Today’s flâneur afternoon on the MoviePass featured Black Panther, the title of which was shortened to Black Pant on the theater’s LED sign even though there appeared to be plenty of room to to finish off the word “panther”. Even an extra letter H would have sufficed to keep certain of us from thinking about black pants when entering the auditorium.
Black Pant
This is not really my kind of movie but hey, what else am I gonna do? I thought it would be worth seeing on the huge screen on account of its enormity, but I felt a little let down possibly for sitting too close to the screen, where the rapid sequence action scenes seemed not to move smoothly enough so that I could see what the hell was happening. I also have had trouble with the air at this particular theater, where in the past it has been so musty and skunky that I just had to leave or else hyperventilate. I have sensed that air quality problem the times I’ve been to this theater lately but it has thankfully always gone away.
I had thought one of the advantages of MoviePass was that I was free to leave if I felt sick like that. It turns out leaving a film early more than once a month could get my account canceled if their surveillance mechanisms detect my movements. I don’t trust that disabling location tracking or even turning the phone off altogether for 24 hours after entering the theater would be enough to fool MoviePass’s surveillance mechanisms. Even if they cannot detect in real time my movements during and after the movie on account of the phone being completely turned off I suspect they can figure it out by inference. It is all automated to the point where reaching a human being can be next to impossible. So the bots generally have the final word.
At times Black Panther felt like a fantasy version of Rambo, at other turns I sensed echoes of Independence Day and Star Wars. I’d read somewhere that this film was filled with allusions to other movies. Assuming that’s true I don’t think I caught a single concrete reference, but such inside jokes seem to be a constant running through many movies. The cynic in me asks why they can’t just write a 100% original script, but I guess you gotta make shoutouts to your peers in Hollywood.
I thought the King was pretty soft as far as kings go, while his potential ouster should never have been brought back to the country. The action scenes in South Korea were cool. The CIA dude was just about over the borderline in terms of being a weasel but he didn’t go too far. Much of the film went by too fast for me to remember, but the costumes and effects were impressive, the costumes more than the effects. I’d like to see this again on my TV at home, since I think it has a better quality picture than at the theater.
I get its significance culturally, and the message it conveys is unmistakable. But in the end you don’t really take anything away from this that you can use.
