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)

That Which Is Indistinguishable From Garbage

Year: 2015

Director: Josh Trank

Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There are drawbacks to Marvel Studios owning the world. Aside from the obvious (cookie cutter superheroes flooding the market to the point of extinction), there are far more nefarious issues lurking in the shadows. The few properties that aren’t held in the iron first of Disney-Marvel are being desperately clawed away from that IP tractor beam by the companies that own them. In the attempt to avoid their lease running out and hold onto those rights, studios like Fox and Sony must continue making movies to renew their grip and defy the seven year copyright expiration date. That’s why we’re getting crap like the third Spider-Man reboot. Sinister, isn’t it?

If you combine that spirit of making movies for the sake of being able to make that same movie at a later date with the supremely dubious attitude of Chronicle director Josh Trank, you get a real spectacle of garbage. It’s called Fantastic Four, and I screened it for your reading pleasure. Here we go.

Heaven help me.

In the not-too-distant present, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is a wunderkind prodigy who accidentally cracks interdimensional travel for a science fair project. He is taken to the Baxter Institute, where he develops a full scale transporter with manic pixie dream scientist Sue Storm (Kate Mara), her hot rod-racing brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and their totally friendly ignore the name compatriot Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). On their first trip to the alternate dimension, Reed invites childhood friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), his ever-present sidekick.

Obviously, the mission goes wrong, Von Doom falls off a cliff, and the remaining four return safely, but not before being mutated into inhuman monsters. And by that I mean embarrassingly cheap CGI. They are taken to a base where they can learn to use their powers, Von Doom shows up, they have a brief preliminary battle, and… oh, was that it? The movie doesn’t so much end as shut off at the 100 minute mark.

Not that I’m complaining it wasn’t longer.

Where oh where do I begin? Fantastic Four is such a heaving mass of missteps that one major problem doesn’t immediately leap out, so maybe I’ll start with some good things about the movie. In brief (as if it could be otherwise), the beginning wasn’t downright terrible. I mean it was poorly written, ham-fisted, awkwardly paced, and implied that The Thing got his beloved catch phrase by imitating his violent older brother and is thus locked in a dangerous cycle of abuse, but it was decently entertaining, y’know. In fact, my initial enjoyment had my esteem for the film stubbornly plateauing at a solid 4/10 until the film exploded like an all-dynamite chemistry set. And the kid actor casting is pretty remarkable, showcasing two young boys who look more or less exactly like Miles Teller and Jamie Bell. So there’s that.

And that’s all, folks. There is literally nothing else in the film that is refreshing, entertaining, interesting, or even fundamentally functional in any way, shape, or form. Fantastic Four is a dour, grim exercise in seeing just how much expoisition a  single film can withstand without actually sustaining a plot. There are a lot of comic book movies with flaccid, overlong origin stories but Fantastic Four ups the ante by 1) repeating essentially the same beats of the 2005 Fantastic 4, and 2) sucking every last bit of light or comic booky joy out of the proceedings. It reeks of gritty flop sweat, straining for gravitas while displaying a deadly allergy to fun. It’s the absolute nadir of the Nolanization of superhero cinema, and if any film manages to steal that title from it, we’ll just have to call it quits on the whole Hollywood thing.

Here’s looking at you, Batman v. Superman.

It’s a story sad tell, but I’ll briefly run by you through my FF experience so you can understand the gravity of the situation. (Incidentally, the film’s initials are exactly the sound that will come out of my mouth if I ever find out that this is getting a sequel.)

I survived the abysmal script. As a veteran bad movie fan, I’m inoculated even against such atrocities as “I’m adopted.” “I know how that feels. Because I wish I was adopted.” Or Mr. Fantastic (who, never, by the way, actually receives that moniker over the course of this, his origin story) marveling that the university library has chemistry books from the 1950’s. You know, way back when they knew way less about chemistry. Hooray? I could ignore the fact that Sue Storm is an expert in all fields of science or that Von Doom apparently thinks they’ll be taking a trip to the fourth dimension, which any idiot who has even brushed by a stack of sci-fi novels know is time, not the ineptly-titled Earth Zero (fewer calories, same polluted taste).

I could suffer through the pacing, which uses time like a hopscotch board, leaping through days, months, and even years for no discernible reason. And I sustained myself through the special effects, which across the board looked like a World of Warcraft beta test save for one instance. Mr. Fantastic’s stretching is rendered in such a photorealistic way that you’ll wish you had bought popcorn so you could have a barf bag readily available. The one time the effects actually rise to the challenge is the moment the film needed to be most cartoonish.

Are they doing this to us on purpose?

I received this movie with enough patience to earn immediate canonization, but the third act broke me. I snapped like a West Side Story ensemble member. In the climax of the film (if you could call it that), the dialogue whips into a frenzied maelstrom in which Miles Teller narrates the wicked doings of the returned Doctor Doom and the script makes a belated, misguided effort to spice up the action with some quips that fall flatter than an Iowa cornfield.  The pacing makes an effort to make up for its previous doldrums by zipping through the battle at lightning speed. I guarantee that there are hardly fifteen minutes between Dr. Doom’s reintroduction and ultimate demise, which the Fantastic Four effect through some hitherto unknown variant of “teamwork” that involves pretty much everyone standing around and watching while the villain more or less defeats himself before quietly expiring.

The wailing Marco Beltrami score bleats and bellows as if there were an actual triumph buried somewhere under the confused dross, reminding everyone that it’s been there the whole time, echoing the movie’s terribleness in sonic form. Then the movie just sort of… ends, brutally chopping its crude character arcs to the quick while resolutely failing to actually resolve anything.

Did I even mention that the cinematography lovingly details every scar and blemish on the actors’ faces? Unless it was intentional, in any other movie, this rough handling would be an element so egregious that it would be the main crux of my review. But here it’s just one more instrument in a shrieking symphony of incompetence. Fantastic Four is a brutalized, beastly little movie, neither delivering thrills nor interesting characters, brainlessly repeating a story we’ve already seen.

If it were a thought exercise to see how a movie could be even worse without Jessica Alba, I would commend it. But these actors don’t deserve this treatment, this material doesn’t deserve this treatment, and you especially don’t deserve any of this. Stay very far away from Fantastic Four if you know what’s good for you.

TL;DR: Fantastic Four is a steaming pile of garbage, and it really doesn't matter whose fault it is.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1298

Hanging By A Moment

Year: 2014

Director: Tom Gormican

Cast: Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever heard of the term in medias res? It's Latin for "in the middle of things" and it is a rhetorical device used to draw people into a story by revealing details from a later point in time at the beginning, then telling most of the story in flashback. This idea has been used far and wide in movies like The Hangover, which opens with a desperate trio wondering how they will make it to the wedding before going back to the beginning to explain "how we got here." There's a whole thing about it on TV Tropes. Check it out.

As you may have gathered, That Awkward Moment begins with an in medias res moment. Jason (Zac Efron) is sitting on a park bench in the freezing cold as his voiceover narration asks "I bet you're wondering how I got here." 

No, Zac Efron. We are not wondering why you're sitting on a freaking bench. It's a park bench, not the Iron Throne. The rest of the movie is no less stupid than this opening scene, although it is somewhat less exciting to mock, alternating from being bland and tasteless to relying on the worst kind of odious gender essentialism.

And a heaping helping of white nonsense.

Jason is one of a trio made up of him and his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Mikey (Miles B. Jordan), two other up and coming actors. Teller attempted to make a name for himself in the quickly forgotten YA adaptation Divergent and Michael B. Jordan recently lit up the indie scene in Fruitvale Station. It is clear that they agreed to do a movie together in order to hopefully lift each other's careers up and over the high wall of success. 

It is unclear why they chose to do this particular movie with its characters that are far too old for the actors portraying them (Mikey is a married surgeon; Daniel and Jason are successful book cover designers), a director fresh off of producing the steaming pile of rat dung that was Movie 43, and non-starter dialogue and scenarios that could only be an aborted script for a sitcom pilot.

And not a particularly good sitcom. Not the kind that pushing the envelope of storytelling like or creates a zeitgeist hit based on a solid ensemble of relatable characters. But rather the uninspired style filled with (two and a) half-baked zingers and lazy gender psychology. Did you know that the one thing every woman in the entire world wants more than anything is a pair of shoes? Zac Efron knows. And all the women in the film agree.

Sure, shoes are cool. But it makes you wonder if the screenwriters have ever met an actual woman who wasn't a 3mmx3mm jpeg at the corner of a chat bar. And the inclusion of the line "So, you're gonna go full girl with it?" spoken to an emotional man was enough to cement the movie entirely into my lack of esteem. The shock displayed when a girl expressed interest in video games sent me into a supernova of anger, from which my houseplants are only now starting to recover.

True story: Sometimes they were so aware of the direness of their dialogue, they tried to mask it with a jaunty pop tune.

The film is just as blasé and careless about every other aspect of its creation. The editor cuts abruptly away from scenes before they end, any of the human emotions that are more challenging to write (i. e. anything that isn't "horny" or "bland") are smoothed over by turning them into musical montages, taking all the contrivances out of the plot would render the movie twelve seconds long, and - perhaps most egregiously - there is a date scene in the coffee shop where the scone they are sharing lies on a plate untouched for a matter of hours.

So, the plot. I guess. Let's just get that out of the way real quick. Mikey and his wife (Jessica Lucas) are getting a divorce, so Daniel and Jason make a pact with him to stay single in solidarity with their fallen brother. They of course all immediately fall into intense, loving relationships. Jason meets a Word Vomit Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Ellie (Imogen Poots), Daniel falls in love with his sarcastic best friend (Mackenzie Davis), and Mikey gets back together with his wife after little deliberation. The pact doesn't seem to matter until the very end of the movie when it suddenly does, where it is used to create a frail snotrag of conflict.

For the first hour or so, though, we are stuck watching absurdly well-off white people date each other in New York while an absurdly well-off ethnic couple does their business in private on the other side of town. There is no sense of urgency, no plot direction to speak of, just endless minutes unspooling of Zac Efron romancing his nonsense maiden.

You rang?

The humor is like a low sodium cracker - it exists, but it doesn't make you smile. The title is irrelevant to the plot and immensely pandering. The ending is bonkers if you're a sane human being. And although the production values are nice enough and the people are pretty enough to not hate spending an hour and a half together with them, they certainly tried their hardest to make you feel otherwise.

TL;DR: That Awkward Moment is entertaining enough to make me not want to drive a knife through my eye, but is too terribly put together to be much more than that.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 955