movies

[Jocephus]

i just realized that michael b jordan was wallace on the wire.

[heyzeus]

Just watched the final 2/3 of "Atomic Homefront". It's a documentary about the Bridgeton (MO)/West Lake landfill.

It's equal parts frustrating and gut wrenching. If you want to get depressed/feel borderline helpless watching people in the St. Louis area slowly die, then watch this 90-100 minute movie on HBO.

I'm watching it now, and it's devastating. You can't believe what you're seeing, even.

[ghostrunner]

went to see a 2:30 showing of BP on saturday but it was sold out by 1:55

Buy your tickets in advance...it's not 1996 anymore.

i was using a gift card

Sell that [expletive] on the street at .25 value

Stay tuned for CardsofSTL's new podcast - Tough Love Lifehacks

[The Third Man]

I saw Black Panther and posted miscellaneous thoughts elsewhere which I'll copy and paste here:

the politics could best be described as muddled. or, more generously, complicated.

spoilers, but I'm guessing you don't care that much:

the long and short of it is that it's a film about an isolationist African empire which is so far beyond technologically advanced compared to the rest of the world that they actually hide their true nature by posing as a third-world country in order to prevent their unbelievably sophisticated tech from becoming accessible to bad elements worldwide. enter the film's antagonist, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, who is a black revolutionary, raised in America without a father, self-made, trained by the CIA, who (successfully) seeks to overthrow their ruler so that he can spread their technology and get it into the hands of oppressed black people worldwide, in order to start a global revolution.

the protagonist is the titular Black Panther, who eventually harshly criticizes his forebears for remaining isolationist over the course of centuries of subjugation of their neighbors and oppressed people worldwide, but who believes that Killmonger's rhetoric is too incendiary and is steeped in notions of violent retribution as much as any true revolutionary spirit. of course, the complicating elements here are that A) the film writes Killmonger this way deliberately, surely in order to cut off his politics at the knees, and B) this film is set in a fictional universe in which a country such as Wakanda exists, and given the history of colonialism and the manner in which their neighbors have suffered, they're not entirely wrong - or at least, unjustified - to remain isolationist. (on the other hand, what complicates that is that they're so far beyond advanced that they could've squashed the [expletive] out of all of these imperalists coming to raid their African neighbors. like I said, muddled...the source material brings some inherent limitations with it.)

anyway. the film ultimately meets somewhere in the middle of the two characters, admitting that Wakanda's policy of isolationism was wrong and the cause of much unjust suffering, while hedging against Killmonger's radical rhetoric by insinuating that his tactics are bloodthirsty and themselves imperialist in nature (he even has a line about learning from his enemies). the movie ends with Wakanda opening up and revealing its true nature to the world, and opening a community center in Oakland (where Killmonger was raised, but obviously also the heart and soul of the real Black Panther party) as the first step to righting the wrongs which Wakanda was entirely content to watch happen to oppressed peoples. in other words, more of the same: change from within, which of course has the unspoken and regrettable consequence of giving capitalism the opportunity to limp along while dangling just enough of a carrot for the wretched of the earth to not rise up like Killmonger and kill their masters.

the counterargument is that Killmonger's pan-Africanism is misguided and his efforts to put weapons in the hands of oppressed peoples worldwide would cause plenty of issues, not the least of which would stem from the fact that African peoples, native or otherwise, are hardly united under some singular banner of "oppressed black people," nor is there reason to believe that any transfers of power that would result from this or these revolutions would be anything more than a panacea to racial politics without getting at the root of the imperalist motivations that would ultimately fuel so many of them. (like those twitter posts about how capitalists want five billionaires to control half the world's wealth, and liberals want two of those five to be women.) though, again, the character was deliberately written this way...kind of like how Dark Knight Rises undercuts Bane's revolutionary rhetoric by suggesting that his "actual" plan is just to nuke the city.

to its credit, the film does plenty to make you see Killmonger as a sympathetic, if tragic, figure, and it's hardly suggesting that the state of the world is remotely just, or that radical change is not needed. it is just, quite literally, counterrevolutionary, when it comes down to it.

as far as the CIA goes, their role in the film is minimal, although obviously loaded and ultimately problematic by their very inclusion: a single character (Martin Freeman) whose role is mostly to be bumbling comic relief, get dunked on, told to shut up, and who ultimately assists the protagonists in preventing Killmonger's spread of Wakandan technology. there's definitely something unsavory about a CIA agent helping to shut down a revolution, given real-life parallels, but like everything else in the film, the message is muddled at best given the combination of social commentary wrt historical analogs and fictional comic-book universe [expletive].

As far as the rest of the movie goes, it's distinctive enough by the standards of Marvel's output to make it one of the few worth going out of your way to see. They still have a problem with shooting action scenes; weird for an entire trillion-dollar franchise of action films to not be able to stage good fights.

[Jocephus]

is it possible movies are only as deep as their running time allows?

[The Third Man]

Hrm? I haven’t said anything about shallow vs deep.

[Michael]

Logan Lucky is on Amazon and it's boring.

[go birds]

Logan Lucky is on Amazon and it's boring.

i liked it tbh

[Jocephus]

[JoeMcKim]

i just realized that michael b jordan was wallace on the wire.

We was also one of the little kids in the Keanu Reeves baseball movie Hardball.