COOL CAT & ROCK STARS

Good stuff this weekend:

Black Panther--Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero of any significance, debuting in Fantastic Four in 1966, and gradually taking over the pages of Marvel's Jungle Action in the '70s. He made his movie debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, played, as he is here, by Chadwick Boseman.

The roll that Marvel movies have been on continues, and maybe reaches a high point, with this extravagant, stirring saga. The title character is T'Challa, a royal in Wakanda, a tiny, isolated African nation. He's a rare (maybe singular?) specimen of both the Superman-Captain Marvel type of superhero, in that he has psuedo-scientifically and/or mystically bestowed superhuman powers, and the Doc Savage-Batman-James Bond school, in that he's a rich kid with unlimited technological resources and official sanction.

Wakanda, you see, has a secret: to the outside world it looks like a bucolic third-world backwater, but the big mountains in its center are a projection masking a futuristic, technocratic civilization far in advance of the rest of the world. It's powered by the deposits of an element called "vibranium" on which the country sits and which, along with training and traditional rituals, are also what give our hero his abilities. The Wakandas keep their real nature secret to keep the vibranium from falling into the wrong hands, and to protect themselves and others from the corruption of interfering in other people's affairs. They're like Switzerland, or Star Trek's Federation with its annoying "Prime Directive."

Near the beginning of the film, we see a Wakandan airship cruise into the skyline of this utopia. At the screening, I was sitting next to an African-American friend who leaned over and whispered in my ear "Thanks for the help during slavery." I must admit that, in all my readings of the comic, this potential for resentment of the Wakandans by other people of African descent, and by disadvantaged people in general, had simply never occurred to me. But it turns out to be the center of the movie's conflict.

The story here involves two villains. Klaue (a version of "Klaw" from the comics), a tatted-up South African weapons peddler with a vibranium-powered mechanical arm and a grudge against T'Challa, is played by Andy Serkis, out from behind the CGI for a change, and grinning with jolly murderousness. But in the course of the story he's overtaken as antagonist by Killmonger, a veteran of the U.S. military with an even deeper and more complicated grudge against our hero. Killmonger is played by Michael B. Jordan, who played the leads in director Ryan Coogler's previous films, the enjoyable Creed and the terrifyingly direct Fruitvale Station.

Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, nails nearly every element in Black Panther.  The narrative unfolds conventionally, but with a precision and a steady pace that makes it feel mythic. The movie is unhurried, yet I can't remember a boring moment, and the strength of the emotional payoff in the final minutes may sneak up on you. The costumes, sets and cinematography have a lush visual whimsicality--an affectionate hint of an old-Hollywood idea of Africa--that borders on the tongue-in-cheek but avoids kitsch.

Better than any of this, however, is the cast. Boseman plays iconic figures--Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall--so often that it's easy to miss that he plays them as human beings. His princely bearing as T'Challa is used, often and wisely, to comic effect. He's a frequent straight man to the ridiculously glamorous women in the cast: Lupita Nyong'o as his spy love interest, Letitia Wright as his tech-genius little sister--equivalent to Q in the Bond flicks--Angela Basset as his mom, and Danai Gurira as the leader of Wakanda's corps of shaven-headed warrior women.

Jordan, on the other hand, brings a touch of the tragic to his performance without milking it. Other cast members, like Forest Whittaker, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, Winston Duke and Martin Freeman as a CIA man, something like Felix Leiter in the Bond stories, bring warmth and individuality to what are, essentially, stock characters.

This movie perpetuates the Star Wars/Lion King idea of royal bloodlines and birthrights being central to society. And it shares the same limitation as most superhero stories: Boiling its conflict down to a climactic fistfight. But within the context of these obligatory elements, this Black Panther is about as good as big-budget blockbuster moviemaking can be.

Early Man--There are armored rhinos in Black Panther, by the way. Did I neglect to mention that?  Yeah, there are armored rhinos in Black Panther, and there are armored mammoths in Early Man, Nick Park's stop-motion animated caveman travesty. This is my kind of weekend at the movies.

It wasn't clear from the initial American TV ads, but Early Man, directed by Park of Wallace and Gromit fame from a script by Mark Burton and James Higginson, is a sports movie--specifically, a soccer movie. Set "near Manchester" (hence its very title is a pun) during the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, it offers an origin story for the "Beautiful Game."

It's about a tribe of Stone Agers who are dispossessed from their homeland by technically advanced Bronze Agers who want to mine it. The Bronze folk worship football, so Stone Ager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenges them to a match for the right to return to their Valley or, if they lose, to work "down the mine" for the rest of their lives. A young Bronze Age woman, Goona (Maisie Williams), joins the Stone Agers and coaches them, because girls aren't allowed to play back home. Dug's warthog pal Hognob would like to play too, but everybody ignores this. At first.

I'd guess there are lots of soccer-related jokes and references in this movie that are lost on us Yanks, as it both follows and spoofs the template of the underdog sports tale. But at another level, it's a parody of old-school caveman flicks like One Million Years B.C. or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and thus it offers us such showpieces as a towering, fanged duck, the ultimate proof of the dinosaur ancestry of birds.

I'm so in sympathy with this movie's nuttiness that I'm reluctant to admit that it's probably not quite on the level of some of Aardman's other feature efforts, like 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie, or 2012's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Besides, so what? Second-tier Aardman is still better than ten regular movies.

TRIUMPH OF THE GILL, 'PAC MENTALITY

Opening this week:

47 Meters Down--Sisters Kate (Claire Holt) and Lisa (Mandy Moore) are on vacation in Mexico. Lisa has recently been dumped, and wants to post pictures online that will make her ex jealous, so she lets the more adventurous Kate talk her into diving in a shark cage.

You can guess how this works out. The winch and crane break off from the decrepit-looking old boat, and the cage plunges to the title depth, where it comes to rest on the ocean floor. The scruffy captain (Matthew Modine) tells the sisters by radio to stay put, as swimming to the surface would risk the bends, always assuming they weren't devoured on the way up by the various great white sharks covetously cruising around the cage. Help, he assures them, is on the way.

It need hardly be said that the rescue operation does not go smoothly. Claustrophobic terror, in the manner of 2010's Buried, and grueling survival measures ensue. As with last year's shark siege melodrama The Shallows, an unseemly amount of the movie consists of women keening in panic and pain.

But 47 Meters Down, directed by Johannes Roberts, is better than The Shallows. It doesn't have Blake Lively and her impressive all-but-one-woman-show appeal, and it doesn't have a scene-stealing seagull, but it also isn't marred by a ridiculously corny, over-the-top action picture finale. It feels plausible. Moore and Holt are touching in their sisterly support of each other, and in their guileless delivery of the simple, declarative lines: "I'm so scared!" "The shark almost got me!"

The special effects are preferable, too. The great whites, with their disconsolate, thuggish faces, come across a little more convincingly than Blake Lively's enemy in The Shallows. But only a little more. 47 Meters Down is watchable, even ingenious at times. But in the end, it lands alongside The Shallows in the same large category: Shark Movies That Just Aren't Jaws.

All Eyez on Me--The role of Tupac Shakur in this biopic is played by a newcomer named Demetrius Shipp, Jr. While Shipp's features don't quite have Shakur's weirdly Old-Masters-like beauty, the resemblance is nonetheless striking, and he's a relaxed, natural actor with a likable manner. It's a creditable debut in what could easily have seemed like a no-win role.

He's no Tupac, however. He has none of the rapper's electrically vivid presence and magnetism. But maybe that was asking too much. Under the circumstances, it's an achievement simply that he doesn't disgrace himself, that he maintains the audience's sympathy.

The movie, directed by Benny Boom, is a conventional show-biz chronicle history of the short, prolific career and appallingly violence-filled life of Shakur, who was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996 at the age of 25. We get his unstable childhood among the Black Panthers, his turbulent but intense bond with his mother Alfeni (the terrific Danai Gurira), his scary youth in Baltimore and Oakland, his early success with Digital Underground, his rise as a solo artist and movie star, the rape charge, the prison term, the partnering with Suge Knight and Death Row Records, the feud with Biggie, and so forth.

The movie doesn't quite sanitize Shakur; his amusement at Knight's brutality to others, for instance, is chilling. Still, through it all, he is depicted as, to quote one of his favorite writers, a man more sinned against than sinning. I'm not remotely qualified to say if this is fair or not, I can only say that All Eyez on Me, though possibly a hair overlong, is absorbing and enjoyable on its own terms. And the music on the soundtrack, both of Shakur and others, demonstrates how anemic is most of the stuff that currently passes for hip-hop on the radio.

Shakur was a furiously angry young man. He was also a smashingly talented, riveting performer, and the evidence of his few film roles suggests that he could have become a great movie actor as well. Because he died young, he's fixed, like James Dean, in tragic radiance. But who knows if he would have kept it?

On the other hand, who cares? Had he survived, he would be pushing 50. Maybe he would have sold out and become happy; he might be on his twelfth season in the cast of Law and Order by now. Or he might have kept his social anger but found a way to channel it productively. Or a little of both. Any of the above would be better than what happened.