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.

MOVEABLE BEASTS

Opening today:

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—J. K. Rowling’s 2001 book, proceeds from which benefitted Comic Relief, wasn’t a novel or even a short story. It was part of the Harry Potter universe, a supposed textbook at Hogwart’s, credited to a certain Newt Scamander, on the histories and habits of creatures of myth and folklore.

In her first produced screenplay, Rowling has a spun a tale inspired by this work. In the 1920s, Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) arrives in New York with a suitcase full of fanciful creatures—magically clown-car full of them; some of them, like the rhino-esque Erumpent, are gargantuan. Others, like the stick-insect-like Bowtruckle, are tiny. Others, like the Demiguise, are invisible. Others, like the endearing hedgehog-like Niffler, are compulsively acquisitive where small shiny objects are concerned.

And so on. It isn’t long, of course, before a number of these creatures have escaped the suitcase, and Scamander is faced with rounding them up. But of course, this being Rowling, that’s not all there is to the story. That’s not even half of the story.

The beasts, as it turns out, oddly aren’t the stars of Fantastic Beasts. The movie twists itself into a dauntingly complex, obsessively imagined saga involving the magical authorities of the U.S., including a sort of magicians’ FBI led by the scowling Graves (Colin Farrell). There’s Tina (Kate Waterston), an outcast magical investigator who first arrests, then allies herself with Scamander. There’s an anti-witchcraft sect led by a puritan (Samantha Morton) and staffed by her spooky foster kids. And there’s the object of Scamander’s visit to the Big Apple, a mysterious, destructive being called an “Obscurial.”

Directed by David Yates, who helmed four of the Harry Potter flicks, the movie is an elaborate and impeccable piece of big-studio craft. James Newton Howard’s music evokes an atmosphere of whimsy taken seriously, and the production design and special effects are impressively rich, despite the usual hint of CGI chilliness. As with the Harry Potter movies, I sometimes got a little lost in the plot, but I was consistently entertained.

Despite the handsomeness of the production, and despite Rowling’s infectious storytelling glee, it’s mostly to the credit of the actors that Fantastic Beasts cast its spell even on a muggle like me. Redmayne and Waterston are a delightfully sheepish hero and heroine. The soft-spoken Farrell, stalking around with his eyes on the ground in front of him, makes an intense yet elegantly assured heavy—despite his excellent American accent, he reminded me of James Mason in his darker mode.

But it’s Dan Fogler who really connects with the audience, as Jacob Kowalski, a “no-maj” (American slang for a muggle) baker who gets caught up in the adventure. The central function of Fogler’s character is to be our surrogate—to be astonished, and get things explained to him. But Fogler’s capacity for wonder makes him heroic, and when he’s stunned with love at first sight by Tina’s gorgeous sister Queenie (the singer Alison Sudol), she’s stunned right back. The two of them steal the movie, and that constitutes pretty grand larceny.

BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED DISADVANTAGE OF PERSONA)

“Dear Lady Gaga, thank you for that wonderful tribute.” These are not words I ever expected to hear Julie Andrews saying.

But they seemed heartfelt, and they were deserved: Lady Gaga’s broadly-played imitation of Andrews, in a Sound of Music medley, was one of the few high points of a generally slow, unappealing Oscar show. Other high points included some good acceptance speeches, especially by Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director of Ida, who managed to be funny and even, in an unpretentious way, a bit reflective.

The low point, for me, was Neil Patrick Harris making a joke at the expense of the dress worn by one of the two ladies who had just won a Best Short Subject Documentary Oscar for Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press One. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s one thing to mock a train wreck worn by some actress who’s a red carpet veteran, quite another to pick on the questionable fashion choice of a “civilian.” Besides, the lady in question had just been talking, seconds before, about losing her son to suicide. Harris may not have been listening, but the effect was ugly in any case.

As for the winners and losers, the big disappointment for me was Michael Keaton not winning. I didn’t much care for Birdman, but I love Keaton’s work, including in that film, so much that I really wanted him to win anyway, as I wonder if he’ll have ever this juicy a lead role again. My wife, by comparison to me the expert Oscar handicapper in our house, was also rooting for Keaton but predicted that Eddie Redmayne would win for The Theory of Everything, as his role as the young Stephen Hawking ticked off too many Oscar-bait boxes: Physical challenge, real-life figure, Brit. One theory floated on some of the talk shows is that Keaton may have been perceived as “just playing himself” in Birdman, as opposed to Redmayne’s transformation.

When people say this about an actor, what they really mean (though they may not know it) is that he or she always or usually plays the same basic character. That’s certainly true of Keaton, but it was also true of Henry Fonda, John Wayne, James Stewart, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman—it didn’t stop any of them from winning Oscars.

One last note: I was also sorry that the Glen Campbell song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” from Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me, didn’t win for Best Song—it lost to the admittedly beautiful “Glory” from the ridiculously under-nominated Selma. But at least it was treated to a fine, simple performance on the show by Tim McGraw, and hopefully it will call more attention to this powerful documentary about the Alzheimer’s-afflicted country great. Please don’t skip this movie on the (understandable) fear that it will be a depressing bummer. It’s sad, of course, but also uplifting.