Black Panther (5/5 Stars)

I would hesitate to say this next thing if it hadn’t been for multitudes of people saying it before me. In fact, before seeing Black Panther I would have argued against it. I would have pointed to about thirty years of movies starting with Spike Lee and John Singleton to argue that black representation in film has been around for awhile. Important movies about the black experience in America have been made by distinguished filmmakers (say Amistad and 12 Years a Slave). There have even been black super-hero movies (Blade and Hancock). But Black Panther is a special movie. Never before has a very large studio thrown so much money and effort in such an unadulterated way towards making an arguably “African” movie. Black people have always been with us but not really like this. Like India in Slumdog Millionaire and China in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Black Panther can be categorized as a “coming out” party. And what a party it is.

For one thing, black people are being represented from a position of strength. The Black Panther, as a Marvel Superhero, is the crown-prince of the fictional kingdom of Wakaanda. Wakaanda is based on the old European myths of utopic cities such as El Dorado and Shangrila that stayed in static idyllic peace while the outside world suffered through the hell of progress. Wakaanda is situated on top of large deposits of Vibranium, a mineral that seems to literally do everything from providing energy, making airplanes, and cloaking entire cities from view of the outside world. As far as the country’s wealth in concerned, Wakaanda is a production designer’s magnum opus of contradictory elements. Wakaanda is essentially a science fiction version of Africa, traditional elements intertwined with technology several decades ahead of the rest of the world. The same can be said of the costumes and makeup of the movie, all three of which should run away with Oscars next year. Black Panther is a gorgeous movie in all its respects. Wakaanda is also an Enlightened country. Even though Wakaanda’s political model is based on fights to the death for dominance (this is a comic book movie after all), women apparently have equal status as men and actually form the most prestigious parts of the army as well as, as far as I could tell, the one and only scientific post in the whole country.

(For reasons that could fill several books, the idea of an isolated highly technological egalitarian utopia is stupidly wrong. The apparent location of Wakaanda, northeast Congo, also known as the world capital of anarchy, poverty, and rape, is the perfect location for the manifestation of a stupidly wrong idea. However, as this is a comic book movie, I will try to refrain from lecturing on the subject of economics.)

The main theme of the movie is whether or not Wakaanda should use its wealth and technology to help the rest of the world or to conquer it in revenge for the oppression of black people. In an interesting twist, the rest of the world is mainly represented by the projects of Oakland, California (where it should be noted, Director Ryan Coogler is from and where he made his first great movie Fruitvale Station). The movie handles this subject the way Nelson Mandela would handle it, with great maturity.

I’m not exactly sure what the black panther legend means in Africa or where exactly it comes from. Here, in America, the Black Panthers were a militant vigilante group that took it upon themselves to police the police, sometimes coming in direct conflict with them (I am also told they did community service). The Marvel superhero actually precedes the militant group by several years and simply does not have the same philosophy. Actually, the philosophy of the militant group is more closely aligned in Black Panther by the main bad guy, a man named Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. This is a black panther in the American sense. Fueled by resentment and hatred, he is bent on using Wakaanda’s wealth and technology to burn everything down. Coogler’s treatment of Killmonger is empathatic but not sympathetic. He develops the character well and explains his actions, but ultimately does not agree with him.

There is one particular scene that stood out to me. When the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) is first made a King, he goes through an ancient ritual in which he visits his ancestors in an ethereal version of the Serengeti. Later on in the movie, Killmonger goes through the same ritual. However, as his father was an exile from Wakaanda, Killmonger visits him where he ended up dying, a project in Oakland, California. It is a scene of great gravity and incongruity and one of the best manifestations of cultural displacement I have ever seen in a movie. It perhaps can be said that a King of a wealthy country like Wakaanda is privileged and can afford then to take a Nelson Mandela (also of royal blood) view of the world whereas Killmonger grew up poor and excluded and is entitled to his resentment. But no matter, the point I believe is that black people want to have the decision to choose to be included in the world. Given the choice, it seems that Black Panther is stating that they would choose inclusion. That’s fine with me. If that is where the words "black panther" lead now, I will follow.

So much of black culture seems to be simply reactionary to white culture (a dumb generalization but I don’t want to spend the space to get any more specific). By positioning Black Panther’s arguments and themes in a place outside of white influence, it allows the “peace and inclusion” choice to avoid the Uncle Tom label of appeasement. In recent years, I have been continually annoyed by other black movies (“black movies” another gross generalization but I won’t spend forever writing this) from the incompetent Selma to the insult-to-history which was Birth of a Nation to the multitudinous iterations of "untold stories" of the "first black ___ to do ___” like Hidden Figures that arrive in theaters in a ever-reliant stream. If the complete absence of white people in Black Panther indeed enabled its philosophical maturity and creativity, then we should start producing more "black movies" set entirely in Africa and/or space (having said that, the performance of Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman were fantastic in Black Panther). I also hope that Ryan Coogler can make some more personal movies. Chistopher Nolan got to switch between regular movies and blockbusters. Hopefully Coogler gets a similar deal.

The Florida Project (5/5 Stars)

Roger Ebert once remarked that the power of movies was derived from their ability to act as empathy machines. A great movie allows the viewer to experience different points of view, different people on different continents and in different periods of time. This movie is a great illustration of that insight. I knew nothing of this world and now I feel like I have spent several hours ensconced in it.

Writer/Director Sean Baker has been making movies for a good twenty years now, but he made headlines big enough to garner my attention a few years ago when he shot an entire movie on an iPhone. That movie was “Tangerine” and to my delight it was a real movie that contained a gimmick and not the other way around. More notably, “Tangerine” was about something I had never seen a movie about: a romantic rivalry between transvestite prostitutes with a subplot about a homosexual immigrant Armenian married-with-children taxi driver that frequented the services of the streetwalkers. Again, as Roger Ebert remarked again, to judge a movie objectively you must divorce yourself from the idea that a movie’s worth is derived from what it is about. You must judge the movie based on how it is about how it is about. The plot of “Tangerine” contains many choices and controversies that most of us would find crazy and petty. However, the characters in the story took the problems seriously and the movie took the characters seriously. I did not agree with what was going on but I understood it and in this way the movie must be judged as a good movie.

“The Florida Project” asks the same leap of the audience, to understand various people on the edge of society that are under stress and not dealing with it in constructive ways. What differentiates “The Florida Project” from “Tangerine” though is that it contains at least one great person among the throng of misfits and sublime vignettes of genuine beauty.

The story concerns the very free range childhood of Moonee (played by Brooklyn Prince) one summer in the cheap motel outskirts of Disneyworld, Florida. For all intents and purposes, Moonee and her mother Halley (played by Bria Vinai) are one step from being homeless. They live week to week in the cheapest of motels called “The Magic Kingdom”. The motel, painted bright pink, is home to those just visiting and those on the outskirts of society. It attracts a certain crowd of people that it takes a large degree of patience to work with. The hotel manager, Bobby, not only takes care of the motel, he in large part takes care of the people who live there. And especially, he takes care of the kids of the not-so-responsible adults that find themselves in such a place. A very interesting and sometimes heartbreaking part of Bobby’s job is the line he draws between people who are invited to stay at the hotel and those who are so far out of the mainstream that they become disinvited.

The sense of place that Sean Baker creates is indelible. If you didn’t know how a cheap motel works and the various sorts of people that frequent there you will have a good idea by the end of this movie. Our guide is Moonee a rambunctious six or seven year old as she finds and becomes best friends with another girl who just moved into the motel across the street, the Purple Castle. They explore the main strip, conspire to procure free ice cream, and generally annoy Bobby. At times I was taken out of the movie by just contemplating how natural is Brooklyn Prince’s performance. I’m not sure what spell Sean Baker cast over the child but he is getting scenes and reactions out of Moonee that seem impossible when one considers the difficulties of working with children.

The enabler of Moonee’s carefree sometimes dangerous childhood is her mother Halley. Moonee’s father is not around nor does Halley bother mentioning him during this movie. Halley is a bit of a free range child as well and the movie’s plot arc has more to do with Halley’s decline in prospects than any substantial change in Moonee. Sean Baker’s treatment of Halley says a lot about his great compassion for his characters. Baker is not defending Halley’s actions, but he does not condemn her unnecessarily as well. Nevertheless when child protective services shows up at the end, the audience understands why they have come and they understand why Moonee and Halley probably should be broken up. As Moonee’s childhood is a happy one and her mother obviously loves her, the actions of the government have more to do with a question of culture than a pattern of abuse. It fairly reminds me of the reasons given by past governments to separate children from indigenous tribal people and put them in government run orphanages and schools. That is, they simply believed the children would be better off. This is a good movie to have an interesting conversation with the people you have seen it with. “The Florida Project” is one of the best movies of 2017.