Thursday, April 5, 2018

At the Cinema - February/March 2018

Black Panther – 9
 
Atticus Finch is dead.  The days of great book adaptations set forth as high budget, high brow movies have officially ended.  The source material of the day is comic books.  Marvel is here, and we’re going to have to deal with it.  It makes some sense.   The stories are unbounded by reality, the colors are bright, and the stories are plentiful.  It’s ripe for Hollywood’s favorite tool – the sequel.
 
Most of the Marvel universe has spawned blockbusters.  Well-funded, well-conceived, and well executed.  My favorite type of movie?  No, I’d rather see a Martin Scorsese original, and see how he was going to use “Sympathy for the Devil” again.  Black Panther is the latest, and you’re talking Jaws/Star Wars/Titanic world-wide momentum here. It is already the 10th highest grossing movie of all time.   Is it up to the hype?
 
Mostly, yes.  The screen oozes with the charisma of the stars – Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o (wow she grew up fast) and Angela Bassett to name a few.  The story, of the hidden kingdom Wakanda in Africa with an advanced technology – a bullet to the spine can be healed in 24 hours – based on the strongest element vibranium, is original and spectacular.  The king of the country is decided in a challenge ritual fight, they have spies all over the world, and they’re sitting on their technology, not trusting the world enough to share.   Oh, and the New King is about to be challenged.
 
Of course, the fight scenes are overlong and too fast and blurry to really see, and there’s an air battle that’s so lifted out of Star Wars, that you expect Hans Solo to sweep in and save the day.  But, with the brilliant Ryan Coogler at the helm as director, there are so many original, really cool concepts, that I’m going to do the unheard of – look forward to the sequel. 

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Eric Clapton:  Life in 12 Bars – 9

Eric Clapton is one of those musicians who has provided the soundtrack for my life.  He’s not been a constant presence, but a sporadic one, with classics interspersed throughout the years – songs that I love, like Layla, Sunshine of Your Love, Can’t Find My Way Home, and many more. 
 
I thought I knew a little about him, but oh, was I wrong.  This Showtime documentary covers the life and hard times of Eric Clapton.  He thinks his youth is going along swimmingly until he realizes his mother isn’t his mother, slap, it’s his grandmother and the shy young introvert withdraws more than he already has.  Fortunately, his withdrawal is deep into the Blues music coming mostly from America.  It’s a theme repeated over and over as his life goes on – the music saves him, but never cleanly. 

Eric’s female, drug, and alcohol indulgences are everything you would expect of a rock star, and it surprises him and us that he didn’t go the way of Hendrix and all the early departing rockers.  But the music is still there, and amazingly, so is he.  He plows on through and keeps on entertaining. 

Thankfully.

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