Alloys

Just to address it up front, I missed the fact that it was Thursday yesterday and my normal posting schedule for a couple of reasons. First, it was a spontaneous vacation day. My kids, for reasons I will never fully understand, get a full week off for Presidents' Day (or President's Day or Presidents Day... I'm not sure. Please choose the one that best fits your personal brand of pedantry), so I bagged off my job to hang out with my boys yesterday and today. Of course it's normally possible to do that AND post my regular weekly blog post for all four to eight of my remaining readers on time.

But that brings us to point number two: during my regular posting time* I was otherwise engaged with the most inescapable of duties as a father of teenagers these days: watching a superhero movie at the first available opportunity. At the first showing of Black Panther at our local IMAX 3D multiplex spaceship engage-mo-tron palace, I was there, goggled and agog, watching storytellers posit an indestructible human paragon and then trying to find ways to make him destructible. You know, for the drama.

I kid, screenwriters, I kid. I really loved the film. It was interesting and smart and original and challenging, to the extent mass culture entertainment of this specific genre and scope can be challenging. Some of the action visuals were a little wonky, but it's always awkward to animate a human body doing things no human body should be able to do and have it look... natural, is that the word? Maybe just "not fucking weird." And sometimes it looked weird. Not Matrix Reloaded weird, but that pageant of CGI rubber doll-ing is both the progenitor and still the gold standard of CGI-human failure wonkitude.

The movie touches directly on ideas of colonialism and the African diaspora (both the anthropological prehistory and the more recent migrations, forced in various horrible ways) and (the part I thought most satisfying) tries to answer the question immediately raised by the idea of a powerful, insanely prosperous sub-Saharan Wakanda: if there is a country so blessed by stability and plenty, why isn't it using that to affect positive change locally, regionally, globally? The answer to that informs every conflict and decision, from the opening scene to the last one.** It infuses the whole experience with cohesion and purpose and underlines the thought, care and love the filmmakers (starting with Ryan Coogler, the director and co-screenwriter) poured into this project.

The performances were touching and smart and as grounded as they could be for a film with a cast this size and given the heightened genre stakes. Two things stood out: I still have no idea what to think of Michael B. Jordan as an actor. He alternates between great, personal, expressive work (Creed, also with Coogler. I haven't seen Fruitvale Station yet, but apparently more of the same) and ones where he sounds like he's reading lines off a prompter and then remembering to express a thing maybe half a beat later. I don't know.

The other thing, my favorite thing, is that I don't think any of the principle cast in this film speaks in his or her native accent. There was exactly one American character featured at all and he was played by Tim from The Office. No, not Jim, I mean very explicitly Tim. Literally everybody was putting on a voice and a cadence, which for me made it all seem more giddily make-believe, more let's-pretend than maybe it otherwise would.

So I liked it. And I missed my posting deadline because of it. Good news: it's a self-imposed deadline, so it's just me and my quiet guilt to deal with. The fact that I didn't remember at all until I woke up this morning means I seem to be dealing with it OK.

Also, it's been kind of a shit week. A bit fraught, a bit heavy, with all sorts of features like deep internal questioning and reorienting my human center in relation to literally all other people. You'll hear critics of our current era of superhero bombast dismiss films like this as pummeling tenderizer for our baser feelings at the expense of more nuanced ones (the ones indifferent to explosions? Like such a thing exists...), an anesthetic for a more challenging complex of human experience.

To that I guess I'd say, what's the matter with the occasional feeling-anesthetic? Especially one starring Chadwick Boseman.

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*or at least the mentally preparatory lead up to it. What, you didn't think I just sat down and started typing whatever random bullshit jumped into my head and came out of my fingers, did you? Because that would be... I mean, of all the irresponsible... you know what, no more questions in the asterisk section. Go back to the body of the piece already. Why am I sweating?

**Well, maybe not the LAST last one. This is Marvel, so until the house lights come up, you can never be sure it's actually over.