Black Panther (2018), dir Ryan Coogler

:D

This will be the first best picture nominee I haven't watched since the wild horses couldn't drag me to Finding Neverland.

this was a lot better than finding neverland

I think one of my issues with BP is that I don't really like the main character.
I find him kinda annoying.
And M.B. Jordan was about 10 times more charismatic (and even likeable) than him !
Also, another nice thing compared to many other Marvel movies is that the main fight/battle wasn't a total mess with too many heroes and whatever space invaders.
I was almost "minimalist" !
The Avengers movies are too exhausting for me on that aspect.

It was almost "minimalist"

i'm surprised people are talking about this as a best picture contender, can only assume they will come to their senses in a year or five or just forget anyone ever said anything of the kind.

relative to the mythical aspects of MCU, or any superhero comic book, storytelling, it seemed really over-rationalized, presumably the effects of an effort to render its materials intelligible to as large a low-information audience as possible ($$$$$). that would not make it stand out among recent MCU movies, it's what makes them so long and safe. but here i think it hurts a bit more because rather than being an origin story turn for a superhero character (they being nothing if not viciously archetypal, always linked to the premises of their originating constellation of ideas: relationships to parents, source of power, iconic abilities, etc.), this is set up as an origin story for wakanda itself. in a typical origin story the result would be 'now this superhero's story begins' (naturally, bound to repeat and need rebooting and continuity editing). but the result of this story is that wakanda enters world history, i.e., that until now it has not properly had any history. thus the rigidity of the setup - herbs and ore and powers and a scrupulously observed ritual combat as a device for rationalizing a hereditary succession of power, which they act like has been totally reliable forever. the separate existence of m'baku and the jabari hints at the possibility of an internal history (just like m'baku's scorn for shuri as technologist suggests that she represents a break with the past), but he accepts the strictures of their rituals all the same once he yields to t'challa. at that point in the movie they're talking 'tradition' in a way that makes it seem like they can hardly imagine its opposite enough to reject it.

in order to have an appropriately mythical (i.e. archetypal in the usual superhero comic-scale way) action in at the heart of the origin story they do use the story of killmonger's father's death to relate killmonger and t'challa to each other on a dramatic level, to introduce a big lie, etc., but it seems like all that does in the movie as it plays is to situate its heart outside the focal point of the storytelling, to make the germ of wakanda's entry into history an outsider whom the movie is not really in a position to show the wakandans as understanding.

that matters for the movie's supposed 'politics' because if it as a whole establishes any kind of mythical structure of its own (inclusive of the entry into history) it has to be something like what t'challa's speech at the end suggests, of a free and independent nation choosing to enter into history (out of a kind of pre-history) on its own terms, from a position of relatively uncontestable superiority (he says they want to share their knowledge; do they imagine that anyone else in the world could teach them anything?). killmonger tells the wakandans he wants to liberate others who look like them, but it seems like his dying lines underline, accurately, the difference between the reality of race outside wakanda and its virtual un-reality inside. the return to oakland in the last bits is meant to show that gap being bridged, but there's something about the dynamics of the overall narrative that make it feel like the ending they'd like was never earned.

production design had lots of cool stuff going on in it but the cgi was way too arid and fakey. m'baku had about the only real lol, feeding agent white to his children (i think because they decided they had to make nearly the whole cast aristocratic types who never lower themselves by laughing - shuri gets a few in but not enough - not all that abnormally for superhero comic depictions of social life at the more rarefied levels of 'powers', but still, the other dialogue was way too flat to be able stay vital without some more irreverence).

relationships to parents is actually pretty low in Marvel (far more a thing for DC): only Guardians of the Galaxy and to an extent Thor have it in their origin stories.

source of power / iconic abilities are obviously necessary parts - we need to know that Tony Stark will die if the reactor in his heart is off for too long, and that he can't summon a magic hammer (okay okay, technology is frequently treated as magic)

Point taken though that 2/3 of this happens in another film entirely.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the idea that Wakanda has no internal history - it runs from the very first scene, including the history of Klaw.

(also please stop saying mythical / archetypal - Joseph Campbell is happily rotting in his grave)

(i don't mean it in that sense, but it's not as if talking about that dimension of a narrative is something he invented or that died with him. it's about making sense of the core metaphors tied up in the fact, in-movie, that the characters are more(-powerful)-than-human - which most of these do with some kind of logic of transformation and control. i don't see how you don't have to do it sooner or later with superhero universe movies, just to identify the core interest. otherwise they're all just a lot of spectacular junk.)

otherwise they're all just a lot of spectacular junk

https://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bloom-County-Complete-Library-Vol.-6-278.png

i'm surprised people are talking about this as a best picture contender,

important to bear in mind that film quality is totally irrelevant to a best picture nomination/award, which is more about the industry collectively and publicly affirming the values it likes to think it holds

personally while I'm glad this movie got made and was popular, I fell asleep and couldn't finish it

Only complaint I had was that I know what Forest Whitaker looked like in 1992, and it damn sure wasn't like Denzel Whitaker.

Who is.. no relation?

None at all!