A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, September 10, 2018

Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)

Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther
Black Panther T'Challa / Black Panther: Chadwick Boseman
Erik Killmonger: Michael B. Jordan
Nakia: Lupita Nyong'o
Okoye: Danai Gurira   
Everett K. Ross: Martin Freeman
W'Kabi:  Daniel Kaluuya 
Shuri: Letitia Wright
M'Baku: Winston Duke
N'Jobu: Sterling K. Brown
Ramonda: Angela Bassett
Zuri: Forest Whittaker
Ulysses Klaue: Andy Serkis
Ayo: Florence Kasumba 
T'Chaka: John Kani 

Director: Ryan Coogler
Screenplay: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
Based on comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Cinematography: Rachel Morrison
Production design: Hannah Beachler
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Michael P. Shawver
Music : Ludwig Göransson

This past week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put on hold its proposed introduction of a new category: best popular film. The idea provoked a barrage of criticism and mockery. Did this mean the Academy was admitting that its recent best picture winners had not been popular? What criteria would be used to determine popularity? The box office take, for example, or would that be a tacit admission that the Oscars have always been in it for the money? It was also noted that the idea was not a new one: At the very first Oscars in 1929, two "best picture" awards had been presented, one for "outstanding production," which went to William A. Wellman's Wings, and the other for "unique and artistic picture," which went to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.* The Academy apparently found the distinction unworkable way back then, because it was discontinued the following year. Critics also noted that some of the most popular films of all time, such as Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and Titanic  (James Cameron, 1997) had won best picture Oscars, so what was the problem? The problem, if there was one, seemed to lie in the fact that the Oscars had lost clout. By the time the Academy's awards are presented, there have been so many other awards shows, from the Golden Globes to the BAFTAs to the Screen Actors Guild awards, that there's hardly any suspense left about who will win. And ratings for the Oscars on TV had steadily declined -- the show was overlong and featured too many categories that viewers don't care about. The Academy has apparently stuck to its plans to give out some of the less-glamorous awards, like the ones for sound effects editing and for short films, during the commercial breaks in the TV show, but caved to ridicule of the popular film award.So what does this have to do with Black Panther, ostensibly the topic of this entry? One of the criticisms of the proposal suggested that the popular film category was only a way of pulling in fans of blockbuster hits like the Marvel superhero movies, of which Black Panther was the most recent example. Of course, there's nothing to prevent Black Panther from being nominated for the old best picture category -- though to date no Marvel film has been so honored. It currently has a 97% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which indicates not only that it's popular but also that even the critics think it's good. So do I: It has an interesting story to tell, a unique perspective on race and history, and it's sharply directed and superbly cast. Its appearance, in the midst of the political and cultural uproar caused by the election of Donald Trump, is more than timely. And it has even provoked intellectual debate over whether it is a fresh and clever valorizing of the black experience or, as Canadian journalist James Wilt put it,  "a fundamentally reactionary understanding of black liberation that blatantly advocates bourgeois respectability over revolution, sterilizes the history of real-life anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere, and allows white folks such as myself to feel extremely comfortable watching it." For my part, I never felt "extremely comfortable" watching Black Panther, though I did feel entertained and more than a little provoked to think about the issues raised by it, which is more than I can say about any other recent superhero blockbusters.

*Both films were released in 1927. The first Academy Awards for for films released between August 1, 1927 and August 1, 1928. The split-year eligibility continued until the awards presented in 1935, which were for films released in the calendar year 1934.
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