The Wild Robot: A Review - Domo Arigato Mrs. Roboto

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but emotionally potent film that is deeply moving for parents and children alike. Just be aware of the movie’s less than ideal sub-text.

The Wild Robot is an animated science fiction film that follows the travails of Roz, a utilitarian robot marooned on an island inhabited by a variety of animals.

The film, written and directed by Chris Sanders and based on the wildly popular book series of the same name by Peter Brown, features Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy and Catherine O’Hara among its voice acting cast.

The Wild Robot has a lot going for it. For example, the book series it is based on is enjoyable for both children and adults, and the animation on display in the film is as good as it gets in the genre.

While the film does enough with what it has to be an enjoyable and emotionally moving experience, deep down I couldn’t help but feel that it could have been better. That’s not to say that it’s bad, because it isn’t, in fact I assume this movie will be a front runner for a Best Animated Feature Academy Award, but I still think that it could have been better than it is.

Let’s start with the positive.

The film, which I’ll do my best not to spoil for the uninitiated, centers on the love between a robot and an orphaned gosling. The relationship between Roz (the robot) and Brightbill (the gosling), is sweet and funny and ultimately realistically heartbreaking as Brightbill matures into goose adolescence.

To writer/director Chris Sanders’ credit, The Wild Robot hits all of the proper emotional beats and does so extremely effectively. Both parents and children will be emotionally moved by the film in untroubling and at times exquisite ways.

Any parents in the audience will recognize themselves in Roz and easily relate to Roz’s heartbreak – which is the natural state for any parent. And children will recognize, at a minimum sub-consciously, the yearning Brightbill has to break free of parental control and go make his way in the world, but also the sadness and sense of loss that comes with embarking on that exciting adventure.

The biggest issue I had with The Wild Robot was not the perfection or potency of its emotional journey, but rather with the rhythm and rhyme of the narrative and the morality and ethics of its sub-text.

The story of The Wild Robot works best when it is simple – namely when Roz is trying to raise, protect and teach Brightbill. But when the story expands it loses its dramatic power and becomes, dare I say it, meandering and, at times, tedious.

In addition to losing narrative momentum when the story expands, the film also loses its emotional power amidst a bevy of action sequences that feel flat and derivative.

Another minor issue I had with the film was that the voice cast was just ok. For example, Pedro Pascal, who voices the character Fink, a mischievous fox, lacked a vocal crispness and dexterity that the character required. His vocals were a bit mushy for my taste and felt off for the character.

That said, I thought Lupita Nyong’o was very good as Roz.

I saw the film with my young son and when it ended, I asked him if he liked it, which he did (as did I despite my criticism). I then asked him which he liked better, the movie or the book. Much to my shock, since he had just seen the movie and had read the book many, many months ago – and reading is not his favorite thing to do, he said he liked the book better than the movie.

The movie does change things from the book. For instance, the pivotal character from the book, Chitchat – a motormouthed squirrel, is all but disappeared from the movie and replaced in the narrative by Pinktail, a mother possum (voiced by Catherine O’Hara).

The ending of the movie is different from the book as well, and is another reason why the emotional power of the film gets diminished in its final third.

Other book to movie changes are more subtle but no doubt book readers will notice and be either mildly or majorly disappointed by them.

Ultimately, The Wild Robot tells a story of love between a parent and a child, and that is moving and meaningful no matter how that parent/child relationship begins.

But there’s also a more subtle, and some might say nefarious or malignant sub-text that fuels the final fourth of the film, and that is about acquiescing to fascistic power. The sub-text of this film is the polar opposite of the old adage that “it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees”. The Wild Robot sub-textually endorses the notion of living on one’s knees, which is a total subversion of the hero’s journey – which has historically been a masculine tale, replacing it with the feminine instinct to placate and survive rather than to fight and die.  

So instead of teaching children to fight tyranny and authoritarianism, The Wild Robot in its cinematic form teaches them to bend the knee and keep their head down in order to scrape out a meek existence where freedom and love are momentary gifts to be stolen under an ever-watchful tyrannical eye instead of God-given rights worth fighting and dying for.

No doubt most people would roll their eyes at this interpretation of the film and claim I am reading way too much into it…but they’d be wrong. Movies (and tv and all other entertainment) are powerful propaganda tools and are used to manipulate and condition people in general, and children in particular, as to how to see their world and what to find acceptable.

The story of The Wild Robot is a benign and beautiful one…until it turns into a malignant and malicious one. That turn occurs late in the film and effectively uses the overwhelming emotion of the first three quarters as a way to bore into the collective unconscious of audiences and then drops the seed of acquiescence and impotence in the face of power.

Interestingly enough, the book is not structured in the same way as the film and it’s hero’s journey is therefore different, more traditional and therefore mythologically and archetypally more satisfying.

With all of that said, the truth is I “enjoyed” The Wild Robot because it effectively made me feel, and that’s what we want from cinema, even if it involved animated animals and robots living out the drama of life.

That the emotional strings plucked by The Wild Robot are used to promote a nefarious sub-text, is, if you are able to watch it consciously, still dismaying but somewhat less relevant.

The bottom line is that The Wild Robot is an emotionally profound movie that suffers a bit from a narrative that gets a tad meandering, but overall, I think it is still worth seeing.

Just watch it with an open heart and a watchful mind – and teach your kids to do the same thing.

©2024

The 355: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!***

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully-made, abysmal girl power action movie misfire that wastes its all-star cast on a forgettable, formulaic, neo-feminist fantasy.

The 355, which premiered in theatres on January 7th, is another one of those pieces of girl power propaganda that is more interested in activism than entertainment.

The idea behind the movie was born when the film’s star, Jessica Chastain, spoke with writer/director Simon Kinberg about making a female led James Bond/Mission Impossible type of spy/action movie.

Kinberg then wrote an egregiously unimaginative script that featured a derivative plot and trite dialogue, and slapped female leads onto it as a twist. The end result is the almost instantaneously forgettable The 355.

The 355, the title of which is derived from Agent 355 – the codename for a female spy for America during the Revolutionary War, tells the story of a diverse group of female super spies from across the globe who come together to stop a deadly computer weapon which can infiltrate any system and crash everything from planes to stock markets, from falling into the wrong hands.

Of course, in order to check all the right boxes in this feminist fantasy and woke wet dream, the lady super spies must all be of different skin colors and ethnicities.

Jessica Chastain is the white CIA agent, Lupita Nyong’o the black MI6 agent, Diane Kruger the hard-edged German BND agent, Penelope Cruz the fish out of water Columbian DNI psychologist, and Fan Bingbing the mysterious Chinese MSS agent. It’s like the united colors of Benetton ads except with bad-ass lady super spies.

Not surprisingly, all of the heroes in the film are women, and all of the men are villains. These brave women fight to save the world from not only the murderous mansplaining misogyny of turncoats and terrorist but also from the structural sexism of the all-powerful patriarchy in the form of the web of corrupt global intelligence agencies.

What’s so disheartening about The 355 is that the film’s leading ladies are incredibly talented dramatic actresses, with six Oscar nominations among them (and two wins), but they are woefully ill-suited for an action movie.

Producer and star Chastain has made a great deal about how in order to keep costs for the film down she did many of her own stunts. Unfortunately, it shows. Chastain is among the best dramatic actresses in the business, but she, and her co-stars, are embarrassingly unathletic, and their fight and action scenes are uncomfortably awkward.

This is not to say that women can’t be action heroes, they can, Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron are very good at that sort of thing for instance. It is to say that being an action hero requires an athleticism and physical presence that none of the women in The 355 even remotely possess.

Just like I wouldn’t want to see Jason Statham do Shakespeare, I don’t need to see gifted thespians Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Lupita Nyong’o attempting to do mindless action sequences.

Another issue with the film is that director Simon Kinberg, who has been a successful screenwriter for a long time in Hollywood – scripting Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Sherlock Holmes and X-Men: Days of Future Past among others, is simply not a proficient filmmaker.

Kinberg’s directorial shortcomings are on full display on The 355, as the poorly shot film is saddled with amateurish fight choreography and egregious editing errors.

Kinberg’s script is also painfully pedestrian, as he repeatedly uses tired tropes like ‘accidentally spilling drinks on a bad guy as a way to distract them and pick their pocket’ in order to keep the plot moving. His dialogue too is clunky and cliched, featuring such eye-rolling gems as ‘Because we’re spies, asshole!”, and “James Bond never had to deal with real life!”, which was followed up by the lament “James Bond always ends up alone.”

The 355, which was supposed to be released last January but was delayed due to Covid, has a production budget of $40 million, but despite being so economical (by Hollywood’s bloated standards), it faces an uphill battle to break even at the box office.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is simply an unstoppable juggernaut right now and the second rate The 355 is going to be lost deep in its box office shadow.

The film will also suffer because it’s just another in a long line of recent girl power propaganda movies that were obviously more focused on getting their neo-feminist “women should behave like men” message out rather than making a quality film.

Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean’s 8, Charlie’s Angels (2019), Terminator: Dark Fate, Birds of Prey and Black Widow, all put their neo-feminist message first and entertaining their audience second, and they either bombed or underperformed at the box office, struggling to break even.

The only reason many of the above-mentioned movies, as well as The 355, were made, was because they appeased the pussy hat wearing brigade by featuring women as action heroes.

The problem though is that The 355, and many of its predecessors, are just dreadful movies, and fairly or not, their failure is seen by many to be a referendum on not only the future of female led-films, but also on the insipid cultural politics these films espouse.

A wise man, and it was most assuredly a man, as pop culture tells me my gender compulsively mansplains things, once said, “get woke go broke”. In regards to The 355, that statement definitely holds true, as this shoddy, vacuously neo-feminist movie has earned the right to be entirely ignored.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Trailer for Girl Power Spy Movie 'The 355' Wraps the Same Old CIA Propaganda in a Woke Feminist Cloak

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The long running CIA-Hollywood partnership is at it again trying to fool audiences with a female driven action movie set to release in January of 2021.

Hollywood is churning out yet another feminist action flick for the cinema going public to ignore.

The 355, directed by Simon Kinberg and starring Jessica Chastain, tells the story of five female intelligence agents from different nations – U.S., U.K., Columbia, Germany and China, who come together to recover a top secret weapon.

Besides Chastain, the film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing.

The trailer features such eye-rolling pieces of dialogue as “now we have a common enemy…and if we don’t stop them they’ll start World War 3” and “we put ourselves in danger, so others aren’t”.

If the final film is as dreadfully absurd as the trailer, then it’s sure to be an odious piece of cinematic garbage.

What is most interesting to me about The 355 though is that while I don’t know this for sure, it certainly appears to be just another in a long line of pro-intelligence agency Hollywood products that propagates America’s nefarious global agenda under the ruse of promoting female empowerment.

For example, in 2001, America’s sweetheart Jennifer Garner starred as CIA super-agent Sydney Bristow on the hit tv show Alias (2001-2006). Despite the show being a fawning CIA propaganda piece, Garner went the extra mile and filmed a recruitment video for the agency. The CIA’s press release announcing that video is insightful.

“Ms. Garner was excited to participate in the video after being asked by the Office of Public Affairs. The CIA’s Film Industry Liaison worked with the writers of Alias during the first season to educate them on fundamental tradecraft. Although the show Alias is fictional, the character Jennifer Garner plays embodies the integrity, patriotism, and intelligence the CIA looks for in its officers.”

Anyone who unironically claims the CIA is filled with integrity, patriotism and intelligence either is completely historically illiterate or actually works for the CIA.

Garner’s ex-husband, movie star Ben Affleck, is also no stranger to working with the CIA as evidenced by the films The Sum of All Fears and Argo. In 2012 Affleck said, “Probably Hollywood is filled with CIA agents”. I wonder if he was referencing himself or his ex-wife in that statement?

Another pro-CIA, female driven narrative was Showtime’s award-winning Homeland (2011-2020). The producers of Homeland reached out to the CIA early in the making of the show and agency hands are all over it. The CIA even had consultants on set to make sure the depictions of the agency were “realistic”.

The star and producer of The 355, Jessica Chastain, is also no stranger to collaborating with the CIA, as she starred in the infamous CIA propaganda piece Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

On that film, which claimed to show the true story of the CIA hunt for Bin Laden, the agency went to great lengths to control and falsify the narrative. The CIA granted remarkable access to the filmmakers, including classified briefings, in exchange for veto control over what went on screen. The agency took full advantage of that control and made the CIA out to be heroes and torture to be highly beneficial in finding and killing Bin Laden.

Intriguingly enough, it was Chastain herself who pitched the idea for a female James Bond – Mission Impossible type of spy movie which became The 355. Is it possible that Chastain is one of the CIA people in Hollywood that Ben Affleck mentioned? I don’t know, but it certainly seems like she is more than happy to make projects that uncritically show the CIA as the good guys as long as it garners her money and prestige.

Chastain is becoming the female version of Tom Hanks, a talented actor who, as evidenced by Saving Private Ryan, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Post and Bridge of Spies among many others, is always eagerly and reliably in the bag for the intelligence community and military industrial complex.

A damning piece of evidence against Hanks was his cringe-worthy refusal to say that Edward Snowden was not a traitor while doing press for The Post (2017) - a film about Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsburg. When directly asked if Snowden was a traitor the cowardly Hanks replied, “that’s above my pay grade”. Tom Hanks pay grade has earned him a net worth of $350 million.

As for Chastain and The 355, the CIA consistently uses Hollywood to promote the notion of intelligence agency women as American Jane Bonds and that has real-world consequences. Feminists cheer that the agency is now headed by torture enthusiast Gina Haspel, and has women leading three of its top directorates. The pussy hat brigade also proudly embraced former female CIA personnel, Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, as they ran and won congressional seats in 2018 by touting their background as CIA ‘badasses’.

Sadly, by co-opting vociferous feminist voices like Chastain and Captain Marvel star Brie Larson – as well as the feminist movement which has historically been anti-war and pro-peace (think Jane Fonda), this ensures that not only does the CIA have no opposition from famous women, but actually has their endorsement.

Progressive women, like Chastain and Larson, say they care about women’s issues, but by making a Devil’s bargain with the military and intelligence community, they are selling their souls and moral authority to promote predatory power. Their silence in the face of America’s violent militarism and imperialism, which murders and maims countless women and children worldwide, is shameful and damning.

Thankfully, from the looks of its atrocious trailer, The 355 will probably face the same box office fate as the cavalcade of recent busts like Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean’s 8, Charlie’s Angels (2019) and Birds of Prey that put feminism first and quality filmmaking second.

Sadly though, that won’t stop the CIA and Hollywood from continuing to use gullible and ambitious women to mendaciously sell the agency as a beacon of all that is patriotic and progressive – when in reality it is the antithesis of both, because as Ben Affleck once astutely observed, “Hollywood and the clandestine services both spend most of their time convincing people that something that is not true is, in fact, true.”

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Us: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A visually and narratively muddled disappointment of a movie that tries to be everything and ends up being nothing.

Us, written and directed by Jordan Peele, is a horror film that tells the story of the Wilson family who are hunted by their shadow dopplegangers while on vacation in Santa Cruz. The film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex.

Jordan Peele’s last film, 2017’s Get Out, was a horror/comedy that was also a social commentary on race and white liberal guilt that made a remarkable 255 million dollars off of a 4.5 million dollar budget. The film was a cultural phenomenon and critical darling that besides making gobs of money also garnered Best Picture and Best Director Oscar nominations and actually won the award for Best Original Screenplay.

The context in which Get Out became a “thing” is important to remember though, as the #OscarsSoWhite hysteria was at a fever pitch at the time and Hollywood and the media were desperate for any artist, actor or director of color to succeed. Jordan Peele was at the right place at the right time with the right type of movie to become a symbol for all of those hungry for a cinematic savior of color.

When I saw Get Out my response was, “what is all the fuss about?” I was entirely underwhelmed by the film and thought it was at best a pedestrian work with a clever premise and political perspective with which I actually agreed. I also thought that critics were, ironically considering the film’s spot-on theme of White liberal guilt, over-hyping the film and Peele’s filmmaking skill due to a “woke” agenda where all things related to diversity are wonderful. It seemed obvious to me that the incessant and exuberant critical love for Jordan Peele and Get Out was a function of grading on a diversity curve as opposed to on merit, which as a cinephile I find grating and frankly unethical.

Which brings us to…well..Us… Jordan Peele’s follow up to Get Out. It might come as a surprise to some that despite my misgivings about Get Out, I was actually really excited to see Us. The reason for my anticipation was that the trailer is absolutely fantastic. The trailer makes the film look super creepy, scary and bursting with thematic and symbolic potential and possibilities. Add in the fact that it dealt with dopplegangers, which I equated to the Jungian concept of the shadow (which intrigues me as an amateur Jungian), and I am all in for Us. As proof of my excitement for the film, I actually went and saw it at a 10:30 AM screening on the Friday it opened.

Then the movie started and my excitement dissipated and diminished with every passing second that the film played until I was left completely bored and uninterested for the final hour of the nearly two-hour film. I was not the only one who was bored, as in my screening there were only four people, me and three Black men in their twenties or so, who came in individually and sat by themselves. The “phone check index” with Us was very high, as every single one of those men checked their phones at least ten times times throughout the screening.

The biggest problem with Us is that for a horror movie, it isn’t even remotely scary. There are no legitimate thrills or chills in this movie and there is a startling lack of tension.

Another problem is, much like Get Out, it is poorly shot and not very well-made. There are a lot of shots of darkness in the film, which is to be expected in a “horror” movie, but they are poorly executed and end up being little more than just a murky, dark screen. I know that sounds bizarre to the uninitiated, but there is a difference between darkness and a lack of light. “Darkness” is created by using lighting techniques to create a crisp contrast where you enhance the mood but maintain visual clarity and with it interest. For an example of cinematographic “darkness:, go watch The Favourite from last year and see how well they shoot with just a single candle as the lighting. On the other hand, “lack of light” is simply a lack of a light source and brings with it little to no visual structure and fails to create or enhance mood but only diminishes visual clarity and capacity.

In addition, how is it that the filmmakers couldn’t figure out that you need to light people with darker skin tones differently from lighter toned people when you shoot them in low light? Besides being exquisitely beautiful, Lupita Nyong’o is very dark skinned, so why wasn’t there any subtle light used to reflect off of her in the shots with lower light? Lighting her properly would not only make her visible to viewers but highlight her powerful performance and accentuate her exquisite bone structure and features (like was done in the photo to the left). By not lighting her effectively in the film, Nyong’o gets washed out by the faux darkness/lack of light, and even in the light Peele’s camera often loses the detail of her striking features. Maybe I am simply going blind or maybe the projector at my theatre was sub-par (I saw it at the Arclight, a high end theatre here in Los Angeles) or maybe the cinematographer, like cosmetic companies, doesn’t realize you need to light differently and use a different color palate to accommodate different skin tones. Again…maybe this is an issue with my vision or with the poor condition of America’s projectors, both of which are very distinct possibilities, but then again so is cinematic malpractice.

And finally, another problem with the film is that while the trailer presented an intriguing premise, the film’s narrative ends up expanding too broadly and in doing so dilutes any potential tension. Instead of making a focused and intimate film about just one family and their personal/familial shadow, Peele expands his thesis and by doing so neuters the film of all its power. The trailer had me thinking this film was sort of a crazy combination of The Shining, Straw Dogs and Cape Fear or something like that…all of which show families/couples under extreme pressure from relentless evil foes.

In narrative, thematic, symbolic, mythical and even political terms, Us is ultimately kind of a mess of a movie that feigns both artistic and popular entertainment pretensions whilst spoon-feeding its political/social message with such unsubtle and cringeworthy lines as '“We are Americans.”

Us is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and tries to be everything and ends up being nothing at all. Is the film about capitalism? Racism? Collective guilt? Collective shame? America’s shadow? The film is sort of about all of those things all at once and thus ends up not really being about any of them. The film lacks narrative cohesion, thematic coherence and dramatic compulsion and it never commands your attention.

On the bright side, the cast do the very best they can with the little they are given. Lupita Nyong’o, who plays the Winston family matriarch Adelaide, should be commended for picking the movie up and carrying it on her back. Nyong’o is a magnetic screen presence and it is impossible to take your eyes off of her, which is why it is so frustrating that she is so poorly shot and lit. Nyong’o gives her all but the film fails to live up to her strong work in it.

Winston Duke plays Adelaide’s husband Gabe, and is another top notch actor who is poorly served by the film. Duke is a charming presence but is terribly underused in Us, and his character often feels tonally out of place with the rest of the film.

The two younger actors, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex, play the Wilson’s children Zora and Jason, give solid performances that get scuttled by the visual and narrative mess that is the movie.

In the lead up to Us’s release, the media has once again turned on the hype machine regarding Jordan Peele. There are some who are actually calling him the new Hitchcock, which is pretty stunning considering he’s only made two films and both of them are painfully mediocre. Trust me when I tell you that Jordan Peele is not the next Alfred Hitchcock…he isn’t even the next M. Night Shyamalan…at least not yet. Maybe Peele will grow into being a Hitchcock or will have a few more moderate hits then be exposed for being a cinematic fraud like Shyamalan…anything is possible…but the latter seems much more likely, especially after seeing Us.

The critical love for Us is transparently, blatantly and shamefully a result of a “woke” cultural agenda held by film critics which holds diversity and inclusion in much higher regard than it does the art of cinema. I get the excitement around Peele, I genuinely do, but at the end of the day there is simply no there there. Peele, much like his films Get Out and Us, is cinematic fool’s gold, and anyone holding him up as an a formidable auteur is going to be left looking very foolish…the ham-fisted attempts at making on-the-nose social statements in Us are proof of that.

I remember decades ago Nicholas Cage was revered as some sort of acting genius, like the second coming of Brando except funny. Well…I knew back then he was a fraud and no one listened…and history proved me right and exposed Mr. Cage’s artistic vacuity. I think the same will be true of Jordan Peele. And to be clear, I don’t dislike Jordan Peele and I don’t want him to fail, in fact he seems like a good guy and I wish him success because I want SOMEBODY…be it Peele or anybody else, to be the next Hitchcock or Kubrick or Altman or whomever because I love cinema and cinema needs great auteurs. I wish there were more great film makers in the world not less, but wishing doesn’t make it so, and all the film critics in the world wishing Peele’s movies were great doesn’t make them any better and it certainly doesn’t make him a great filmmaker.

The hype machine is doing Peele no favors either, at least not in the long run. Yes, it will drum up business…hell, the hype and the great trailer had me so excited to see Us I trudged out to the theatre on opening day and I was really hoping it was awesome. The problem though is that it wasn’t…and that is sort of a big problem. The critical hype around Peele can only last so long before audiences tune out or get angry. This is what happened to M. Night Shyamalan, whose early films were considerably more financially successful than Peele’s. Once the bloom came off the Shyamalan rose his career plummeted and he has been struggling for years to try and get his filmmaking head above Hollywood waters ever since.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Us currently has a 95 critical score, which is extremely high. In contrast, the film has a 69 audience score, which in my eyes, and probably the eyes of the other audience members at my screening who would rather look at their phones than at Us, is a much more accurate assessment of the quality of the movie. It is striking that in the crazy world in which we now live, critics adore a supposedly crowd pleasing, populist piece of entertainment like Us much more than the crowd it is supposed to be pleasing. As previously stated, I think the critical love for this film and for Peele is mostly powered by the White liberal guilt of film critics, which means that while the film is not philosophically or politically insightful enough to be worthwhile viewing, the hype surrounding it and Jordan Peele is much more instructive and insightful about the world we live in than anything found in the film.

In conclusion, Us could have been a really fascinating movie, but it ends up being a terribly boring disappointment because it is so poorly written and executed. Us is too visually muddled, narratively incoherent and cinematically flaccid for me to recommend you see it in the theatre, but if you really do want to see it I say wait until it is on Netflix or cable and see it for free.

©2019

Black Panther: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars                

Popcorn Curve* Rating: 2.5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Unless you are a superhero fanatic, there is no reason to see this movie. If you really want to see it, don't feed the Disney beast, wait and watch it on Netflix or cable for free. 

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler and written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, is the story of T'Challa, a prince of the technologically superior African nation of Wakanda - who is also the superhero Black Panther, as he rises to the throne of his native land and struggles to keep his nation safe. The film stars Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa with supporting turns from Michael B. Jordan, Daniel Kaluuya, Lupita Nyong'o and Angela Bassett.

Black Panther is the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe which includes but is not limited to Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and all of the Avengers film. What makes Black Panther noteworthy among the rest of the myriad of Marvel properties is that Black Panther is the first of the Marvel films to have a Black lead actor and a Black director. 

As a White man, a member of the demographically dominant culture here in America, I am afforded the luxury of not caring about the race of a film's director or lead actor. The only thing I care about in regards to a film is its quality, not its diversity. I am mildly self-aware enough to understand that not everyone thinks like me or has the same perspective on the importance of quality in cinema. 

With all of that said, I understand that my experience as a cinephile watching Black Panther is going to be very different from, say, a young African-American boy's experience of watching Black Panther. An example of which was told to me recently by a friend (who is White) who recounted taking his 8 year-old African-American son to see the film and as they left the theatre his son said to him, "I didn't think superheroes could be Black!"

That anecdote highlights the fact that Black Panther is undoubtedly culturally important and is a remarkable achievement for African-Americans in film, but sadly, that doesn't make Black Panther even remotely close to being a decent film. And while social/political importance and relevance might trump cinematic quality for other viewers, it does not for me. 

Black Panther is bursting at the seams with all sorts of dramatic and cinematic potential, but like most of the Marvel superhero films, it never lives up to its robust source material. Stan Lee created the character Black Panther back in 1966, and it is a fascinating myth. The idea of Wakanda, an African nation that was never touched by colonialism or slavery, is so brilliant as to be ingenious. And naming a Black superhero Black Panther, after the revolutionary and iconic civil rights activists The Black Panthers (Members of the Black Panther Party), was another stroke of genius. Black Panther is not a terrible film, but it definitely is a disappointing one mostly because it only briefly skims the surface of the rich archetypal material percolating beneath its feet. 

The biggest problem with Black Panther is also the reason that it is getting so much attention…namely that it is a Marvel/Disney movie. Marvel/Disney movies all make billions of dollars at the box office but they are also all pretty bland and derivative ventures in shameless self-promotion, and sadly, so is Black Panther.

Ryan Coogler is considered by some to be a great director, his Fruitvale Station is fantastic, but like every other director of a Marvel movie, he is handcuffed by the process and the system which churns out these movies from the money-hungry Disney assembly line. The bottom line is this, Black Panther is a pretty shoddy movie that fails because it is so suffocatingly claustrophobic and looks unconscionably cheap. To be fair to Black Panther, all Marvel movies are just as visually flat, dull and devoid of cinematic vibrancy as Black Panther. I don't know if the plethora of failings of Black Panther are entirely Ryan Coogler's fault or not, but I do know that if Ryan Coogler is a such a great filmmaker and artist, then why isn't he making movies that matter artistically and not swimming in the retread pool of Rocky films and Marvel movies.

The rich themes at the core of Black Panther, nationalism vs. neo-liberalism, the generational scars of colonialism and slavery, the psychological plight of African-Americans who live with a psychological/historical void, are only touched upon briefly and never with very much genuine insight. The debate over whether to fight for Black people across the globe, or to preserve the sanctity of Wakanda is the most fascinating and relevant discussion in the film in my opinion, but like all the other potentialities in the movie, it too gets short shrift. 

The character that carries all the weight of these heavy issues is Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. Killmonger is a potentially phenomenal character that is so ripe with archetypal and mythic meaning I was hoping we'd see much more of him in the film. The problem with Killmonger though, and why we probably see less of him than we should, is that Michael B. Jordan, for all of his acting capacity, is a huge disappointment because he is unable to harness the character's immense power. I remember the first time that I saw Michael B. Jordan, it was in an episode of Friday Night Lights, and I sat up and said, "who is that?" He reminded me of a young Denzel Washington back in the day when he was on the tv show St. Elsewhere. Jordan, like Denzel, oozed charisma and had an innate star quality about him that was undeniable. As the years have passed though, Jordan's growth as an actor seems to have been stunted and he has not evolved past being that charismatic but one-dimensional teenager. 

The problem with Jordan's performance in Black Panther is that his voice scuttles the work his ridiculously sculpted body is meant to be doing. Jordan's voice is that of a child in a man's body, which results in Killmonger's menace and gravitas, which are vital to the narrative, being undermined. Jordan should be a palpably charismatic screen presence, but he ends up being rather wispy and inconsequential because his voice is too high pitched and not grounded in his belly, where he could connect with the character's (and his) rage. Killmonger should speak in a guttural, nearly primal growl that reflects the torment and suffering of those stolen from and locked out of the Garden of Eden (Africa/Wakanda), not in the high pitched whine of a petulant teenager preening and posing for effect. 

Besides Jordan's voice being not grounded or connected, he also suffers mush mouth, which might be a result of the fake gold teeth he has to wear, that further disconnects Killmogner from his primal fury. Unlike most of the rest of the cast, Jordan is not confined by an African accent which can be emotionally limiting or stifling due to its vocal formality, but he is still unable to use this freedom to viscerally connect with the existential animosity that fuels Killmogner.

Jordan also fails to imbue his character with a specific and detailed intentionality that would fill his silence and stillness, and focus his intensity. The result of Jordan's failure to create a vivid inner life for Killmonger is a dissipation of the character's volatile energy because it has nothing to contain it, which means it has nothing to enhance and increase it. 

It was also odd to me that Killmonger is such a highly educated man, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and got graduate degrees from M.I.T., and yet Jordan has him speak in a watered down, ghettoized and not just casual, but intentionally improper, American English that feels forced, posed and phony. At the end of the day, Killmonger is a character I wish could have been explored much more deeply and honestly, but due to Jordan's frivolous performance, it would need a different actor to play him, and a different movie in which to do it.

Chadwick Boseman stars in the film as T'Challa/Black Panther, and he suffers from an egregious charisma deficit. Boseman is a decent actor, but in a Marvel movie you need more than a decent actor, you need somebody to carry a movie for two hours, or in this case two hours and twenty minutes. Boseman is no Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, and that is no crime as few actors are as skilled and charismatic as Downey…but Boseman isn't even as magnetic as that dead-eyed dope Chris Evans who plays Captain America…and that is a major problem.

I found Boseman to be intensely dull and devoid of any magnetism whosoever. In the story T'Challa and Lupita Nyong'o's character Nakia, are supposed to have a history and chemistry between them, but the scenes between them are so wooden and lifeless as to be comically stultifying. Boseman has a pleasant energy about him, of that there is no doubt, but he certainly doesn't have a compelling one. 

The rest of the cast are all fine but none of them stand out. Nyong'o's Nakia feels under developed to me, as does Danai Gurirra as Okoyo, T'Challa's bodyguard. Angela Basset is always a compelling screen presence, as is Forest Whitaker, but both of them are not exactly doing much heavy lifting in the film. 

Martin Freeman plays CIA officer Ross and feels entirely out of place. Were there no American actors available to play the American Ross? Because Freeman's butchered American accent is abysmal and is totally distracting. Not to mention the obvious, which is that a CIA officer being a "good guy" to any African peoples at anytime is such a fairy tale as to be absurd. 

The audience clapped at the end of the screening I attended, but it feels to me like this was an entirely manufactured cultural moment where people think they are supposed to love this movie, so they choke on their disappointment and, like with Black Panther's super suit, they use the kinetic energy of that disappointment and turn it into vocal support for the film.

As these philistines clapped I wondered, did they watch the same movie I did? Did they see the shoddy and lethargic fight choreography? Did they notice the poor cinematography, especially in the night shots which lacked any coherent contrast or texture? Or how in the day shots there was not any use of shadow or light to propel the story or tell deeper dramatic truths? Did they not notice how thin and cinematically tinny the climactic battle scenes were and how subpar the special effects? 

Reading headlines even before the film was released it was easy to see that the marketing machine at Marvel was already into hyper drive as Black Panther was declared not just a great super hero movie but one of the best movies of all time. Good grief…it reminded me of Wonder Woman last summer, which was held up as being akin to Citizen Kane because a woman directed it. I liked Wonder Woman but Citizen Kane it is not…that said, Wonder Woman is so vastly superior to Black Panther that in comparison it IS Citizen Kane. Neither Wonder Woman nor Black Panther are even in the same ballpark as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, which is a masterpiece, but they pale in comparison to last year's Logan, which is a terrific movie. 

I was reminded of the most recent Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, when I was finished watching Black Panther. The Last Jedi received the same sort of critical hype that Black Panther received before its release, all due to the fact that the film was a bastion of diversity. I attended a Christmas party this year and at the dinner table The Last Jedi came up and a woman asked me if I liked it and I said no, I thought it was junk. The woman was very distraught at my opinion which I voiced in front of many children, and so as to not make a scene in front of these impressionable youngsters she leaned in and sternly whispered to me in retort "yeah, but it had a really positive message". I bit my tongue, for what I wanted to say to her but didn't out of social delicacy was that I don't give a flying fuck if a movie has a "positive message". What I care about is cinema…that is it. I don't care who stars in a movie, or who wrote it or who directed it, I only care that it is at least good, if not great. 

If you like a movie, like Black Panther, simply because it conforms to your preconceived social or political views, that is fine, but don't confuse that with the film's quality and don't confuse it with film criticism. It would be nice if film critics were professional enough to be able to discern between those things as well. 

The woman who was horrified at my honest opinion of The Last Jedi, would no doubt be even more horrified by people who loved American Sniper because it had a "positive message" in their view. Me…I am going to tell you the truth about a movie…and the truth about The Last Jedi, and Black Panther and American Sniper for that matter, is that those movies are not good. You may "like" those movies because they conform to your belief system, but that STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM GOOD! 

The problem with film criticism today is that social/political views are overwhelming critic's judgment of cinema. This results in the "ground breaking" Black Panther benefiting from what I call the "leg up" program where cinematic standards are reduced in order to fulfill some sort of social/political requirement. This reduction in standards is how we end up with a mind-numbingly average popcorn movie like Get Out being considered an "Oscar worthy film" simply because it is written and directed by a Black man, Jordan Peele. If Get Out were written and directed by a White man, and were titled, oh…I don't know…Scream...would it be Oscar worthy? No, not in a millions years, because it simply is not that good…which is why it isn't an Oscar worthy film! 

Look, again, let me reiterate this...I do not care about an actor's, writer's or director's race, gender, color, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation…I only care that they make a good movie. I am not sure, as I haven't spoken to anyone about the movie, but I think I may not be alone in my opinion of Black Panther, or The Last Jedi for that matter. I say that because I looked and saw that both films received incredibly high Rotten Tomato critical scores and a plethora of positive press, but when push came to shove, audiences seemed not to believe the hype and had much lower opinions of the movies than critics, which is odd as it is usually the other way around. For instance, Black Panther is currently at a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, but has a 77% audience score, which is an anomaly compared to any other film in the Marvel Universe. Other Marvel films all have critical scores and audience scores that are within just a few points of one another.

The Last Jedi is an even more telling example, as that film currently has a 91% critical rating but a dismal 48% audience score. It might be that people, unlike film critics, are judging these films critically for what they really are REGARDLESS of whether it conforms to their social/political beliefs, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score reflects their disappointment at what is actually on the screen. 

Film critics may think they are helping African-American artists with their paternalistic benevolence when it comes to judging Black film, but they aren't. What they are doing is lowering the standard for quality for Black film which will only hasten to alienate audiences who are only interested in seeing something good, not seeing something "important" and then pretending it is good. 

The reality is that Marvel movies in general are usually pretty awful, and Black Panther in particular is entirely underwhelming. Not only does Black Panther not live up to its enormous hype, it doesn't even live up to the low bar of Marvel movie standards, as I would place it in the bottom half of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the general vicinity of a film like Dr. Strange.

For me, the truth is I would rather watch a movie about the actual Black Panthers and how the FBI, which liberals have now grown to love, adore and trust, systematically infiltrated, decimated and assassinated the group and its revolutionary message into extinction. Unlike the actual Black Panthers, which were revolutionary in both thought and deed, Black Panther the movie may somewhere deep down be revolutionary in aspiration, but in deed is so mundane and banal as to be little more than a piece of distractionary establishment propaganda.

There were three White, sixty-something year-old women sitting near me at Black Panther who clapped once the movie ended and then, and I am not shitting you here, they literally clapped through the end credits for any and all of the Black actors and actresses as their image and name appeared on the screen, but only the Black ones. The silence for the White actors like Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman was deafening and frankly, hysterically funny to me. These women, who no doubt have never seen a Marvel movie in their lives, were partaking in a form of cheap "woke" grace with their ovation for Black Panther, and honestly, I find it utterly appalling. (These same woman were probably among the throng of dopes who cheered at the end of the truly abysmal The Post because it pushed all the proper Establishment Democrat Party buttons.)

If these White women want to "do" something "woke", they shouldn't cheer at a shitty superhero movie because it has a Black cast and director…instead they should sift through the bullshit they are being continuously fed on a daily basis by the mainstream media and understand how they are being manipulated into seeing oppressive entities, like the FBI for example, as American heroes. Instead of virtue signaling their "wokeness" to strangers in a theatre, why not go educate themselves about genuine American heroes like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton, or the Black Panther Party free breakfast program that J. Edgar Hoover once described as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the nation". Or go read about the charismatic young Black Panther Fred Hampton who was assassinated in Chicago by the Chicago police, the assault led by Sgt. Daniel Groth, who admitted under oath that his team of heavily armed cops executed their attack on Hampton at the behest of the FBI. (and as an aside go read about Groth's connection with the curious case of Thomas Arthur Vallee, a heavily armed, disgruntled former Marine who had previously been stationed at a U2 base in Japan - just like another three named disgruntled former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald - who was living in Chicago and who worked at a factory that overlooked the motorcade route that JFK was supposed to take in Chicago just weeks before he was killed in Dallas…it is a fascinating tale that James W. Douglass touches upon in his great book JFK and the Unspeakable) 

Regardless of whether you look into the real Black Panthers or not, what you shouldn't do is waste your money going to see Disney's Black Panther, and then post on Facebook about how #woke you are. The Mickey Mouse corporate monster ain't "woke", and he ain't going hungry and he sure as shit doesn't doesn't need your hard earned money, so trust me when I tell you that this movie is definitely not worth your time and effort. But if you do go and see it, all I ask of you is that you try to honestly judge the film for what it actually is, and not for the movie that you desperately want and hope it to be. 

*The Popcorn Curve judges a film based on its entertainment merits as a franchise/blockbuster movie, as opposed to my regular rating which judges a film solely on its cinematic merits.

©2017