THREAD. Reading overall trends in criticism is fascinating to me. To be clear though, overwhelmingly positive reviews are a miracle. I don't want any dialogue to overshadow that or miss what makes a movie like Black Panther so amazing.
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But I'm also fascinated by the reasons people don't like stuff. And what it can tell us about the ways we engage movies, all to help move the overall dialogue forward by addressing core misunderstandings.
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And the one criticism that I'm seeing pop up again and again with Black Panther is a "just a comic book movie" and people are just reading in too deep." To which I have a few thoughts.
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The first is that every single piece I've read this far has been semiotically responsible and referencing the text. Which is sort of remarkable. I'm hard pressed to think of a movie that's actually inspired THIS much 1:1 analysis and it makes my heart happy.
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Meanwhile, this sort of "just a ___" criticism is inane. People use the same lgoic with "it's just a movie!" to discount cinema as artform all together, so by all means, don't be quick to line up your thought process with that.
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You could boil it all down to "don't judge a book by it's cover," but the grim truth shades of the sentiment has still been expressed time and time and time again throughout film history as a way of dismissing genre, especially when you look at oscar voting.
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Hell, people used to call film noir and detective stories meaningless fluff without realizing it was changing the language and artistic capacity of cinema. What's hilarious is how many people would confidently scoff at that notion today in "a marvel movie! impossible!"
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And the truth is I could care less about predicting the future. I'm not here to say comics are the new noir (after all, most of them are... not good), nor here to even compare. The truth is I just see what's in front of me and the merits of the result.
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And I see so many genre / popcorn movies in the last few years that are full of life and meaning and complexity and empathy and powerful expressions of the world around us.
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Sure, sometimes that power comes in the form of BIG IMPORTANT DRAMAS, sometimes they come in the form of fun-as-hell popcorn flicks. But never mistake "serious texture" for actual thoughtfulness - and that also gets to the hilarious catch 22 of all this...
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Shakespeare was pop art in its time, but his works still shaped the art form and its effects are still felt today.
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