Getting punchy

CREED III

2023

Directed by Michael B. Jordan

Written by Keenan Coogler, Zach Baylin, and Ryan Coogler

Spoilers: moderate

Because you're dangerous

CREED II

Released with the best sense of timing that just about any film's ever had, what would've already been (let's not say "just") a great and satisfying sequel in any other time and place becomes, in the November of 2018, something close enough to perfection to count.

2018

Directed by Steven Caple Jr.

Written by Juel Taylor and Sylvester Stallone

With Michael B. Jordan (Adonis "Donnie" Johnson), Sylvester Stallone (Robert "Rocky" Balboa), Tessa Thompson (Bianca), Phylicia Rashad (Mary Anne Creed), Wood Harris (Tony "Little Duke" Evers), Florian Munteanu (Viktor Drago), Dolph Lundgren (Ivan Drago), and Brigitte Nielsen (Ludmilla Drago)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Godspeed you, black emperor

BLACK PANTHER

Okay, the first thing you should know is that I liked it. The second thing is that I get to write about race in American discourse, so... yippee.

2018

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Written by Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler

With Chadwick Boseman (King T'Challa), Lupita Nyong'o (Nakia), Letetia Wright (Princess Shuri), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Angela Bassett (Queen Mother Ramonda), Forrest Whittaker (High Priest Zuri), Daniel Kaluuya (W'Kabi), Winston Duke (M'Baku), Martin Freeman (Everett Ross), Andy Serkis (Ulysses Klaue), and Michael B. Jordan (Erik "Killmonger" Stevens)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Reviews from gulag: In the eternal war of dads against communism, sometimes your dad comes home, and sometimes he does not

Given that the Cold War has been over for a quarter century now, perhaps it's mildly surprising that 2015 offered not one but two stories of fathers who crossed the Iron Curtain for their country.  Today we take a look at Bridge of Spies and Creed... and, okay, fine, it's a lot more because I watched them back-to-back than they have any actual thematic overlap whatsoever.

BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)

It's 1957, the Cold War goes on, and in the midst of a counterintelligence sweep, Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is identified, captured, and charged, inter alia, with espionage.  James Donovan (Tom Hanks), a lawyer at a prestigious New York law firm specializing in insurance defense—but, more importantly, a veteran of the prosecution team at Nuremberg—is cajoled into taking Abel's case, to demonstrate that the spy has received the due process of law.  But Donovan, a man of principle, takes Abel's rights more seriously than anyone might have expected, and offers a vigorous defense, even appealing the case to the Supreme Court—though he finds little sympathy there for his arguments.  In the end, it's all Donovan can do to persuade the trial judge to not execute Abel—not because the judge wouldn't like to see the commie fry, but because, one day, a live Soviet prisoner may be more useful to America than a dead one.  And, hey!  Wouldn't you know, apparently later that very same week—or maybe it's five years later, for Bridge of Spies exists in the kind of bizarre timewarp where children don't age and the ongoing narrative finds itself crammed into a space that is at once too large and too small—Gary Powers gets himself shot down over the USSR.  And this isn't to even mention poor, innocent Frederic Pryor, arrested under false charges in East Germany.  The CIA reasons that since it was Donovan's idea in the first place, it seems only fair that Donovan be drafted into the service of his country once again, and thus do they send this untrained civilian into East Berlin to bring our boys home.

Firstly, Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski need to stop, or be stopped.  For twenty years, Kaminski has coasted on his twin triumphs of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, a pair of films notable for being shot in high-contrast black-and-white and being set almost entirely outdoors, respectively.  Otherwise, Kaminski has largely busied himself with undermining Spielberg with perhaps the most offensively grating interior lighting set-ups in all cinema—and Spielberg, for his part, has fucking loved it.  Meanwhile, it makes it all the more distasteful that critics unaccountably seem to like Spielberg and Kaminski's ENORMOUS SHAFTS (of light), although I strongly, strongly suspect this has more to do with all the other moving parts of Spielberg's emotion machines—the editing, the scoring, the acting, etc.—which all still function more-or-less as well as ever.