Black Panther (2018), dir Ryan Coogler

smdh

Xp, is it a speech impediment? I thought it was just a very pronounced version of the NorCal/Oakland accent, a la Marshawn Lynch: https://youtu.be/IBMCZN9TYbM

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/villain

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/antagonist

xpost that for sure but Coogler definitely has a speech impediment on top of all that - he's obviously worked on it but it's there. he gets 'stuck' sometimes at the beginning of a sentence, where he'll repeat a sentence fragment a few times before he moves through the whole thing, definitely noticeable in situations where he's nervous.

killmonger did nothing wrong, everything he did was consistent with his sympathetic, yet contrary and violent, relatable views

t’challa opposed him philosophically and definitely opposed his course of action but remained sympathetic throughout — his bad acts were in the service of a goal that was disagreed with, but was understandable. being the king means taking blame for your nation, and his nation fucked up

what about when he killed his girlfriend

what movie did you watch

didn't he kill that co-conspirator lady he was smooching with?

and also the guards killed in the museum, they were killed in service of ... ?

I mean, he's a complex villain, with sympathetic views and motivation, but still a villain. not every antagonist is a villain, but every villain is an antagonist.

Killmonger was a big Speed fan iirc

well, then as the head of state, black panther is responsible for the ills of his people, including withholding technology and support from millions of people -- which was exactly killmonger's point

this is exactly the idea behind the claim that seeing one murder changes you for life, hearing about the deaths of thousands evokes mere sympathy

every person killed on screen is absolutely nothing in the grand stakes erik's fighting for! even if his methods are ultimately pretty fucked up. this is, ultimately, war. he's proposing a righteous worldwide conflict and we're tearing up over a handful of people

Killmonger and Nakia had nearly identical goals for Wakanda. Nakia just had the additional benefit of, you know, not having her father murdered by her uncle and being abandoned in America right around the time of the LA Riots then trained by the CIA to be a killing machine.

^^^

i.e. Killmonger is not the anti-T'Challa, he's the shadow Nakia.

In dramaturgical terms, isn't the essential function of an antagonist is to serve as an opposition force to the protagonist? as I understand it, this opposition can take the form of a villain (which is to say a character/characters with evil or malicious motives). but opposition to the protagonist doesn't always come in villainous terms. in a survival story, the antagonist is the environment – but it isn't a villain. in a classical sense, there's an argument that killmonger isn't necessarily a villain.

except nakia makes a point of not killing innocents

also killmonger sets all of the sacred herbs on fire, clearly a bad person

i get that he’s no worse than, say, the imperialist west, but that just makes the imperialist west a villain, it doesn’t make him not a villain

and he killed forrest whittaker ffs

Killed him for being the person black Panther's father saved from being killed by his father.

exactly

I would like to nominate "nearly" for several medals and ribbons and memberships in elite adverb clubs for all of the work it is doing in Phil's first sentence up there.

#WakandaForever pic.twitter.com/CmJySoHFjB

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) February 21, 2018

Reading this great interview with Winston Duke, who plays M'Baku (who, btw, has the best lair in the movie, the interior decorating is insane, never mind the gorilla-supported cantilever the throne room is in), I need to know if DJP is okay with the fact that half of the cast went to Yale.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/02/winston-duke-black-panther-mbaku-interview

I mean, Yale has a bomb acting department. If I’d realized this in high school, I would have tried to go there.

Another good interview with Duke

https://www.gq.com/story/black-panther-winston-duke-interview

WARNING -- he says nice things about martin freeman

SO WEIRD.

So excellent. Just hit so many bullseyes from the start through to the end. My favorite Marvel film to date and just a damn good movie. It didn't hurt that I was part of an enthusiastic audience. Biggest applause came when T'Challa pointed out his real estate investments ( rhino hitting the brakes was the next biggest lol).

Kind of surprised nobody has pointed out that T’Challa is being another example of an overseas rich person snapping up urban US real estate and turning desperately needed affordable housing into what amounts to a massive consulate building. and in the Bay Area no less.

That is a spicy take

Searing

Am gonna check if raggett has retweeted it yet

From the Root article:

Would they use that generic African accent overused in Hollywood films?

It isn't actually answered in the article, but a friend who saw it in Addis Ababa said there was laughter the first time that T'Challa opened his mouth, as it's a mix of East and West African accents.

If we sat through Kevin Spacey in ordinary decent criminal (NB we didn't) then it's bearable

I had to look it up, but I guess the African dialect they sometimes speak is real, one of South Africa's many, and specifically the language Nelson Mandela spoke. I had just figured they made it up.

Yeah, "nearly" was a bad choice of wording, I was on my phone and had just finished donating blood platelets, sue me.

This is a good piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/black-panther-erik-killmonger/553805/

N’Jobu is killed by T’Challa’s father T’Chaka for his insubordinate attempt to end the centuries of isolation that have kept Wakanda safe.

This is an odd thing to get wrong, tho.

(in that replacing 'killed' by 'silenced' or 'nullified' would not have affected the rest of the excellent article)

i didn't really enjoy this at all. it's not particularly bad, a kids movie that didn't do much for me. i haven't seen any recent marvel movies so maybe my bar wasn't sufficiently lowered (+ expectations raised by hype)

Give it time. In the week since I saw it, it's only gone up in my estimation. It's a grower, not a shower.

The only one of these Marvel movies of the last couple years I've wanted to see a second time might be the most recent Spider-Man, and perhaps Thor Ragnarok.

Am gonna check if raggett has retweeted it yet

Tsk.

But I will share this, which rules.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-internet-s-favorite-black-panther-fans-talk-about-f-1823190395

It's all <3 but I have considered blocking u for a month maybe

Patience. I'll be talking more about Drag Race soon enough. (Like tomorrow.)

Two months, maybe

I've not seen this yet, am not even sure I will see it anytime soon, but it's been a long time a film resulted in so many interesting written pieces.

This is an interesting counterpiece to all the praise, from AfricaIsACountry.

Where all these takes lose me is that they start off with the idea that any meaningful iterations of Pan-Africanism can even exist alongside the concept of Wakanda, which by necessity must erase the reality of "Africa" even as it amalgamates and emulates it.

Black Panther comics, for that matter, have never been about the African experience - at least not to an African. Hasn’t stopped me loving them over the years but, that is loving them with an understanding of how limited the premise is as a vehicle for broad, political and cultural allegory.

https://qz.com/1210704/black-panthers-african-cultures-and-influences/

How does it erase the reality of Africa?