Captain Marvel (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Captain Marvel (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Jude Law, Annette Bening, Djimon Hounsou, Lee Pace, Lashana Lynch, Gemma Chan, Clark Gregg, Akira Akbar. Screenplay: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, Meg LeFauve. Cinematography: Ben Davis. Production design: Andy Nicholson. Film editing: Debbie Berman, Elliot Graham. Music: Pinar Toprak.

When I was a kid, Captain Marvel was a big guy in red long-johns and a cape who looked like a swole Fred MacMurray. But now, many years and many lawsuits later, the captain is a woman and my erstwhile superhero has taken on the name Shazam! which was the magic word that Billy Batson used to transform himself. And that's another movie -- not to mention another comics universe -- entirely, one that I hope I hope to see before too long. Captain Marvel the movie is about Carol Danvers and the origin story of her superhero alter ego. Or perhaps I should say one of the origin stories, because if you start rambling around the internet you'll find that the mighty captain has had many personae along the way. Even this origin story is a little head-spinning, involving rival alien races, abduction, amnesia, accidentally acquired superpowers, and much more. Even now, I'm not sure I can tell you for certain whether the Kree and the Skrull are the bad guys or the good guys and where Annette Bening's Dr. Lawson fits into the whole thing. Only my familiarity with Nick Fury and Phil Coulson (Samuel F. Jackson and Clark Gregg, respectively) from other Marvel movies and TV shows makes me think that Carol Danvers is doing the right thing by trusting them. Even my favorite character in the movie, Goose, is a somewhat ambiguous figure, apt to turn into a voracious many-headed monster when provoked. Good kitty. I have long since grown impatient with movies in which the credits run almost as long as the story, so the narrative complexity of Captain Marvel bored me less than the usual CGI foofaraw it sets up. Brie Larson does what she can with a character who, if she's really as invulnerable as the film implies, doesn't hold much chance for challenge and growth. I assume the sequels will show us what her Kryptonite is -- she can't just potter around the universe tidying things up forever.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017)

Jacob Batalon and Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Peter Parker / Spider-Man: Tom Holland
Adrian Toomes / Vulture: Michael Keaton
Tony Stark / Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr.
May Parker: Marisa Tomei
Happy Hogan: Jon Favreau
Ned: Jacob Batalon
Liz: Laura Harrier
Michelle: Zendaya
Pepper Potts: Gwyneth Paltrow
Aaron Davis: Donald Glover
Flash: Tony Revolori
Herman Schultz / Shocker #2: Bokeem Woodbine
Anne Marie Hoag: Tyne Daly
Abe: Abraham Attah
Coach Wilson: Hannibal Buress
Principal Morita: Kenneth Choi
Mr. Harrington: Martin Starr
Mrs. Toomes: Garcelle Beauvais
Mac Gargan: Michael Mando
Jackson Brice / Shocker #1: Logan Marshall-Green
Karen, the Suit Lady (voice): Jennifer Connelly

Director: Jon Watts
Screenplay: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino
Production design: Oliver Scholl
Film editing: Debbie Berman, Dan Lebental
Music: Michael Giacchino

Although he looks closer to 21 (his real age) than to 15 (his character's age), Tom Holland makes Peter Parker into a charmingly geeky and impulsive adolescent in Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest iteration of the comic book hero, and I think the best. It benefits greatly from a good and refreshingly multiethnic cast, and most of all from Michael Keaton's participation as Adrian Toomes, whose work clearing up the rubble from the Battle of New York, which we saw in The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), allows him to salvage some alien technology and turn himself into a supervillain called Vulture. So far, this is standard superhero movie stuff. What makes it fresh is that Toomes is also the father of Liz, a girl on whom Peter has a crush, leading to the best scene in the movie: the moment that Toomes realizes that the boy who is taking his daughter to the homecoming dance is actually Spider-Man, with whom Vulture has already tangled. It elevates the familiar teen-movie awkwardness of meeting a girlfriend's father into something deliciously awful. Both Keaton and Holland make this mutual recognition scene a small classic, more memorable than the big chopped-up, noisy, CGI-flattened action sequences. (Although even there, I admired the wit of the scene in which Spider-Man tries to use his webbing to glue the halves of a bifurcated Staten Island Ferry back together.) The set-up for the film is that Peter, after being mentored by Tony Stark in the conflict at the center of Captain America: Civil War (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, 2016), has his head full of glory and plans to join the Avengers. But Stark wants him to grow up, and insists that he stay in school -- a STEM-focused high school in Queens for budding geniuses. He can become "the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in his down time, handling bicycle thieves and purse-snatchers, but nothing more than that. He does have a fancy new suit, but its powers are limited by a "training-wheels protocol." Naturally, Peter and his best friend, Ned, who discovers Peter's secret identity by accident, manage to hack into the suit's wiring and disable the protocol, launching the naïvely ambitious superhero into a world of trouble. I enjoyed Spider-Man: Homecoming more than the usual comic-book movie because its hero's dilemmas are familiar real-world ones, unlike those of gods like Thor and Wonder Woman, visiting aliens like Superman, rich dilettantes like Iron Man and Batman, or time-shifted science projects like Captain America.

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.