Black Panther (2018), dir Ryan Coogler

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

Hey guyz, Boseman himself thinks Black Panther is the villain of the piece. There's room for multiple readings. Also 'Killmonger' is 40-year-old Marvel IP not some new thang they whipped up to stigmatize the antagonist. Just be thankful they refrained from calling M'Baku 'Man-Ape'.

I don't really get ppl casting Killmonger as some sort of valid depiction of black radicalism or whatever: dude's main motivation is revenge, and his objective is world domination (non-white parts of the world included). That he's also a victim of racism adds depth to the character but it doesn't make him a good stand-in for any kind of political thought, at the end of the day he's a comic book super villain.

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

Eh, it was telegraphed from the begining, dude made it pretty clear his loyalty was contingent on T'Challa adopting a new strategy of govt.

he turned in ten secs after first failed attempt of that clear strategy it was weak

He already mistrusted T'Challa before this and the failure just confirmed his missgivings - it's not like the movie plays his betrayal as a great reveal or anything,

yea he made comments about T'Chaka's failures insinuating long-standing frustration with his family's rule. and then a stranger shows up with a dead Klaue who T'Challa couldn't deliver.

what's so difficult about this

nothing difficult at all it was pish

lots of it was pish tbh

glad yall thpught it was great, genuinely.

Anecdotally, I appreciated seeing this in a theater where the only white folks within my field of vision at a given moment were my gf and Martin Freeman. And even three weeks in, it was as packed as any movie I've been to in recent years.

has now grossed over $1 billion worldwide

9th highest domestic gross of all time. 9th. Of all time. This thing hasn't even been out a month.

man, imagine the numbers if it had been woke in the right way

Imagine a world where people are critiquing a movie without concern for the box office bottom line because that’s how normal people interact with film

I don't really get ppl casting Killmonger as some sort of valid depiction of black radicalism or whatever: dude's main motivation is revenge, and his objective is world domination (non-white parts of the world included). That he's also a victim of racism adds depth to the character but it doesn't make him a good stand-in for any kind of political thought, at the end of the day he's a comic book super villain.

Of course his character’s methodology and end game are awful but ... that’s what I mean about thumbing the scales. It sets up an unfair status quo and conflates revolutionary response with world domination, as if the only alternative to “foreign aid” style liberalism was being “just as bad but in reverse”; pathologizes the diasporic revolutionary as somehow “damaged” & irrational (due to the home country’s original sin, sure, but still pathologized) when his mo for most of the film (if not his stated end game) was entirely rational. The film took the safe route, making the hero an Obama type figure instead of a revolutionary, suggesting the revolutionary was while important as a tool for getting the country to open up to the outside world, too radical to be taken seriously.

It’s not that the movie is “wrong” as much as “lacks the imagination to envision a world in which things were truly different”

9th highest domestic gross of all time. 9th. Of all time.

unless you adjust for ticket prices, of course, which exposes the ESPN-style thing of "all time" beginning in 1998

The film took the safe route, making the hero an Obama type figure instead of a revolutionary, suggesting the revolutionary was while important as a tool for getting the country to open up to the outside world, too radical to be taken seriously.

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Saturday, March 10, 2018 11:16 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is a nice summation. i think there are ways that a bp movie could really dig into these complexities but hey this is marvel studios, i'm going to take "script was vaguely aware of current geopolitical climate" as a success.

Thank u for lifting the scales of unadjusted gross from mine eyes, Morbs. Colors are brighter, food tastes richer, etc.

Apologies, all: Black Panther still has a ways to go before it clears the unassailably-adjusted heights of The Bank Dick (which I believe did about $78 trillion in 2018 dollars).

It's Gone with the wind, it's always Gone with the Wind.

(though adjusted Black Panther is about 13 places behind 1945's The Bells of St Mary's which I understand is a short film about the correct use of apostrophes)

It’s not that the movie is “wrong” as much as “lacks the imagination to envision a world in which things were truly different”

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Sunday, March 11, 2018 4:17 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Could turn turn that around and say its a failure on the part of those pushing this view, to imagine what it would actually mean for there to be a nation of black people untouched by white supremacy.

So much of the joy that people talked about on leaving the cinema came simply from having experienced a version of our history where blackness isn't reified through the prism of whiteness. Think about how truly rare that is for a second and understand why so few of the rules and tropes we're used to playing with don't make any sense here.

It's so telling how eager these critical takes have been to frame the conflict in the movie as a fight to protect whites, because it's completely counterintuitive to imagine blackness outside that dialectic. But what relevance do CIA machinations have to an African country that exists in isolation? What does a black revolutionary mean to a nation of black people that haven't experienced oppression? And what relevance can a Wakanda that didn't heed Nkrumah, didn't read Fanon and didn't meet Malcolm, have to the broader black struggle?

And for that matter it's not ok that the notion of black revolution and what that means isn't being interrogated here. Why is it taken for granted that such a nebulous impulse has genuine currency amongst black people and should be taken at face value, while what bloodthirsty leaders and internal conflict has actually meant for so many African countries over the last 60 years is ignored?

Those are some really great points. It's easy to forget that the issues of race we've experienced are not inherent and inevitable and that race itself is a spurious construct. Questions of what a truly aracial civilization might look like and how that civilization might respond when faced with the impact of race on the larger world are not really anything I expect a Marvel movie to parse in depth. I think they took a pretty solid swipe at it.

To be clear, I’m not saying the film was inherently bad or disposable for taking the path it did, and as a white person I’m certainly not suggesting I know the “right” way to portray an African revolutionary cause on screen ... in many ways i felt like this is one of the only action films in recent memeory which seems engaged with relevant issues in the real world and don’t mean to undercut that

but tsrobodo, wasn’t there something a little...underwhelming about that conclusion, a kind of vague, generalized “outreach” ? Did that not feel just a little emotionally pat?

I do agree that there’s something American-myopic about the revolutionary focus maybe but the film itself doesn’t seem super tied up in African politics today

Tbc I’m not trying to argue for the movie being good or bad as much as I am interested in unpacking the ideology arguments it makes or doesn’t make, looking at where the limits of its imagination are w/r/t that ideology

It already has to try and explain vibranium’s paradoxical relationship with infrasound — the explanation of pan-African politics, America’s disgusting post-Reconstruction record, our “soft empire” and exceptionalist / interventionist foreign policy approaches ended up on the cutting room floor.

but tsrobodo, wasn’t there something a little...underwhelming about that conclusion, a kind of vague, generalized “outreach” ? Did that not feel just a little emotionally pat?

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Sunday, March 11, 2018 5:21 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Honestly? Not really.

It's entirely consistent with the specifics of the plot:

Black Panther father kills brother, abandoning nephew to discover his cold corpse.
Black Panther son seeks to atone by reaching out to those who grew up like his cousin, starting at the place of original sin.

Trite? probably, but I don't see what more you could reasonably expect.

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.

― tsrobodo, Friday, February 23, 2018 12:27 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I go back to this because in fairness they do really skirt the line here. The movie incorporates concepts and ideas that the scope of the story is not equal to but rather than these passes constituting a genuine argument I see it as grounding the movie in our lived realities so that its emotional beats hit harder.

People forget that Wakanda is no less mystical and fantastical than Thor's Asgard, but because 'Africa' as anything other than a place where children starve, wildlife rules and terrorists kidnap schoolgirls is completely absent from the public imagination, Wakanda in all its allure and visual glory functions as a stand-in and ends up being afforded a realism that it can't possibly live up to. I have to imagine any disappointment with the direction taken stems in part from that.

Best Coogler decision was to kill Killmonger so that other marvel productions don't ruin him.

comix killmonger has died more than once iirc

so i just got back from visiting my family on vacation

my mom spent most of my visit with her complaining that "black panther" was monarchist propaganda

my mom hasn't seen this movie and, as if it need be said, isn't particularly much of a comics reader

i offer this information in the hopes that it may provides some amelioriation, or at least sympathetic backdrop, to my own frequently-expressed uninformed crackpot theories

two hours of propaganda for Big Vibranium imo

to be the first film released in saudi arabia in 35 years

https://shadowandact.com/black-panther-breaks-saudi-arabia-cinema-ban

When does this open in the US?

it's banned in the contiguous united states iirc, gotta get yrself to alaska and/or hawaii to see it