Naw, I’m one of the main dudes on here that says we are hyper-critical when it comes to black films, and that’s reflected with how they often perform at the box office. When I go to see movies like Devotion, I’m damn near the only black person up in that bytch. However, people often cap about how they want non-comic book IPs and stories that represent black people in other roles besides slavery. Don’t even get me started! Regardless, I can hold that position (that we are too critical with black art), and that Coogler isn’t a GREAT director yet, simultaneously.
He has time, though. I don’t think he’s really had that idea, story, film that fully came together. He has to have a film that transitions him from a dude that directs movies to a dude that “makes” movies. That hasn’t happened as of now in my opinion. Moreover, if he’s not in the class of dudes like Nolan, Chazelle, et al., then he hasn’t crossed the “great” boundary yet. Otherwise, what are those dudes? Gods or some shyt? The whole truth is that as esteemed as someone like Nolan is there’s a sizable group of people that think his films are trash, or that he’s overrated.
Hell, there are very vocal voices on this board that say Nolan’s films are trash. You will always have critics. When you juxtapose someone like Nolan, who at this point is a superior director to Coogler in their respective careers (I think most sane people would agree to that) it’s clear that Coogler has room for growth. shyt, some of Nolan’s later films have clear issues: most notably the sound engineering. What I find myself being most critical about Coogler is that often in his films there is a beat that is very important in terms of the story arch, but how it is presented cinematically doesn’t indicate nor illustrate that it is.
For example, when Riri Williams first dons the full Ironheart suit, she is making a proactive decision to become a hero. Her life going forward is never going to be the same. Whoever she was before that moment, she’s never going to be able to be that person anymore. She’s not the little girl that just wants to go back home to MIT. She’s actively deciding to put her own self-interests on the back burner to fight for others. Her story actually parallels Shuri’s in many ways. Yet, it’s presented such a ho-hum manner. There’s so much cinematic “space,” in that scene that the average movie-goer is not even going to see its significance. Age of Ultron was trash for a variety of reasons (e.g., story is goofy, Whedon is mid, and so on), but contrast a very similar beat/theme in Age of Ultron to what Coogler did:
(^^^1:22)
Now, admittedly a director has to choose carefully when and how many of these moments they’re going to have in a film. You can easily over do it, but in my opinion Black Panther 2 needed more of that than what was presented. People will say stuff like, “Her character was shoehorned into the movie. The movie didn’t need Riri Williams.” That’s because the director was incapable of making you FEEL like she was integral to the story, because she actually was.
Lastly, speaking of great scenes, I’ve realized that you can have great scenes in bad or middling movies as a byproduct of this discourse. Zack Snyder is a master at this: producing one or two great scenes in an otherwise emotionally vapid movie. Such that, he’ll always have a diehard fanbas—no matter how much of a hack he is overall—because he gives you one or two dope moments in a film.
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h someone would do a Sliders rebbot tho
the coli is getting more right wing every day
