a stately, classic gothic feel that has never made a dent on my nerves in the first place, and they’re intermittently successful. What really saves this film, and I’m a teensy bit loathe to admit it, is its admirably goofy sense of humor. While it undercuts the horror at every turn, that horror wasn’t particularly strong to begin with. Hell, the climax, which I solely horror, is an interminable slog in spite of Murphy’s surprisingly subdued performance and convincing chemistry with the devastatingly sexy Angela Bassett.

No, with Vampire in Brooklyn, the goofier it gets, the better it is. OK, there may be some indefensible scenes that have Murphy Klumping it up in various silly costumes, but the movie frequently hits a register that evokes classic Blaxploitation by way of a Sam Raimi splatter flick. This is most evident in the gleefully gross performance by Kadeem Hardison as Julius Jones, a dock-worker turned ghoulish assistant. As his body rots due to the vampire’s magic, parts of him fall off at very inopportune moments. It’s a very juvenile, Monty Python Black Knight style of body horror slapstick, but especially when he’s paying off John Witherspoon as his grouchy landlord, it’s downright hilarious. A lot of these funny scenes (especially any with the Italian mobsters infesting the town) are pitched at a very high register, but Craven embraces his camp sensibilities and thus allows it to flourish.

Vampire in Brooklyn is no masterpiece, but it’s a diverting way to spend 95 minutes. Almost any other Craven film is a more worthwhile watch, but this one certainly has its cheesy charms.

Rating: 6/10

The Fireworks Woman

Year: 1975

Director: Abe Snake

Cast: Jennifer Jordan, Helen Madigan, Erica Eaton 

Run Time: 1 hour 13 minutes

MPAA Rating: X

A young woman with the possibly supernatural power to ignite lust in those around her pursues an ex-flame who’s a priest… and her brother.

Now, just to reassure any lawyers who happen to have stumbled across this blog, it has not been conclusively proven that Wes Craven directed this pornographic film, though it is known he spent years in the New York porn industry as an editor and producer. The film is officially credited as being written and directed by Abe Snake (and co-written by Hørst Badörties, which I suspect is a pseudonym for the Swedish Chef), but any scholar of Craven could tell you instantly that his fingerprints are all over the project.

For one thing, Wes Craven literally plays a character in the movie: the mysterious Fireworks Man who may or may not be the Devil. It’s kinda hard to deny your involvement when you face is on celluloid, beard or no beard. But even if his literal face was nowhere to be seen, his spirit thrums through the entire story, which chews on a lot of the favorite themes that he would return to over and over again throughout his career: repression of desire leading to violence, the potency of dreams (especially nightmares), the oppressive and hypocritical nature of the church, and the dark side of the suburban family unit.

The entire DNA of his career, from Nightmare on Elm Street to The People Under the Stairs, to My Soul to Take, is present in a film where a woman makes love to her brother with Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” playing in the background. What a trajectory! Being a porno movie, the plot is understandably rather repetitive, but he fact that it has themes worth mentioning at all speaks to Craven’s irrepressible intelligence.

That said, I can’t understand why any self-respecting heterosexual would find the film particularly erotic. A massively uncomfortable rape scene is shoehorned in (though, true to Craven’s ever-goofy form, in the same scene a man is hit over the head with a giant fish), and most of the consensual sex is underscored by tittering, nightmarish Insidious music. It actually kinds works as a horror film, melding woozy dream imagery and penetrative sex in a beautifully eerie fantasia.

Let’s not kid ourselves that The Fireworks Woman is worth seeing by anyone but the most institutionally insane Craven fan, but speaking as one of those, it was certainly an interesting insight into a burgeoning creative mind stripped of all propriety.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1032

Do The Harlem Shake

Appropriately enough for my spring cleaning period, two of the films I watched this week are very perfect, equally strange echoes of one another. They both deal with the topic of urban education in Harlem, but one focuses on the plight of the white teacher and was directed by master of horror Wes Craven, and the other focuses on a black teen and was based on the novel Push by Sapphire.

Music of the Heart

Year: 1999

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Cloris Leachman

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A newly divorced single mother takes the only job she can get – teaching violin to underprivileged kids in a Harlem elementary school.

Music of the Heart is a very special film. It’s the only film in Wes Craven’s career that isn’t horror or a thriller, and I’m immensely pleased he was given the opportunity to make it, even if he did have to strong-arm the producers by threatening not to make Scream 3 (although a world without Scream 3 isn’t necessarily a bleak prospect). This film is but a taste of the world that could have been if Craven hadn’t been pigeonholed as a horror director by the one-two punch of The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. Frankly, as a fan, I can’t say I’m sorry it worked out the way it did, but at least this film proves that the man was capable of expanding his horizons.

Unfortunately, that expansion was channeled into a heartwarming biopic, which might just be my least favorite form of cinema after straight-up snuff films. I would have preferred to bestow this movie with a full-ledged review, as I would with any Craven work, but this genre is just too daunting a prospect for the little ol’ horror nerd that I am. That said, the film itself is pretty decent, though woefully generic in the wake of thematically similar flicks like Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver, Take the Lead, and even Danny DeVito’s Renaissance Man (a film I secretly love). 

Craven’s horror upbringing is totally buried (save for one instance in which the classic Vertigo shot – where the background seems to stretch into infinity behind a character – is reversed, with profoundly mystifying results), replaced with fluttering birds and warm, rosy lighting. The film spends a great deal of time cycling through an It’s a Small World-type array of every conceivable urban conflict and occasionally goes alarmingly far out of its way to be Meaningful, but as a low-key character study it excels.

Meryl Streep’s Roberta Guaspari is no airbrushed white savior to these Harlem kiddos. She’s a cracked and broken, immensely weak-willed woman with more character flaws than there are heads in Hannibal Lecter’s pantry. She’s not some perfect Barbie doll whose only flaw is Caring Too Much. This ain’t a Hillary Swank picture, and this ain’t that part of a job interview where they ask “what’s your biggest weakness?” There’s no sugar-coating off this rude, brash, selfish, scared, desperate woman who finds her inner strength through the course of a ten-year teaching career (the time jump in the film is startling at first, but it picks up fast).

Streep is excellent, it must be said, though you can figure one can just assume that at this point. Cloris Leachman (as her mother) seems a little lost in the words at points, but she’s hardly in the film long enough to really matter, and she’s bolstered by its supporting cast including a tough-as-nails Angela Bassett, a proudly subtle Gloria Estefan, and the second-creepiest Culkin brother, Kieran. But Streep is the cream of the crop with her unflinching, raw portrayal of a woman on the brink.

Craven’s typical sense of humor is also at play in Music of the Heart, allowing it to flow smoothly without becoming a dour, didactic treatise. There’s perhaps a bit of an overemphasis on full performances of musical pieces, without which the pace would be snappier and the run time blissfully shorter, but the film never stops being fun, which is much to Craven’s credit.

I’m happy such a singular film exists in the great master’s oeuvre. As a genre devotee I can’t say I’ll ever have the urge to watch it again, but Music of the Heart is a dashing and competent piece of filmmaking. What more could I ask for?

Rating: 7/10

Precious

Year: 2009

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton

Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An impoverished, illiterate, overweight Harlem teen attempts to get a basic education while literally everything bad happens to her.

Lee Daniels will not be getting an invitation to my fantasy dinner party. My guess is that he’d more or less immediately start screaming about the hypocrisy of enjoying oneself while there is still turmoil in the Middle East. That said, a personality like that instantly lends itself to Oscarbait filmmaking, and Daniels’ audacious visual style make Precious a tremendously satisfying watch, even if it is never a truly enjoyable one.

For starters, he uses one of the simplest tricks in the book to lay a foundation on which to build his film: a realistic, faux-documentary filming style. Shot largely on handheld cameras that zoom in and out in the middle of shots and occasionally receive an obstructed view of the proceedings, this aesthetic puts the audience right there in Precious’ universe, almost subconsciously implying its authenticity. At intervals, Daniels goes overboard and one gets the impression of being yoked to a catnipped ferret as it runs back and forth around the room, but for the most part it’s not intrusive, in the style popularized by shows like The Office or Parks and Recreation.

With this structure in place, precious builds a mighty empire of daring aesthetic decisions. Many of these revolve around Precious’ fantasies of a better life, the sleek glitziness of which is captured by blissfully still, traditional camerawork. These frequent fantastical intrusions into her daily life can be subtle (a glamorous younger photo of her abusive mother coming to life to coo soft words to her daughter) or alarming (Precious escapes into a staccato fantasy world while being molested by her father – whee…), but they are always aesthetically confident and deeply impactful. These additional touches lessen as the film goes on, but presumably it’s intentional, although the film does lose some of its sparkle from there on out.

Precious is a film dominated by its visual schema, because as a plot there’s almost nothing to it. Something bad happens to Precious, she tries to make a positive change, something worse happens to Precious. Lather, rinse, repeat. The ambiguous ending isn’t nearly as dour as it could have been and – again – the lack of closure is certainly an authorial choice, but this is a film that can’t escape a thick cloud of Importance. It’s certainly an important story to tell, but one absolutely must be in the mood to receive it.

You see, the world where Precious lives, the world where beautiful white people are incessantly pumped into the living room through her TV, is our world, a fact which the film’s entire being endeavors to drive home. In addition to the gritty documentary aesthetic, the actors make great sacrifices to drive the point home. Gabourey Sidibe – hardly a traditional movie star – suffers abuse at the hands of everyone around her, painting Precious as a sort of social turtle, drawing back into herself and speaking almost inaudibly when she feels uncomfortable. Her performance is infinitely varied and certainly breathtaking.

The performers that surround her are likewise tremendously brave, and I don’t mean in the sense that they forgo movie star makeup, though they do. Mo’Nique (who plays Precious’ mother) overcame a childhood of repression to therapeutically portray a gut-wrenching, subtly human, yet startlingly evil role, Paula Patton channels her inner frustrated teacher, and Mariah Carey doesn’t sing a note. That’s true dedication.

Precious is a tough watch, it is a daring tirade, and it is overwhelmingly an actor’s movie. As a showcase for pitch-perfect film technique, it is untouchable, though as a story – even an Important one – it’s a little too unfocused to be truly special.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1377