Black Panther (2018), dir Ryan Coogler

The triumph and tragedy of its central conceit is that it has no plausible way of interfacing with the colonial experience, i.e. that which shaped African lives and experiences more than anything else over the past century.

xp

i was looking up black comic book characters on google for future cool franchise ideas and i think i found the worst superhero name of all time: Doorman!

https://pm1.narvii.com/6327/7c196e0841012083a22ce592914a2bcdf15cfa4e_hq.jpg

Coal Tiger pretty bad too though.

http://worldofblackheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/coal-tiger1.jpg

Doorman is worse than Arm-Fall-Off Boy as a serious superhero name?

xp iirc he's solar energy tiger now

Clean Coal Tiger

This video of Coogler, Nyong’o, Boseman & Jordan with Eric Nam in Seoul karaokeing “All My Life” is kiiiind of life affirming imo

https://instagram.com/p/Bfg0AizjOWl/

$400 million domestic by the end of the day; I’m presuming it will become Marvel’s biggest standalone success here by the end of its run; even with adjustments for inflation only the original Avengers film will beat it out once BP hits $500 million domestic, and I’m guessing it will do that by next weekend or so. (Original Avengers earned $635 mil, $700 mil adjusted.)

saw this again. in addition to the rich characters and story, it's so damn beautiful to look at. especially the final sunset.

i saw this today (don't see most marvel films but this looked interesting). it had a lot going for it - mostly the scene-setting. kind of reminded me of prester john on krypton (though i guess most people don't know about the prester john myth these days? probably for the best that they avoided specifically mentioning it because it's problematic). just a gorgeous, gorgeous film. pacing wasn't perfect - the third act was just a series of fight scenes, pretty much gave up on any narrative momentum the film had up to that point, and worse i didn't think there was a lot of visual pop to them - the climactic fight between black panther and killmonger just gave me flashbacks to "streets of rage 3". everything leading up to that final fight scene was pretty top-notch, though.

Saw the film yesterday.
Really enjoyed it.
Wondered if there was a canonical history of Wakanda anywhere around cos I wasn't clear on how far ahead of the west they were. & would like a comparative timeline. Or is it intentionally vague.

I hear its supposed to be in East Africa so petty close to where my dad comes from. Nice.

Is that haircut on Killmonger the black equivalent of what is being called Meet Me At McDonalds now that it's been revived by teen hoodies after the same thing denoting Heavenly/Sarah fans like 30 years ago?

Does this map onto existing Black panther comics arcs or is it all new. I know the character for years but haven't read a load of his comic appearances.

Is there a bit in thsi film where people can hear each other speak when they shouldn't be able to or did I misshear a technical explanation given earlier.

https://sunjaguar.tumblr.com/post/171301708712/he-finally-took-her-to-coachella

I thought the description of how vibranium was transported by train involved a device that prevented vibration. Did I hear that right.
Thought it was supposed to be pretty much all inclusive. So does it not include sound.
Need to see that bit again after later events.

Something about not being stable in its native state. So look forward to that in Infinity War

https://gizmodo.com/can-black-panthers-vibranium-ever-be-real-1823226602

vibranium appears to absorb energy transmitted to it via particles much better than it deals with energy from waves, so presumably the sonic pressure waves around the maglev tracks are there to nullify the vibranium ores' more dangerous properties, which has the side effect of also making the black panther armor semi-useless. It's the same principle as noise cancelling headphones, but comic books.

i loved this movie and when i showed my students a clip from Bird tonight in class, I said "this is the same guy from Black Panther!" and it reminded me how much I love Forrest Whitaker.
Loved pretty much everything about this movie (and I know literally nothing about comic books or comic book movies aside from "there is DC and Marvel and they are different")

thing 1): most comic books do not have superheros in them

thing 2): every time someone on ilx says "comic books" when referring to the superhero sub-genre rather than the medium, sic will be there, like when the Cryptkeeper lights up the Archie-signal in comic book "The Walking Dead".

i knew thing one, did not know thing 2 apols for the incorrect terminology. i am not trying to be annoying, i am just this way naturally.

A few stray thoughts on the film, and I wasn't familiar with the comic.

I only said bcz LL noted that she doesn't know anything!

and she lives basically around the corner from Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti and Eddie Campbell and Jeffrey Brown and Jessica Campbell and Conor Stechschulte and Emil Ferris and Anya Davidson and Lucy Knisley and Perfectly Acceptable, could avoid some accidental awkwardness in a coffee shop

i just used the wrong terminology - i wasn't thinking about it very much when i posted. i meant superhero themed movies based on comics or whatever i was supposed to say. (i wouldn't recognize any of those people tbh, i do know who chris ware is)

My point was directed at sic more than LL - most people know what you mean when you write "comic books". However, I just learned that that Eddie Campbell doesn't live in Brisbane anymore (may have been the case for years, I haven't kept up), so good job everyone.

I need another look at the film in general I think but couple of things stuck in my mind. The vehicle interface thing looked like it was set up around existing chairs in both cases which they made a point of not being there when the ride was over. Am I seeing that wrong & the seats were just the first semi solid object that the technologyy manifested?

Boseman on sympathizing with Killmonger

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/28/17063218/chadwick-boseman-tchalla-enemy-black-panther

Love T'Challa's accent

without sounding too spoilery, Killmonger would have been better written if he once acknowledged other benefits of Wakanda technology besides the one thing

This thread went full spoiler a while ago

oh, i just read 10 posts back

i never thought i would make an effort to see another marvel movie but felt like i'd be missing *a moment* if i didn't catch this in the theater. for something so thoroughly predictable i enjoyed it, mostly b/c the world-building and look felt new and interesting and the cast was engaging. i think the movie was pretty on-point when it came to reckoning w/the fact that wakanda is founded on a lie (made literal w/the orphaning of killmonger). that the solution to that is a liberal outreach program really shouldn't be a big deal, i'll reluctantly lol @ twitter leftists who forgot that this is a fantasy and/or want to see a lot of human beings die.

a liberal outreach program with a spy as founding director!

How many times did this yute watch Black Panther because this accuracy has finished me this evening sjsjsjjsjsjsjsjs 😂😂😭 pic.twitter.com/sxAA6g7Aaf

— manda (@Comanda_x) March 5, 2018

OMG dying

As is my wont, I got in on this too late to say anything as-yet-unsaid in this thread. Except maybe a quick + seemingly non-sequitur challop that occurred to me as I left the theater: that was waaay better than The Last Jedi.

And that video is everything.

The Last Jedi is doing different things though - Black Panther doesn't have 40 years of history to deal with, and the tradition it is in (superhero films), it's a perfectly standard example of (everything angle other than "a superhero film", it's 110% on)

not a challop imo

Black Panther has some layers the Last Jedi doesn't, but the Last Jedi is better at doing action movie stuff in a fresh way. Both have better sci-fi villains than the norm, though.

Both have the antagonist kill off the trite villain somewhere in the second act, too.

Black Panther doesn't have 40 years of history to deal with

Created in 1966! Though of course since general audiences don't know/care it can take its history as inspiration to pick and choose from, while with SW it's a weight it has to carry.

maybe a quick + seemingly non-sequitur challop that occurred to me as I left the theater: that was waaay better than The Last Jedi.

― I'm not meltdown. (Old Lunch), Wednesday, March 7, 2018

examines post closely for challops, finds nothing

just out

wasnt great at all

may not even have been good tbh

now that’s how you do challops itt

deems, later: "in fact it didn't exist, and neither do movies"

i loved everyone in it and dim gonna read thread to see if theres been any dissensus cos three week old repetition aint no good

then ill be back

also its a better use of my time than ilx maleness

Now, before we proceed with the ugly part, let’s make a few things clear: no superhero movie needs to have good politics. In fact, none of them have, and probably none of them ever will, because the superhero genre does not lend itself to them easily. Vigilante action, power fantasy, and the idea that some people are just inherently superior are baked right into the recipe and extracted only with great effort and self-analysis; comics have attempted it only rarely and movies never. Furthermore, nobody ought to go into Black Panther — a multi-million-dollar product released by a mega-billion-dollar corporation — expecting it to be progressive, or woke, or even politically aware. That would be terribly naïve, and nobody should have done it; not before the movie was released, and not now.
And that’s good, because, folks, the politics of Black Panther are pretty goddamn terrible. I’m not the first person to point this out — I especially recommend Ricky Rawls and Leslie Lee’s Twitter posts — but the plot of the movie essentially involves a heredity monarchy built on ritual combat monopolizing a natural resource to maintain a nationalist, isolationist system. When a legitimate heir to the throne appears and decides to use that resource to arm and equip oppressed people of color all over the world, he instantly becomes the villain. Rather than participate in anti-imperialist revolution, the country’s leaders opt for a violent civil war; the revolutionary figure (who, to boot, is portrayed like a mad-dog ghetto thug straight out of a paranoid NRA fantasy) is killed and the newly aware monarch settles for teaching inner city kids to code. As Lee puts it, Black Panther “dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints it as villainous, and then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the Earth slaughtering each other to protect whites.”

There’s all sorts of other problems with the movie politically. The presence of the Martin Freeman character, a CIA agent who literally blows black people out of the sky to prevent them from aiding the struggle against people exactly like him, is a huge mistake, particularly in light of the real CIA’s real history with real African leaders. The movie also tries to have its cake and eat it too, in an obvious dodge swallowed whole by way too many Marvel stans, by implying that the problem with Killmonger isn’t his revolutionary intentions, but his violent means.

First of all, I have bad news for you, folks: the question ‘Is violence bad?’ is deeply and profoundly dumb and boring. Yes, violence is bad. So is cancer. The question is what we’re supposed to do about it. A much more interesting question is ‘Is violence effective?’; another is ‘When is violence justified?’ But Black Panther isn’t very interested in those questions, so we’re left to somehow accept that it’s bad for Killmonger to use violence to overthrow oppressive governments that exploit entire countries and wipe out entire populations, but it’s fine for T’Challa and his people to use violence to beat Killmonger — or, for that matter, to fuck around with slavers and child soldiers in neighboring countries, as long as the people they kill are other Africans.

It’s a complete ducking of the issue, made even more absurd by the fact that it takes place in the context of a superhero movie, where the whole genre is built in the idea that it’s fine to use violence against bad people. Do you remember any other Marvel or DC movie that did so much hand-wringing over the concept of violence? Apparently it’s only a concern when the violence might be targeted at the ruling classes. Beyond all that, as Rawls argues, the whole notion is bogus from the premise up: Wakanda has had incredible technology for a thousand years that puts them light-years beyond any other country on Earth, but it’s never even occurred to them to have a system of government slightly more responsive to human needs than a bloodline monarchy predicated on whoever is the best at beating the shit out of people? These aren’t inherent qualities of the narrative. These are choices made by writers, and they’re bad ones.

― grawlix (unperson), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 13:00 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol

― DUMPKINS! (darraghmac), Tuesday, 20 February 2018 13:11 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol indeed because having watched it this screed is 100% correct

also the cgi was eye jarringly bad at times.

also his mate with the rhinos turned on him so quick and so terribly that it was woeful

also all the fight scenes were impossible to follow, just a mess

i wanted it to work, it was very cool, as ive said the entire cast was great, but guys this was not good.

o ok

if it was not good ... why did i enjoy it so much

the pathologizing of killmonger (even in his name) is so evident it thumbs the scales, they have to make him crazy even though his entire plan is at one level completely rational