A Good and Enjoyable Movie
Kerry Washington's performance was Breathtaking and the ENDING was Brilliant!!!!
Although this film adaptation can not quite breakaway from its award winning Stage Play origins, it's intentions are well-founded and thought provoking. All character performances are strong, but as a single scene ensemble piece, it can't quite avoid treading on some very stereotypical tropes. Depending on an individuals world-stage experiences, you could be forgiven for not totally understanding a lot of the subtext and it's emotional connections to real-world issues that simply do not plague some members of society.
It's dark ending is refreshing; as real-life doesn't always end in silver-linings and personally, I didn't see it coming. My final thoughts are that American Son could very much be used as a teaching aid for sociology classes. It's controversial subject matter is likely to provoke polarised views and topical debate amongst diametrically opposed cultures.
Complete nonsense. They escape with Raquel from the courthouse. Free to go anwhere but they take her to the Mint. Why?
I genuinely fucking loved Season 1. It has it's mistakes but overall is very entertaining.
The first part of Season 2 had a bit more noticeable mistakes/plotholes/stupidness and just felt like a rehash of S1. But because I already fell in love with the characters I still quite enjoyed it.
The second part of S2 is just bad IMO and makes me wish S1 was a miniseries with no follow up. Plotholes all around that are getting harder and harder to ignore (WTF was that shootout in episode 13?). Characters are acting even more stupid and annoying than before (why the fuck was Arturito even in this season?). Unnecessary plotlines (Nairobi? Lisbon at the end?)
It just feels like they ran out of ideas and are now just trying to squeeze as much money out of this as they possible can with minimable effort.
Too much Drama in this season. Feels a lot different than Season 1 & 2.
Almost everything is disappointing compared to season 1
Season 2 is literally a joke. Except 2-3 episodes all episodes are boring. I'm not going to watch another season of it
Worst first 10 minutes of a movie I’ve ever seen.
Wow another show going into 2018 I'm watching that has been cancelled. Just when it jacked up into a another gear to drive the potential ideas that season 3 put forward. Not sure I have much left to watch. FOX canned pretty much all their comedies that weren't animated (if Bob's Burgers went I'd just give up on TV and put on puppet shows on the front lawn in my underwear until I was arrested).
Nothing in the new line up of any of the networks this year is grabbing me at all. Police, police, police, FBI, Doctor, Police.
Reruns it is. :(
A touching story.
Simply put, Black Panther is one of these films that include many things we love the most: the love, the culture, the bravery, the politics, the technologies, and above all, the exhilarating well-driven action that we love & cherish as it stands.
[8.1/10] Black Panther doesn’t have the aura of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Yes, it has the allies and enemies we’ve met in prior movies like Age of Ultron and Civil War. It has the jovial vibe among its main cast. And it has the mandatory, climactic third act battle, draped in CGI and the usual fanfare.
But it also stands apart from the rest of the MCU’s offerings. It is unabashedly Afrocentric in its focus and its approach. It is a plainly political film, meditating on the legacy of colonialism, the oppression of people of color around the world, and the push and pull of isolationism vs. global activism. Though squeezed into the standard, three act superhero structure, Black Panther takes its audience to a different space, one untouched by the rest of the world and, in some ways, untouched by the broader cinematic universe the film acts in concert with.
It is a uniquely, profoundly black take on the modern superhero film, one long overdue, if for no other reason than how it breathes new life into the familiar formula. There’s nothing wrong with comic book movies hitting certain standard notes of uncertainty, challenge, and self-realization. But Black Panther is a cinematic argument for broadening the franchise, showing the renewed, distinctive character these common stories take on, when they’re told from a fully-formed, confident, and different perspective.
That distinct atmosphere is the best thing about the film, alongside the clear camaraderie among its cast and characters. No hero is an island these days, and while the title character has a notable arc that’s done well, the most enjoyable portions of the movie emerge when the plot mechanics of that arc are set aside for Black Panther to chat, spark, and laugh with his tech-wiz sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his altruistic ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), and his fierce, principled guard Okoye (Danai Gurira). So much of these films depends on the chemistry and connection between the people the audience is asked to spend two hours with, and Black Panther soars on that front, building a rapport among those core characters that carries the day.
At the same time, Chadwick Boseman gives one of the best dramatic performances to grace a Marvel film. Thematically, the film centers on the notion of whether someone with a kind heart but also uncertainty about how and where to guide his people can be a good leader, and Boseman brings the inherent decency and heft to make these ideas land.
Black Panther constantly puts its title character between conflicting choices and impulses. T’Challa has to balance his inherent sense of mercy, shown to the leader of a challenging tribe, with his desire to deliver swift justice, shown when he threatens enemy of the state Ulysses Klaue in public. He has to reconcile his deep love for his father and his deep respect for his people’s traditions with his growing realizations that his forebears were men, not gods, who made mistakes, and that his homeland may need to change and evolve. He must square his country’s tradition of isolation, with the competing calls to share the nation’s wealth and knowledge in order to help those in need, or to use those resources to bring down the oppressors around the world who keep them in that state.
If there’s one area where Black Panther excels, it’s in creating a central character who’s pulled in multiple directions, on multiple dimensions, leaving him unsure what path to take and what sort of man to be, until the right direction is forged in fires of challenge and hardship. The film is a political story, a cultural story, a family story, and a personal story.
It’s just that Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole seem not particularly interested in it being a superhero story. That’s not necessarily a problem. Films as tonally diverse as Logan and Deadpool have shown you can use the superhero framework to craft a multitude of different films with different approaches within the superhero framework. But there’s a sense in Black Panther that the comic book-y elements are perfunctory, that Coogler and Cole had a compelling story to tell about legacy, power, and obligation, couldn’t tell it without including the de jure superhero fireworks.
Black Panther is at its best when it shows its title character confronting his responsibilities as a citizen, son, and leader, or finding strength, challenge, and affection among his friends and family. And it’s at its weakest when it shows him punching and kicking those things in comic book movies that inevitably must be punched and kicked.
At times, Coogler and director of photography Rachel Morrison capture the same sort of raw intensity of combat that hews close to a boxing match from Creed. The close quarters combat of the challenges for leadership are tight and visceral, giving an immediate sense of the personalities clashing at the same time bodies are, and a digitally-stitched but nominally unbroken action sequence early in the film has the energy and fluidity of a splash page. But too often, the film’s fight sequences are a big jumble, edited to bits and nigh-impossible to follow from one blow to the next. Worse yet, the CGI is especially in these sequence -- digital characters move without weight, animated creatures and vehicles disrupt the immersion of a scene, and climactic fights between fully computer-generated figures in a computer-generated world feel like gameplay clips pulled from Mortal Kombat.
Despite the strength of the story that ends in that skirmish, the film ostensibly breaks little new ground in terms of its narrative. Notably, Marvel’s own Thor trilogy covers much of the same territory, from the prince questioning his place as king, to far off lands debating the appropriate level of engagement with the outside world, to unruly yet sympathetic relatives with an appetite to conquer angling for the throne.
But what makes Black Panther so refreshing is the perspective from which it approaches this material. There is a richness to the cultural wellspring that Coogler and his team draw from, one underutilized in big budget filmmaking. The film is rife with different hues, different pleasures and sore sports, that inform the movie’s sensibilities even as it applies them to the smash-and-then-find-yourself routine that the Marvel origin movies have nigh-perfected at this point.
It’s the critic’s crutch to see a film’s story as a metaphor for the film itself. And yet it’s hard not to see parallels between the story of T’Challa deciding to bring Wakanda into the rest of the world, and Coogler deciding to bring his Black Panther into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the wonderful things about the MCU is the way that it can create a cohesive sense of place among different films, and foster the sense, through minor easter eggs and the occasional team-up, that all of these events are taking place in the same world.
But despite having a few of those continuity nods and connections, Black Panther feels like it occupies a world all its own, one full of its own color, character, and vibrancy. At the end of the movie, T’Challa opts for outreach, he decides to open Wakanda’s borders, and share his nation’s knowledge and culture with the world. With this film, Ryan Coogler & Co. do the same for Marvel, telling their own story in their own, but also bringing such a distinctiveness and a specificity to it that makes the world of these films a deeper, richer, better place for Black Panther’s presence within it.
Saw Black Panther last night and I definitely enjoyed it. It wasn't earth shatteringly good, but it was a very nice change-of-pace from the usual superhero movies, especially those coming from Marvel. The entire setting of Wakanda was just amazingly done and is honestly the real star of the film. Black Panther has got its whole own mythos, culture, and set of vibes/themes that really sets it apart from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I really dug the entire look and feel of the movie.
The story was pretty solid as well. Very-Shakespearean as others have described with family, betrayal, royalty, etc. I liked what they did in terms of the villain with Michael B. Jordan and how things progressed, but I feel like just a little something was missing in the last third of the movie or so. Perhaps the conflict could have allowed to develop a bit more intensely, and then we could have gotten a story that was truly special. Instead, we get a solid redemption story type thing at the end. I don't really know what could have been added or changed to the story (that's why I'm not directing a multimillion dollar movie), but I feel like something truly epic could have materialized (albeit time restraints are a real thing as well).
Anyway, Black Panther was still a great movie, and very much part of its own universe. I actually liked this path that Marvel took for Black Panther by limiting the Marvel cameos and trailers/lead-ins to other movies as much as possible, and rather focusing on the characters and people of THIS movie. It's kind of like the opposite of what happened with Spider-man: Homecoming. Definitely go and try to check this movie out. if you can get a ticket... :P
The first season as well as the prequel season were down right amazing. The new guy that took over for Andy after his passing (Liam McIntyre) was nowhere near as good of a Spartacus, and I feel the show suffered because of it.
