The not-so-sudden sudden death of Chadwick Boseman

Damn.

This one hits hard.

In some kind of tragic coincidence that just screams #2020, Chadwick Boseman, the man who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42, died on the very same day that Major League Baseball was recognizing Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947.

That actually occurred on April 15th of 1947, not August 28th, but since there was no April 15th on the baseball calendar in 2020, August 28th was -- as far as I can tell -- randomly chosen as a substitute date.

It might have seemed logical just not to recognize the anniversary this year, except as it turned out, honoring Robinson was something that ended up feeling very important not only this year, but this week, as the country reels anew from another heinous police shooting of a Black American.

Instead, there's a kind of cruel irony in this day, as Boseman ended up passing from colon cancer on the same day. He didn't just play non-fictional heroes to the Black community -- like Robinson and Thurgood Marshall -- but he also played one of the Black community's greatest fictional heroes, T'Challa, otherwise known as Black Panther.

It didn't feel like Wakanda would last #forever on this particular day.

Boseman's death would have been painful anyway, but what made it especially painful was that I had no idea he was sick. None. And had been so for four years. I don't suppose most people knew. Last I heard, Black Panther 2 was all systems go and he would be front and center. He had been revived from Thanos' snap and could live to fight another day, many other days, on into Phases 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the MCU.

Now ... he's gone.

Just like that. In a snap.

I did a double take when I read the headline. I guess that's always the reaction when someone so young, so vigorous, so apparently overflowing with joie de vivre, is taken from us. I mean, he played an incomparably gifted athlete and a superhero so lithe, so quick and so agile that his character's name evoked the feline. There wasn't a thought in my head that we were about lose him.

You walk around with a number of names in your head of people whose obituary you could expect to see any old time. Like, when Olivia de Havilland finally died at 104, it was almost like a sigh of relief that someone else could finally occupy one of those spots. Someone like, say, Sean Connery, who just turned 90.

But Boseman? I didn't wake up Saturday morning (my time) thinking Chadwick Boseman could die today. And yet he did.

I was not as big a fan of Black Panther as most people were, but I was a huge fan of Boseman. Being the baseball fan that I am, I was more of a fan of 42 than most, I think. Those were some pretty big cleats to fill to play Robinson, one of the all-time baseball greats and baseball ambassadors, and yet he was the perfect choice. Quiet dignity, inner fire. That was Boseman to a T.

The Robinson biopic was where I first learned of Boseman, who got a late start on his movie career, only appearing in his first movie role after age 30. (He had been appearing on TV for five years before that, but not on shows I watched.) But he shot up quickly into other immediately interesting work. 42 was followed the next year by Draft Day and Get on Up, the latter a biopic of another hero of the Black community (though a bit more problematic than Robinson or Marshall), James Brown. I don't really remember him in Draft Day (though I liked that movie), though of course he's the central force in the highly effective Get on Up, a role that was expected to earn him awards consideration.

At this point his career became quite occupied playing T'Challa in four Marvel movies, though he did continue to make what I assume was interesting work, as I have not yet seen Marshall, Message from the King or 21 Bridges. The last movie released in his lifetime was Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, in which he plays a character seen only in flashback, because he died during the Vietnam War. Died young -- just like Boseman.

Because Boseman got a late start in movies, he seemed even younger than 43. And because he radiated star power, that contributed to the sense that he was just at the beginning of a long and rich career that would alternate between serious and crowd-pleasing work -- and in the best cases, work that would be both at once.

My heart aches. Rest in peace, Panther.

Setting a $404 million bar

I have to imagine that the phenomenon that immediately followed the phenomenon that was Black Panther's $404 million worldwide opening weekend was this phenomenon:

"Is that all?"

That being said by some audiences who saw the movie after the first weekend, but had heard about the first weekend and were extra pumped.

That was me, sort of. This is a good movie, but I'm not sure it's a whole lot more than that. Raking in that kind of cash made me think it would be a masterpiece, that it would spin my head, blow my mind, and fill me with emotion the way something like Wonder Woman did.

It didn't. And I heard one person walking out of my screening saying "Well that was pretty mediocre." And then another person whose first reaction was "But none of that explains where it fits in the timeline." (I know what timeline they're talking about. We saw T'Challa become king in Captain America: Civil War, and then go off to get involved with Iron Man and the rest of the guys. That part of the story is not at all touched on here, though presumably it was happening at about exactly the same time.)

I guess the point is, it was impossible for this movie ever to live up to the hype and that box office. And, it doesn't.

There are some cool things in this movie, but I was surprised by how few of the moments really felt transcendent or stuck with me. I shudder to think that it has anything to do with an inherent inability on my part to relate, because my God I hope it's not that. I like to think I can put myself in anybody's shoes, even if it's not entirely true; the goal of a critic is to divorce yourself from the exact demographic you inhabit, and view a movie through others' eyes. And, for example, the stuff that made me so emotional in Creed, Ryan Coogler's previous film, didn't have anything to do with Sylvester Stallone's Rocky. It was all about Adonis, played by Michael B. Jordan, who also features here.

I just think it's not that great an example of storytelling. Especially when I know what Coogler is capable of.

The story ... well, there isn't really a story. Or the characters don't really have firmly established goals (except for the villain). It's much more satisfying if a movie's hero is striving for something, but T'Challa is not -- not really. He's staving off a challenge from Eric Killmonger (Jordan), as well as from another tribe's chieftain earlier on, but in terms of his own agency? There isn't a lot there. What functions as a driving narrative force is the quest to bring Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) to justice, but then that gets knee-capped halfway through, leaving not a lot that this movie is about.

I suppose it's about T'Challa's quest to realize his own destiny as a king, to make the tough decisions a king has to make, the decisions that a "nice guy" can't make. But that doesn't really happen. He kind of remains a nice guy, meaning his narrative arc is not all that satisfying.

The example of Wonder Woman seems to be instructive here too. If asked "What does Wonder Woman want?" the answer is obvious, because the movie tells you about a hundred times: she wants to kill the god of war. No two ways about it.

What does T'Challa want? To serve his people? To honor his father? These are rather nebulous goals. And I suppose it's okay for a reluctant hero to have goals that are not as well defined, but they should at least become clearer as the narrative moves forward.

I don't really want to go on nit-picking this movie, especially when there are things I loved about it, like each and every female character. The world was pretty fully realized, and Jordan was awesome.

I primarily wanted to talk about my expectation that there will be some backlash -- some Blacklash, if you will -- on this movie that will inevitably be viewed as some kind of racism, and may of course have that component to it as well. I'm here to say that this movie is just a lot more standard superhero stuff, a lot more infused with CGI, and a lot more good-but-not-great than that box office would indicate, and realizing/publicly acknowledging these things does not make you a racist.

What it represents = terrific. Its box office = fantastic, and it makes me exquisitely happy.

What it actually is = could have been better. That's all I'm saying.

White bird, black panther

Yesterday, February 15th, was an important day on the Australian cinematic calendar. The best movie of 2017 and the best movie of 2018 both opened -- on the same day. (Well, I suppose either of them could be challenged for their respective honors by Paddington 2, depending on what hemisphere you live in, as the movie was released in a different year here than it was in the States.)

That's right, a mere 104 days after the date of its first limited release in the U.S., best picture nominee (frontrunner?) Lady Bird finally graced our shores. A day before its U.S. release, so did Black Panther.

And yes, they both have ridiculously high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. The once unblemished Lady Bird still stands tall at 99%, while Black Panther sits a mere percentage point behind it at 98%. (Glad my editor at ReelGood does not get tabulated on RT, as he gave it a mere 5 out of 10.) Humorously, both movies still do trail Paddington 2, which remains at 100%.

Their release dates and high RT scores is where the comparison between these two movies seems to end.

Though they could be flip sides of the same coin.

Although it has not suffered for this in any significant way, Lady Bird may be one of the last of a dying breed -- a movie craving widespread mainstream acceptance that does not have any characters of color in significant roles. In scanning the credits list on IMDB, it appears that there is a Latino guy and a woman who seems to be of mixed race, though without having seen the movie, I can't comment on the size of their roles. I can say they are 10th and 11th on the cast list, though.

Black Panther is kind of the opposite, though this, paradoxically, does not seem to be as much of a problem in today's climate. (Which, unmistakably, seems like a good thing to me.) Instead of token minorities, it has token whites, as Andy Serkis is the 12th ranked member of the cast, followed by David S. Lee three spots later.

As I said, this is a good thing. Until I came up with the current take on its release, I was going to write a post heralding the opening of Black Panther with a title along the lines of "Marvel makes a movie with a bunch of black people in it." You know, summarizing a very exciting development -- a Wonder Woman-style development in terms of its social significance -- in a provocative manner that would certainly turn your head if you weren't expecting it.

But we also know Marvel only does things that it thinks are in its best financial interest, which is the truly encouraging thing about Black Panther. The movie has proven Marvel right, shattering ticket presale records, because there is a collective hunger for this type of movie, obviously among black audiences, but among white audiences who find themselves poised to embrace the type of movie that might have made them feel alienated just five years ago. White audiences -- thinking white audiences, anyway, which may only be a small percentage of them -- want this. Not as much as black audiences do, but they want it too. And that's fantastic.

You know that thing where you walk into a movie that isn't aimed at you, and you find yourself in kind of a demographic Twilight Zone? "Oh, this is what it feels like to be ... a three-year-old kid, or an old person, or yes, a black person." Well congratulations on this "unique" experience. This is how black audiences felt for years, when only a handful of films each year truly felt like a reflection of their lives and experiences. And since those movies weren't made with big budgets by big studios, they often didn't attract the most talented filmmakers, or actors.

Well, that may be changing. Slowly, but then sometimes dramatically. Black Panther still could have continued taking baby steps by making a movie that was, maybe, two-thirds black. Five years ago, it might not have dared to be any more than 51% black in the cast. And it almost definitely wouldn't have been directed by a black man, though Ryan Coogler is one of the best talents we have going of any race.

But this is 2018, and something has happened -- something in our culture that has allowed this to happen. At a time when things seem their worst under Trump, something is still bubbling underneath, more like a majority than a minority, that celebrates the diversity that seemed to be repudiated by the last election.

And hallelujah, amen.

So where does that leave Lady Bird? I guess the answer is, Lady Bird will be fine. Lady Bird has always been fine, and it will continue to have a place in the cinematic landscape. You can't really make a movie with no black characters anymore, anyway, though some people still try. Lady Bird is close, but not totally there. And it's directed by a woman, so at least that's something. And I still look forward to trying to see it over the next week ... though I will see Black Panther first.

I do think there's an important shift that's occurring, that makes Lady Bird seem like the movie that's a bit tone deaf, a bit antique, a bit in its own hermetically sealed universe in which not only the people are white, but the problems are also white, no matter how many characters who are not quite white it may have in it. I think we are moving closer to a Black Panther world, and that's a world I want to live in.

And hallelujah, amen.