For those who complain that the recent spate of superhero movies aren’t about anything other than bombast and reaching into your wallet, I give you “Black Panther.” Directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Chadwick Boseman in the title role, it’s a movie that delivers wham-bam action but serves it up with compelling sides of mythology and social awareness.
The film starts with a quick origin story, detailing the introduction of vibranium to the small (fictional) African nation of Wakanda. This mysterious metal is a wonder. Near indestructible, it can absorb kinetic energy and has imbued a Wakandan flower called the Heart-Shaped Herb with a supercharge that gives superpowers when ingested.
Cut to modern day. After his father’s death T’Challa (Boseman) is crowned King but just as he is ordained a rare Wakandan artefact made of vibranium is lifted from a London museum by two very bad men, Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) and Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan).
To retrieve the precious metal T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, along with spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and warrior Okoye (Danai Gurira), travel to Korea where the artefact is about to be sold to CIA agent Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman).
A wild battle ensues to a power struggle that may not only compromise the throne of Wakanda but also threaten the safety of the world.
“Black Panther” takes place in a couple of time frames—NO SPOILERS HERE!—but at its heart it is a timely story about social responsibility—a wealthy nation state confronting its role in the world—that pulsates with smart commentary about race and revolution.
“The world is going to start over,” Killmonger declares, “and this time we are on top!” It’s the kind of thing movie bad guys have been saying for years but this time around the villain is so multi-layered and interesting it packs an extra punch. Jordan isn’t just evil—although he is pretty bad; covered in scars for every person he’s ever killed—he’s a villain with a purpose. His motivations are personal—AGAIN: NO SPOILERS HERE!—but when he suggests arming the, “two billion people who look like me all over the world,” with vibranium he’s not just speaking as a revolutionary but as someone hungry for representation and recognition. It’s a powerful message and Jordan brings it home in a performance that is both intense and very emotional.
Letitia Wright plays T’Challa’s sixteen-year old sister Shuri and steals most every scene she appears in. Imagine James Bond’s Q with a snappier wit and more brains than Tony Stark. She has some of the movie’s best lines and is destined to become a featured player in future instalments.
Boseman has made a career of playing iconic characters on screen. As sports legend Jackie Robinson in “42” or James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, in “Get on Up,” or Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice in “Marshall,”: he has breathed new life into characters we thought we already knew. Here he takes a well-known comic book character, the first black standalone superhero in the Marvel Universe, and delivers a performance ripe with subtext. His Black Panther is not only capable of fighting the bad guys but is also a vessel for the film’s study of the importance of legacy and identity.
“Black Panther” pushes the Marvel Universe past the typical Avengers style bombast fests like “Age of Ultron.” This is a breath of fresh air, a warm breeze along the lines of “Ant-Man” or “Doctor Strange,” films that transcend the superhero genre, pushing the form into new, unexplored territory. It may be a tad too long and slightly uneven in it’s first hour but with its strong female characters—who work together rather than as opponents—an Afrocentric story and social commentary it feels like the perfect movie for right now.
Richard and CP24 anchor Nneka Elliot have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the Tina Fey dramedy “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” the 80s action of “London Has Fallen” and the animated animals of “Zootopia”!
Richard and “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the Tina Fey dramedy “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” the 80s action of “London Has Fallen” and the animated animals of “Zootopia”!
“To be a good journalist you have to be a bit of a chameleon,” says Kim Barker. “You have to be accepting of different cultures, different languages and different situations. I have always been the kind of person who feels like they can go into any situation and fit in.”
In real life, Barker is a journalist who worked at the Chicago Tribune as a reporter and volunteered to become a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In reel life, she’s played by Tina Fey in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot as an expatriate television journalist addicted to the rush of living and working in a war zone.
Whiskey Foxtrot Tango plays like Animal House with warlords, or maybe Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan, but Barker describes the reality of her time there in more poetic terms.
“In Afghanistan everything looks like a picture,” says Barker. “Everything is so beautiful. The people are beautiful. The landscape is beautiful. You are surrounded by mountains when you’re in Kabul. (The people) are very friendly, very direct with very good sense of humour. Also Afghanistan has men with long beards and pick up trucks and guns who hate the government. That is familiar to me. I grew up in Montana.”
At the beginning of her time abroad Barker was a fish out of water but soon learned to culturally adapt and love the country.
“I remember on my second trip there meeting a guy who asked if I wanted to go fishing with him. I grew up fishing but fishing in Afghanistan is a little bit different because it usually involved throwing a grenade into the lake and stunning the fish or blowing them out of the water or using generator wires to electrocute them. That just doesn’t seem very sporting to me.”
Barker’s book, The Taliban Shuffle came to Tina Fey shortly after a New York Times review mentioned Barker’s similarity to the comedic actress.
“Tina Fey saw it,” Barker says. “I think her people probably showed it to her or my people. I don’t really have people but my agent sent it over to her people. She read the book and within two weeks of that review coming out she pushed Paramount and Lorne Michaels (who produced the movie) to option the book and make it into a movie.
“(People) said, ‘Who’s going to play you?’ I said, ‘A smart funny woman in Hollywood,’ and everybody was like, ‘Tina Fey?’ It was everybody’s first answer.”
Barker describes having her life turned into a film as surreal.
“It’s hard to even think about,” she says, “people seeing this in a theatre. They are going to equate me with Kim Barker even though (that) Kim Barker is a version of me. It’s fictionalized.”
She says the film screenwriter Robert Carlock told her early on that they would have to “Hollywood this up.” Changes to the basic story were made, and when they sent her a final copy of the script in 2014 she couldn’t bring herself to read it. Finally her best friend read the script “to make sure it is not going to embarrass you.”
“She read it and said, ‘It’s fine. It’s good. It’s really good. You’re probably not going to like parts of it because it makes you seem more heroic than you think of yourself.’ She was absolutely right. I’m not that brave.”
Kim Baker (Tina Fey playing the real life Kim Barker) needed to turn her life upside down. “I wanted out of my job,” she says in the new black comedy “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. “I wanted out of my mildly depressive boyfriend. I wanted to blow everything up.” And blow everything up she did… as bombs blew up around her.
When we first meet Baker she’s a New York City based cable-news journalist tiring of “writing copy for pretty people.” Eager for a change, both personally and professionally, she agrees to a three-month stint as a war correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. The “Ka-bubble,” the alcohol-fuelled world populated by expatriate journos and media types, soon seduces her and she becomes addicted to the rush of living and working in a war zone. Her three-month assignment stretches to four years as she begins a relationship with a charming Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman) and chases that elusive one big story.
Question is, when will she go home? Answer: When it all starts to feel normal.
“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” breathes the same satiric air as “M*A*S*H” and “Catch 22,” but never rises to the level of social commentary attained in either of those films. There are as many jokes about Baker’s appearance—she is, apparently “Kabul Cute”—as there are about the war. It sidesteps any direct political stance. Instead it’s simply content to make the point that outsiders will never have a bead on how to fix the problems in this part of the world. “This war is like [making love to] a gorilla,” says US Marine Corps Col. Hollanek (Billy Bob Thornton). “You keep on going until the gorilla wants to stop.” It’s not a revolutionary idea but it is brought to vivid life as seen through Barker’s eyes.
The film is being billed as a comedy but it’s not always laugh-out-loud-funny. The jokes are styled to add to the atmosphere—Kabul international Airport, for instance, is referred to as K.I.A., which is also an acronym for “Killed In Action.”—which sits squarely in Tina Fey’s wheelhouse. She plays Baker as a mostly bemused—and frequently hung over—presence, able to keep the funny bits believable while bringing enough emotional heft to sell the serious parts.
“Whiskey Foxtrot Tango” is kind of like “Animal House” with warlords, or maybe, “Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan.” When it is firing on all cylinders, it hits its satirical mark—“Hearts and minds,” says one soldier, “the two best places to shoot somebody.”—but spends most of its running time elsewhere on Barker’s personal journey.
The release of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings Peter Jackson’s trilogy to a close, and marks the end of a life immersed in Middle Earth for the actors. For several of the cast it was a years-long journey, and like any trip it’s nice to pick up a souvenir as a keepsake.
According to director Peter Jackson the actor who played the exiled dwarf king Thorin stole “the most boring thing in the world to steal,” from the set of the penultimate film, The Desolation of Smaug, socks.
“I did steal every single pair of costume socks,” said Richard Armitage, “because we were given a brand new pair every day.”
As production on The Battle of the Five Armies wrapped Armitage was gifted with some more interesting props including the deadly goblin cleaver Orcrist, which he keeps in an umbrella stand, “cause I want to be able to pick it up.”
Martin Freeman, who plays head Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, says he doesn’t miss making the films—“I’m really proud to have done it,” he says, “and I’m really glad to have done it, but I rarely miss jobs.”—but kept his sword and prosthetic ears as mementos.
Unlike Freeman, Sir Ian McKellen does get sentimental when he reflects on making the movies because, “a lot of the audience seeing The Hobbit part three wouldn’t have been born when we started filming it.” After spending thirteen years playing wise wizard Gandalf the Grey he took two priceless props from the set, “Gandalf’s staff, which I keep with umbrellas and walking sticks, and Gandalf’s hat, which I keep in the basement.”
Many actors have pilfered props from their movies. Keira Knightley walked off with Elizabeth Bennet’s striped socks from Pride & Prejudice. Elijah Wood has the One Ring from Lord of the Rings and Daniel Radcliffe liberated two pairs of Harry Potter’s famous round glasses, even though there was a strict policy about taking props from the set.
‘The ones from the first film are absolutely tiny now,” he says, “but they are very sweet.”
Kristen Stewart kept the engagement ring Edward Cullen gave her at the end of Twilight: Eclipse and Zachary Quinto took the ears he wore as Spock in Star Trek: Into Darkness but the strangest cinematic souvenir may belong to Mark Wahlberg.
The Academy Award nominee kept the prosthetic penis he wore as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. “I used to keep it in my desk drawer,” he said, “and I’d take it out and slap my friends in the face with it. I don’t keep many things from my movies, but that just seemed to have personal significance.”
“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” is the end of an era, and the beginning of one of the biggest movie franchises in history. As the third part of the Hobbit trilogy, it brings to an end the Peter Jackson movies inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. In the chronology, however, it is midway, the film that sets up the “Lord of the Rings” movies.
The action picks up seconds after the Dwarves evicted greedy dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) from the gold filled Lonely Mountain in “The Desolation of Smaug.” With the wicked worm gone exiled Dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) has now reclaimed his homeland and all the gold and power but wearing the crown has made him paranoid. He trusts no one, not even his loyal warriors and won’t listen to Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) attempts to make him see reason. His irrational behavior leads to the epic showdown mentioned in the title. Legions of bloodthirsty Orcs (complete with their giant, hard-headed War Beasts) face off with Dwarves, Elves of the Woodland Realm, King Dain II Ironfoot of the Iron Hills and the Men of Laketown. The fate of Middle Earth hangs in the balance as alliances are made and skulls are cracked.
At least I think that’s what happens. There is so much going on, so many characters struggling for power and survival it’s sometimes hard to keep track. Jackson wraps up the series with a movie that tries to close every door it has opened which leads to a cluttered film short on story but long on characters and action scenes.
Big themes abound—greed, power, love, loyalty, family, all cloaked in a story about dragons, halflings, wizards, ill tempered Orcs and a struggle for a mountain filled with gold but the one thing, by and large, missing from the story is a strong presence from the title character. That’s right, “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” treats Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) like a supporting character.
Baggins bookends the action and appears sporadically throughout, but the spotlight is fixed firmly on the other characters, rendering the “Hobbit” part of the title a tad superfluous.
The “Battle” part, however, is bang on. The movie is essentially a series of combat scenes stitched together and within those bruised and bloody sequences are some of the film’s highlights. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) running atop bricks, Mario Brothers style, as they fall through the air from a disintegrating bridge is a striking visual image and a scene where Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Saruman (Christopher Lee) and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) thrash away at evil spirits will entertain the eyes.
Jackson’s grey palette infuses “The Battle of the Five Armies” with an ominous air as the dozens of characters breath life into the fight scenes. Heroes and villains abound, and while there isn’t quite enough actual story to justify the two-hour-and twenty-minute running time, the battle between good and evil is so primal, so elemental you can’t help but let it get your blood racing.
For those who complain that the recent spate of superhero movies aren’t about anything other than bombast and reaching into your wallet, I give you “Black Panther.” Directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Chadwick Boseman in the title role, it’s a movie that delivers wham-bam action but serves it up with compelling sides of mythology and social awareness.
