I saw Lady Bird and Black Panther this weekend and what a bad pairing that was! (Never thought about the very similar titles though, which has me too intrigued than necessary.) They were both great movies—a solid B+ to both (B+ being solidly above average) if I had any sense of cinema scorekeeping—but also, I haven’t thought about either one since. I would like to think about them still. I would like to have a scene or an image pop in my head and remind me of how great the show was, but there’s nothing there.
Black Panther suffers from the usual Disney/Marvel toothpaste packaging. The fact that it can rise above that inevitable flaw of corporate overlordship is a testament to how it’s the best Marvel movie to date—but it’s still a flaw that adds to its forgetability. The message of the movie, the performances, the directing, all of it was top notch and especially good for a superhero movie, but then there’s all that other fluff (the particularly well-framed Lexus, the detour to South Korea that felt like it was decided upon by a committee) that doesn’t contribute anything besides what fluff contributes, which is a strangely hollow bloating. So the actual movie is fantastic, it’s what Marvel/Disney insist on injecting into it that brings it down like all the others.
Then again, that’s just what a BLOCKBUSTER is I guess. But should it be? What would be so bad if Misney just handed the filmmaker a sack of cash without any strings attached, no sponsorships, product placements, ratings guidelines, test audiences to appease, even their incessantly Christian need to canonized everything together into a Universe™. Who cares if you need to show so-and-so doing something-or-other in this movie in order to build up to their upcoming appearance in this other movie when all it does is hamper everything else. I say, let those movies actually play with all the toys in the toy box, make a mess.
But anyway, Black Panther was good for all the reasons a movie is good and bad for all the reasons Misney has extraneously introduced into their movie-making.
But then here’s where I contradict myself because Lady Bird was practically the exact opposite from a BLOCKBUSTER and I found it equally unmemorable but for the exact opposite reasons: it was too real, too quiet, too meandering.
Can a movie be too real? Lady Bird was one of those fly-on-the-wall, slice-of-life movies like Boyhood where it commits to absolute realism and accuracy. Boyhood though, had the advent of a “gimmick” of sorts in terms of how it was filmed over the course of the main actor’s life, which made it stand apart. Lady Bird doesn’t have that, it just has its expert portrayal of reality, which makes for an all right movie—I saw myself and my family in more than one instance of the film—but still feels, again, hollow.
It reminded me of The Descendants, which is another movie committed to absolute realism and showing you exactly what this specific family goes through in exacting detail, where you walk away from the movie being impressed with everything, but eager to get away, as if you’ve been spying on someone’s life. These kinds of movies lure you in with their intimacy, but when they’re over you feel as miffed as if a stranger stopped you on the street and told you their live store, then disappeared without explanation.
Anyway. I’ve thought for a few minutes about writing a good closer that wraps all these ideas up nicely (something about how I need a movie that’s a perfect mix of Black Panther’s politics and fantasia with Lady Bird’s documentary eye) but then I remembered that uhhh, this is a blog and I can do whatever I want!