Kendrick Lamar's Black Panther Masterpiece

KENDRICK LAMAR IS HIP HOP'S LEONARD COHEN

 

If you weren't excited about Black Panther, this album, dropping a week early will get you in the mood. If you were already excited, this thing will get you PUMPED!

The first time I listened to it, my first thought was, how did they get Disney to agree to this? I imagine most conversations between directors and their studios go something like this:

Director: Can I please just do what I want and maintain creative control over the whole product?
Studio: NO!!!!

Studios haven't trusted directors since the '70's. Every once in a while, you get an auteur who sticks to his guns, but attached to a tent pole franchise? I don't think I've seen that since Lucas was still in charge of Star Wars. And it it all reminds me of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where the director tapped Leonard Cohen for all the songs of the film and reinvented westerns. Tim Burton did it with Batman too, when he somehow got Prince to do all the songs and invented the modern comic book movie. It's seldom that directors squeak that much control out of a project, and when they do, it's awesome.

Ryan Coogler is an Oakland guy who made Fruitvale Station and Creed, both of which were fantastic. That's how he landed the gig, but how the hell did he get Disney to sign off on this soundtrack? I want to meet him just see what a smooth-talker he is. Shit. I want to be his best friend. I love this guy.

The stand out track for me is the second track: All the Stars.

• SZA is on the track with her sad but optimistic voice perfectly suited for the lyrics.
• The intro beat sounds like an old African animal skin number. It sounds like a live drum, and it anchors the song in warm tradition while voice filters kick in and distortion knobs get turned. And there's something that sounds like a steel drum/keyboard in there sparingly so as not to become a Jamaican tune. That sound comes back on other songs on the album, and it really is a concept album; you don't see that much these days.
• Kendrick's verse is reminiscent of other tracks he's done about the aspiration and letdown of love and trust, and it's great.

I love a song that can be soulful and sad and happy and inspirational at the same time. They're rarer than diamonds.

I'm over the MCU, but I think this album might have won me back for now. I was a passing fan of the character, and I bought a bunch of the comics in the 90's. I hope it lives up to my memories of this cool icon.

Catch up with Black Panther:

This Isn't a Dream

Every time I say "this isn't a dream; this is really happening!" I expect everyone to get the reference and at least smile. But I guess no one has ever seen Rosemary's Baby.

She's adorable in that movie, Mia Farrow.

Those eyes of hers.

There's a whole subplot spoofing the film in the Seth Rogen movie, This Is The End, and I don't think most people get what he was doing there.

Cultural touchstones aren't what they used to be. . . I don't think they even really exist anymore. Or if they do, it's for such fleeting moments that they're forgotten before they accumulate any weight. Maybe that's why we're still talking about Hamlet and other stuff made by men long dead.

Maybe we can just appreciate how pretty Mia Farrow was back when people still cared about the future.

If you haven't seen it, watch it.

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Tomorrowland at Disneyland used to be about what the future might look like if we all just work our hardest and try our best. I was employed there when they announced that all plant life in Tomorrowland was going to be edible. Innoventions was the newest attraction.

Now it's all about Star Wars.

Star Wars is not about the future; it's a fairy tale set in space so it doesn't have to obey the laws of our physics. It's not a shining beacon toward which we might strive; it's a romp in the stars set to orchestral swells.

I don't feel like ranting about Star Wars today.
But does the future matter anymore?
Are we treating reality like a dream?
Maybe the future doesn't matter, but shouldn't it?

I still care about the future.

Wasn't she so pretty?

Have You Seen DUNKIRK? BTW, the Batman Movies Sucked

Dunkirk. a magnum opus, was an incredible use of Christopher Nolan’s bag of tricks. If you like those tricks, you’ll love Dunkirk. Fun with time relativity, action set pieces that pose as works of art, heavy themes that tug at the edges of the narrative, and a refusal to show a handsome man’s face. Dunkirk shines a light on something most Americans are woefully ignorant about, so it’ll probably be history teachers’ new lazy-day film pick. Verisimilitude in motion, it makes everything seem so real it reminds me of idiots telling me how realistic his Batman movies were.

It’s the director’s finest film with hardly any missteps. It reminds me how much I dislike his Batman movies.

His turn at Batman was obviously a genius held captive by a cadre of fools demanding he finish a trilogy for trilogy’s sake.

“Can I please shoot a film on 35mm about a space crew stuck in black hole time warps?”
“Not until you give us another Batman movie!”
“Can I please make sweeping epic about the evacuation of Dunkirk shot on 70mm?”
“We’re going to need another Batman movie!”
“Bloody hell!”

So what did we get? A military Batman who blows things up with military weaponry and unilaterally extradites foreign nationals. Anyone who says they’re set in a more realistic world is delusional. It’s a militaristic world, and after 2001, that’s what film execs thought we wanted and would accept as “real.” One can see his obvious talent, but we already knew he was special with his previous films.

To me, Batman is either the smartest man alive and the world’s greatest detective, or campy and cool. Campy and cool is hard to pull off, but it’s worked before. The greatest detective, smart-guy stuff is harder, but there're tons of comic material ripe for adaptation. Anyway, he was never a super soldier, and only a shitty studio exec would ask him to be.

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Anyway, fuck those Batman movies despite their fleeting moments of brilliance. Yes, there are plenty of moments evidencing Nolan's genius; that doesn't make the movies great. Even an iconoclastic, career-defining performance by Heath Ledger does not a great film make.

I love Dunkirk, by the way. I think it's one of the best things I've seen in a theme I'm actually so bored with I almost didn't go. Do we need another movie about the second world war? Maybe not. But Christopher Nolan's voice is certainly worth listening to, and I think it'll go down as one of the better examples of the genre. 

Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a scary movie, and that's perfect for an October release. It keeps you on edge throughout, and it proves once again that David Fincher is a genius. He's probably the best director of our time, and there are far too many people out there who don't know his name or his body of work. That should change.

My reaction to the big reveal was infuriating. It's weird how people who say they love you can turn into horrible monsters, pragmatic destructors, who are willing to destroy themselves to hurt you. In the film, they give this villain a motive, but it isn't necessary. I knew a guy whose ex-wife broke into his house, stole his dog and everything he owned, and then emptied his bank account out of nowhere. No cheating, big fight, nothing.

Gone Girl is kind of an extreme reflection. It's the fun-house mirror of Hollywood so aptly angled by the prestidigital Fincher that makes it worthwhile. The Trent Reznor contribution shouldn't go unnoticed either. This director/scorer team-up is the best we've seen/heard since Tim Burton met Danny Elfman.

If you wait until it's out on DVD (a mistake) make sure you play it loud.

You should watch Prisoners

Great performances by everyone. Prisoners explores how a crime can turn everyone into criminals, as if demonism is something contagious, and the more the lines between right and wrong are blurred, the more evil or wrong a person becomes. 

Hugh Jackman is a survivalist nut whose kid is kidnapped by a retarded guy along with his neighbor's kid on Thanksgiving. They find the kidnapper in short order, but the cops have to let him go because of a lack of evidence. So Jackman has to go crazy and torture him until his face looks like a boxing glove.

Meanwhile there's a cop who seems like he was also abused at some point, though only a tick, a ton of tattoos, and a throw away line about being raised in a boys home are all that vaguely point at this. I guess his chosen career might also be a hint. Anyway, I'm convinced that's what the director was going for, especially since so much time is given to how other abused children grow up and how their abuse shapes who they are.

Eventually, we find, in classic noir fashion, that all of the clues, no matter how disparate, are connected, and the mystery is solved. This movie reminds me a lot of Seven. It's so intense that I was exhaling deeply after every scene, not having realized that I had been holding my breath for it all. The nods to noir are many and pretty delightful, but it's directed more like a horror movie than anything else. And it's probably the most frightening film I've watched in 2013.

I really loved this movie and would like to see it again. The Pennsylvania winter as a backdrop made everything almost black and white and more noiresque and kind of more quiet and scary. I thought it was a little weird that there were no Xmas decorations anywhere for the whole movie, and I think the contrast of everyone else still celebrating family and togetherness while this family was crumbling would have added to the anguish of the characters, but maybe that would have contributed to an audience's greater acceptance of the torture of the kidnapper. Anyway, I totally recommend seeing this one.

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The only problem I had with this movie is the person(s) responsible for the kidnapping and killing of close to twenty kids. Their Caligulan goal to turn adults into demons by stealing their children in order to wage war on god is fine I guess, but then why let a few of them go? Because they'd successfully turned them into demons? And also, why not kill the kids right away? Because you're crazy? OK, but then why drug them and make them do mazes? To make them crazy before you kill them? That doesn't make any sense. And the husband of the killing team! once he has misgivings about having killed all these kids, goes to the molester priest to give his confession? Of all the people you want guidance from as a crazy killer waging war on god by killing children, you go to the child molester priest? And how did the black kid escape? She could just run better when they were being moved? Ok, also the last maze is unsolvable, so how did the copy cat kid get away? And if you know your war on god is going to shit, why not just kill the kid and her father right away? You have a gun. Just shoot them both and bury them. Why go through the whole get in the hole while I inject your kid with poison in the house routine?

The answers to all of these questions could just be "it seemed scarier to do it the way we did it," and the filmmakers would be correct.

The Spectacular Now

I saw the Spectacular Now this weekend. It was spectacular, but it was also personally difficult to watch. The lead, Sutter, played by Miles Teller, resonated with me in a way that was uncomfortable because it felt like I was looking into a mirror in many respects.

Miles plays a high school kid who drinks too much and thinks that he's unlovable. But he plays like he's cool with it all, and everyone thinks he's just a laid back guy who isn't all fucked up inside. This sets the stage for a deep look into the tumult of the teenage years and the manner by which humans strive to be moral toward one another in a world of American individualism.

Jeez, that reminded me of me. 

The film had me on the verge of tears, laughing out loud, and introspect. This is what the movies are supposed to do at their highest level. This is what all art should do. 

Meanwhile, someone should make a biopic of Robert Mitchum just so that Miles Teller can play the title role. If this kid stays on his shit, he can be the next big American man's man star. He's physically quite large, not too good looking or pretty, scarred all to hell, as deep as Montgomery Clift, and as likable as Brendan Fraser.

The Dark Knight Rises

Actually, after all of my fears regarding this one, it's my favorite and I'm glad it didn't suck.
Lots of violence and suspense, plenty of sexiness, and a healthy dose of fanboy stuff, this final film of Nolan's Batman story is pretty great.
I loved that the film didn't try to be more than a hero epic, and I love that its makers were talented enough and thoughtful enough to make it unique. The similarity batman has to his enemies and the similarities his enemies have to Batman's friends provide some thought-provoking fodder for anyone who feels like looking deeper, but the movie doesn't ask you to. That's a great little trick for an action movie to accomplish, allowing its audience to decide how many levels to enjoy it on.
Maybe my favorite thread of it was the way the military was portrayed. And here, I mean militarism more than our armed servicemen. We start with a CIA operative who is as ruthless and cowardly as the villain, and the villain is promptly boosted from custody by a sort of Navy Seal team that is as loyal to their cause as the special forces supposedly are to theirs. I hated the military badassedness of Batman in the previous films with a Hummer AV as the Batmobile and jelly grenades and that part when he's sucked out a window by an airplane. In this movie, Bane has all those tricks and more. He even drives the same car and has an army of cop-like thugs whom he somehow manages to organize. Batman did this with cops in previous films with a military grade spotlight and tech support.
There's even a scene where a football player is depicted like war hero running from a bomb crater. And later, cops literally condemn a school bus of orphans and the whole city to death. The fact that both Bane and Batman are former League of Shadows movers who use Hi-tech military style devices to deal with their pain is also kind of fun.
If you liked the comics Knight Fall, in which Bane breaks Batman's back or if you liked the Thalia Al'Gul storyline and were wondering why the Lazarus Pit isn't ever mentioned in the first film, you might like this interpretation of the Batman Mythology. I did.