'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' And 'The Fabelmans' Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin
#200: "The Fabelmans," "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," "Falling For Christmas," "Any Given Sunday," "Luca"
Edition 200:
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The Fabelmans | Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
This week marked the arrival of the latest world-conquering Marvel spectacular, on thousands of screens across the country, and the current odds-on favorite to win Best Picture, opening in a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It’s a perfect microcosm of the two diverging communities of movie goers, now fully detached from any Venn diagram of monoculture.
It’s not so much a question of whether someone can like both of these movies from different ends of the spectrum, but rather a foregone conclusion that the type of person who sees one of these movies will never have any interest in ever checking out the other. This makes me sad.
It’s even sadder to realize this fate has befallen Steven Spielberg, one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema while also being one of the most commercially successful — Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park…you don’t need me to list them all. Now he’s the guy who spent $200 million on a movie musical that grossed $76 million at the worldwide box office, but earned seven Oscar nominations and a very positive review from yours truly.
His new movie, The Fabelmans, is the equivalent of Spielberg throwing up his hands and saying, “screw it, then I’m just going to make what I want.” The result is a self-indulgent yet gorgeous autobiography of his young life that practically worships at the altar of Cinema proper.
Nothing could be lower stakes than this story of an upper middle class Jewish boy struggling to cope with his parents’ dissolving marriage, but I guess one thing the movie has in common with Wakanda Forever is that Spielberg clearly sees his filmmaking talent as nothing less than a superpower. The way it is unveiled and the effect it has on people who witness it is Superman-esque.
Still, because Spielberg is Spielberg, everything about this movie feels larger than life. Characters are always backlit and almost always shot from underneath, giving them the classic hero silhouette. The action and dialogue are slightly heightened above believable reality (credit to co-writer extraordinaire Tony Kushner). Set design and camera angles and everything else are perfect. It feels like an all-caps MOVIE, one that wouldn’t have felt out of place being released in 1965, 1985 or 2005. In any of those years, it would be a big hit.
Instead, the world clamors for more Black Panther. Within a week, $400 million worth of people have already seen this sequel to the 2018 miracle that was the original. That movie managed to marry the style of an ascendant, young, vibrant director in Ryan Coogler; the charisma of two mega movie stars, Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan; the social statement of a primarily black cast; the CGI crowd-pleasing punchfest of a Marvel movie; and most importantly, some real themes and thoughts about the real world. All that, I should note, in 2 hr. 14 min.
The new movie, at 2 hr. 41 min., certainly is packed with a lot of stuff. It hops around the globe faster than you can say Angela Bassett, and the queen mother is one of like 20 characters jostling for precious seconds of spotlight. In all of these movies, either magic or ~technology~ (magic by a different name) are used to paper over any jumps in logic. Figuring out the rock-paper-scissors of who wins between a Wakandan in a knock-off Iron Man suit and a Talokan with superhuman acqua strength is exhausting. Still, I respect the fact that the movie doesn’t require me to have a PhD in Avengers-ology to follow what’s going on. It’s not my bag, but if I hold my nose I can definitely swallow it.
The two movies are diametrically opposed, and yet as I watched both of them my mind couldn’t get past one similar trait they share. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was until I saw on Twitter the opening scene for the new Netflix movie The Wonder, which I have not watched yet but definitely will this week, simply because Florence Pugh is in it. It’s some sort of intense, psychological thriller set in 1862, yet the movie opens with a shot of a studio stage in present day. We see the construction of the sets, and a voice over tells us quite explicitly that we’re watching a movie. It’s bizarre. There is zero suspension of disbelief.
It’s not just a nifty trick in an independent movie. Steven freaking Spielberg is doing this too, in his own way. Setting aside the fact that everyone who goes to see The Fabelmans knows it’s Spielberg’s own recreation of his young life — an artificial construction of something real — there’s two moments the movie where he explicitly winks at the audience. When a bully gives the Spielberg-stand-in the classic “tell anyone about this I’ll kill you,” he replies “I won’t…unless one day I make a movie about it” (Jim Halpert face). Later, when he gets advice from John Ford to never shoot the horizon in the middle of the frame, the movie’s camera shakily adjusts its horizon from the middle to the bottom of the frame. In each case, Spielberg decided to break what I’ll call the “narrative trance.”
Of course, Wakanda Forever is a movie whose entire premise is based entirely on the fact that Chadwick Boseman died tragically. Rather than recast T’Challa, it was decided that he would be dead as well. At two separate points, silent montages honor Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa … less for the sake of the character than the real life actor. The emotional anchor of the movie is not even on the screen — it’s reality itself.
I consider these latest examples to be something of a watershed moment for the trend of self-referential, ironic detachment that has been rising for several years. If the biggest commercial and critical hits of the year are doing it, the trend has officially won. In my screenings of each movie, the audiences laughed, cried and loved these “meta” moments.
So I ask you, is this what you want from your movies?
Let me make my opinion very clear — I hate it. This so-called narrative trance is absolutely essential to the true power of cinema, to capture you and transport you out of your experience and into the world of the story, whether it’s as fictional as Wakanda or real as mid-century San Francisco. Any acknowledgement from the movie that this world inside the screen is just make believe is like telling your younger sibling that Santa Claus isn’t real. It totally ruins the magic (that is, for earnest movies…the caveat being that in comedies, zero rules apply). I don’t even like when at the end of docudramas when they show pictures of the real life people next to their on-screen characters. I’m a crank.
Take those two moments out, and The Fabelmans would’ve comfortably fit inside my top 10 movies at year’s end. Now I know Spielberg, the only guy still making old-school, earnest Hollywood movies, feels the need to let his audiences know that he’s in on the joke. I’m not laughing!
Something New
Falling For Christmas (Netflix): Netflix is spitting out movies right now at an impossible rate. I still haven’t seen Luckiest Girl Alive with Mila Kunis, or the movie about Jonah Hill and his therapist Stutz, or Enola Holmes 2 (lol), or as mentioned above The Wonder. They also just added Where The Crawdads Sing. But there’s Falling For Christmas, which is Netflix’s latest attempt at breaking up Hallmark’s monopoly on terribly cheesy Christmas rom-coms by casting…Lindsay Lohan. She plays a spoiled heiress who *checks notes* loses her memory in a skiing accident? This movie is absolutely awful in a way that’s actually quite fun to laugh at, which could be a fun new Christmas tradition for you and your family. If not, maybe check out a movie from the list above before I get to it in future newsletters.
Something Old
Any Given Sunday (1999, Netflix): It’s useful to think about sports fandom as a foreign language. You’re either fluent in it, or you’re not. Because of this, Hollywood movies about sports have varied wildly in quality over the past however many decades, as directors see in sports whatever themes they’re already interested in. Oliver Stone has always (some may say only) been interested in “the man in the arena” myth, and once he realized he couldn’t make another Vietnam movie, he uses the world of professional football to express his signature brand of doomed, macho man sacrifice. It turns out, his interpretation of concussions and CTE was frighteningly accurate some 20 years before it was a mainstream concept.
This movie works because of its charismatic performances. Al Pacino’s pregame speech as the coach goes down in the sports movie history books, and a young Jamie Foxx proves his other-worldly magnetism as QB “Steamin’” Willie Beamen. As with all of Stone’s movies, it’s shaggy and jumbled and the opposite of subtle, but he certainly knows how to hit the high notes. For my friends out there who are about to go into their Fantasy Football playoffs, here’s a recommendation for you to hype you up. Good luck out there.
Something to Stream
Luca (Disney+): This is the one Pixar movie I’d never seen! After my trip to Italy (I mentioned my Italy trip, take a shot) I decided to rectify that. Those that haven’t been reading this newsletter long and might think of me as this cold arbiter of obscure arthouse fare would be surprised to see how warmly I’ve reviewed Turning Red, Soul, Toy Story 4 and other Pixar movies in recent years.
No surprise to find Luca to be an utterly charming, disarming and delightful way to spend 90 minutes, following the journeys of two young “sea monsters” who try to fit in as human boys in a seaside Italian town by winning the local triathlon…as you do. It’s exactly the outsider coming-of-age story you think it would be, but executed at a high level. Now that I’ve seen this movie, and Lightyear, it’s undeniable that Pixar’s current directive is to lower the intended age of its target audience in the wake of Soul, which was literally not a children’s movie. So here, the jokes are a bit less mature, the emotional gut punches a little less severe, and the existential reckoning a little less profound, but that studio up in San Francisco just knows how to tell really compelling stories.
Trailer Watch: Magic Mike’s Last Dance
Ok just so we get the timeline right here, I need to remind you all that the original Magic Mike was an actually good movie with real ideas and style, directed by one of my favs, Steven Soderbergh. That movie made a ton of money, so the studio made a sequel (without Soderbergh) that was literally just a male stripper fantasy flick.
But for some reason (I can’t explain other than to say Soderbergh has always been a risk-taker), the man is back to direct a THIRD movie where Channing Tatum shakes his junk. So even though the trailer looks absolutely ridiculous, I actually think it might be worth watching. Ladies, plan your girls’ night outs for February.