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.

UGANDA LOVE IT

Opening this weekend:

Considering how few people play or understand chess, it’s surprising how many movies about chess there are, and how enjoyable a lot of them are. We watch the actors move the pieces around the board, and dramatically react to these moves, and just sort of take the film’s word for it that we’re seeing tactical brilliance. There are life-and-death chess games, like Karloff versus Lugosi in The Black Cat, or life-versus-death chess games, like in The Seventh Seal, or magical chess, like in Harry Potter.

Then there is chess as the subject of a standard inspirational underdog sports flick, as in Searching for Bobby Fischer in 1993 and Pawn Sacrifice, which was about Fischer, two years ago. Disney’s Queen of Katwe is of this sort. 

The real-life heroine is Phiona Mutesi, who around five years ago, in her mid-teens, began winning junior chess championships in her native Uganda, and representing that country in international tournaments. What made this remarkable enough to be the subject of an ESPN book by Tim Crothers wasn't just the excellence of Mutesi's play but the circumstances of her background: She was from Katwe, a massive slum neighborhood in Kampala, where she worked selling maize in the street for her widowed mother. According to the movie, she was illiterate when, by chance, she learned to play, and she learned to read mainly so that she could study chess manuals.

If you're cringing already, granting that it's a wonderful story but worried about a Disney-fied tone of cultural condescension and saccharine uplift, have no fear. The script, adapted from the Crothers book by William Wheeler, undoubtedly follows the Rocky/Hoosiers template. But the director, masterly Mira Nair of Salaam Bombay!, avoids the potential schmaltz in the yarn without sacrificing its potent emotion, and she shows her usual skill at giving third-world settings their teeming, at times almost epic due without denying or sanitizing their squalor and hardship.

Best of all, she gets terrific performances. There are two star turns, from Lupita Nyong'o as Phiona's desperately wary mom, and by David Oyelowo as her saintly mentor and teacher. But Nair's real triumph was with the kids; chattering in their oddly-inflected, somehow musical cadences, they're believable and funny. Especially fine is Madina Nalwanga as Phiona, whose uncertain but probingly intelligent gaze suggests that she has inherited, along with a high fighting spirit, some of her mother's fretful distrust of good fortune. It's easy to believe that she's a natural at chess. She always seems to be thinking many moves ahead.

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.