Ryan Coogler is only 31.
All the best superhero movies are the ones where the villain is basically right.
I'll probably see Black Panther, but I basically stopped seeing superhero movies about fifteen years ago.
I'll probably see it Sunday. I'm not a big fan of superhero movies, if they never made another one I would not miss them, but I'm hoping this one will be good. It sure sounds like it.
Anyway, I couldn't sit through the one with Peter Sellers. I hope they changed the plot and made more changes than the switch the lead to a black guy.
No, it's actually a shot-by-shot remake of the Pink Panther movie with black actors.
I'm not really "pink", except if I've been in the sun.
I liked Adam Serwer's article on Killmonger on the Atlantic website.
Does anybody know if the ritual combat by the waterfall to determine who gets to be king is in the comic book? I kind of hated that part.
Are Cape movies the South African answer to Bollywood?
10: It looks like that segment was closely based off Panther's Rage (1973), but I'm not sure if it was a coronation ritual as in the movie or just a fight.
Highlights:
* "What are those" (apparently a meme callback)
* Chekhov's Rhino
* Costume design, obviously, worth a watch in itself
* "The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire" (making Killmonger's error super-clear for those in the back)
* "I felt extremely represented in #BlackPanther by the middle-aged white character who was excited to help out in small ways when appropriate"
One weakness pointed out on a podcast is that there was so much excellence in the non-title female roles (Nakia, Okoye, Shuri) that T'Challa against their light looked bland and reactive.
Oh, and:
* Okoye twitching her head like the bad wig is a mosquito.
The villain is called "Killmonger"? Good grief. Please tell me that the film displays some sense of how ridiculous that sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3ESYdtef-s&list=PLrcNrGNMiK5NetfNJGGf45l_2EBH7Ykmt&index=5
15: Yes. Also a character dating back to 1973, but he's given a backstory that makes the nickname seem more organic. (Another character back when was "Man-Ape", and they got rid of that.)
he's given a backstory that makes the nickname seem more organic
He used to be a fishmonger?
Also a character dating back to 1973,
My surprise at learning that, like the nation of Wakanda, is completely invisible to the outside observer and may not in reality exist at all.
It's a misspelling of the original "Krillmonger."
The henchman of the infamous Prawnbroker.
My first exposure to Black Panther was in the 70s. He teamed up with the Thing to fight Idi Amin. That doens't show up in the movie at all, does it?
21: Sadly, no. No other Marvel superheroes in this movie, and no actual historical figures either.
I can't help but feel the absence of Amin was the best call.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm excited about the hype. It's foolish to expect too much from a superhero movie and yet, it feels like it's such a good fit for the cultural moment.
Text WAKANDA to register to vote
Shuri's the most important character.
Movies can have an even longer lasting impact. A good movie changes the audience, and we have tons of evidence to back that up:
...
[T]he point is this: On the one hand, sure, movies are a product engineered to optimize financial windfalls for a small group of corporations and intellectual property holders. But on the other hand, I personally got interested in math because of Ian Malcolm, rock-star chaos theory mathematician in "Jurassic Park," and you would not be reading this if not for that.
So "Black Panther" is a big deal for a lot of reasons, but Shuri is chief among them.
Is anyone else fascinated by the logistical requirements of rhino cavalry?
This paper I just found says rhinos eat between 60 and 84g/kg a day of hay in captivity (white ones eat a bit more than black ones). They range between 1800 and 2500kg for adults, males bigger. Unless I've missed a decimal place, that's a load of hay - 210kg a day assuming we're picking the biggest fuck-off beasts. The study actually quoted "dry matter" and the hay included 10% protein, so I might make that 230kg.
That said, those big forklift bales you see in fields are a quarter-tonne each, so that's roughly one rhino/day of supply. You might say 3 tonnes/acre of yield, so a troop of rhino cavalry (a pachyderm patrol?) will eat a suspiciously round one acre a day. Wakandan farmers are going to hate the army coming on exercise and the claims officer is going to be busy, what with enormous consumption of forage as well as fences, outbuildings, children, etc.
If I was the Wakandan Defence Ministry I'd be seriously looking at converting to horses. I mean, tradition is tradition, but you can feed 20-odd of those on what it takes to support one rhino and if you give the bloke on top an AK-47 it won't make much odds.
I'm pretty sure many societies maintained horse cavalry that ate more than an acre of grass a day.
Obligatory: "Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier"
And armies kept the horses well past the point when you think they could have spent the money on machine guns for better effect. Style matters.
And armies kept the horses well past the point when you think they could have spent the money on machine guns for better effect.
As the song in 27 references, horses were used in afghanistan.
A troop here would be about ten rhinos.
25 is a great comment in the highest Unfogged tradition.
The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.
"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.
"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."
The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century
Since this was 2001, "the last century" is "the one that had finished the year before". I mean, the US army in Afghanistan did a lot of things that no American military had done since the last century, like "use helicopters" and "go into combat" and "shoot guns at people".
My first exposure to Black Panther was in the 70s. He teamed up with the Thing to fight Idi Amin.
A fairer fight than you might think, since Idi Amin had Dr. Charles Xavier on his side. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455590/
Further to 34, if he meant "the 19th century" he was wrong. The US used horse cavalry in the 20th century. The gap between "let's charge those guys on horseback so we can stick them with swords" and "let's drop a nuclear weapon on them" turns out to be about three and a half years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26th_Cavalry_Regiment
34 - yes. My grandfather was in the horse cavalry, like actually riding horses, in the late 1930s when he was in ROTC. Then he switched to horse-drawn artillery. Then when there was actual fighting it was anti-aircraft guns, so.
like actually riding horses
The clapping together of coconut halves didn't occur until later.
I liked the movie okay, but it still is a modern superhero movie; it still is basically four twenty-minute fight scenes strung together with bits of plot and dialogue.
The costuming and design were fantastic, though, and some of the discussion around the political/ethical questions has been interesting.
Between this, Ragnarok, and SW:TLJ, Disney really seems to have gotten a knack for finding interesting directors and giving them a level of freedom to put a new spin on franchises, while in a larger sense still slotting the directors into the existing cinema-industrial complex whose output is fairly similar movie-to-movie if you squint.
41 is what I thought too.
Jelani Cobb's article in New Yorker about Black Panther and the idea of Africa is very good.
All three girls saw and enjoyed Ragnarok, a first PG-13 with me for at least the younger two. Mara (10) decided Black Panther would be too scary and Selah (5) was inclined to agree but we made a plan for what she'd do if she got scared. Mara stayed with her dad instead and ended up watching graphic school shooting footage on the news and has been an anxious mess ever since, so maybe it's even? Selah did ask for her coat a few times so she could cuddle it and have the option to hide her eyes and once yelled at the screen "I said NO MORE GUNS!" but loved it and is begging to go back. She also plans to be the next Black Panther both for Halloween and in reality. Nia (11) too was very taken with it and has reenacted the "what are those?" several times since.
I don't feel a need to overanalyze but it was put together prettily and written well. I'm glad we went.
||
Not sure if this has been noted already, but since this is the open pop culture thread...
Jeff Bezos
@JeffBezos
Happy to announce that Amazon Studios is adapting Iain M. Banks' amazing Culture series -- a huge personal favorite -- as a TV series. Can't wait!
|>
That's the third time, but who's counting.
Oops. It's because I grew up as a Third Culture Kid.
Once for ever Culture post at least.
44: Any hair inpirations for the girls?
Since the horn on a rhinoceros is composed of hair, wanting a troop of rhino cavalry counts.
I enjoyed it, but I thought it was pretty hard on African Americans. One of the three black agenda report's reviews (the second one) was pretty close to my take. Except the white guy in the movie doesn't save Wakanda he saves the rest of the world from Wakanda's weapons.
That's what happens when Pat Buchannon writes the script.
That element of the final fight made no sense at all; why exactly do they need to keep those weapons from being shipped out so badly that shooting down the cargo planes makes sense? If the leadership challenge rematch succeeds, you get on the phone with the agents in London, New York, and Hong Kong, inform them of the change, and tell them to return the shipments. If you fail, another shipment goes out in a few days so what do you gain?
(Other elements of the final fight don't survive this kind of scrutiny very well, either; why does no one in the Wakandan military seem to have a ranged weapon a tenth as effective as the converted mining tool the South African dude had?)
I enjoyed the movie immensely in that I found watching it to be a fun experience, but as people have noted the plot has holes you could drive a truck through. Also the final panther vs. panther fight was a CGI overload. I was also hoping they'd kill off Martin Freeman in a "white man dies taking a bullet for a black woman" reverse trope thing, but in general I appreciated how marginalized white characters were.
I also thought Michael B Jordan did a fantastic job bringing the humanity and pathos to a comic supervillain role. Also, I liked that it's a villain whose politics are fundamentally sympathetic, and I think the movie had some really nuanced themes and politics for a Disney superhero movie.
51: The second review from what ordering? Chronological? Scrolling down?
53: That was a little forced, but it made more than zero sense at least: clearly many Wakandans want to get more interventionist (including Nakia and W'Kabi (Kaluuya's character)) and are not just supporting Killmonger out of legalism, so getting the weapons back won't be as simple as a phone call. The weapons aren't necessarily even going through their existing intelligence networks.
The biggest plot hole is why they didn't bring Killmonger back to Wakanda as a kid after T'Chaka orphaned him. Forest Whitaker was spying on his father, so they can't plead ignorance.
57: T'Chaka didn't want to have to tell anyone he killed his brother. Also, where was Killmonger's mother? Was that discussed?
58: There are like a dozen ways for kings to hide inconvenient spawn. Solved problem. At the very least he could have provided for the kid.
The mother was never discussed or shown, rather big omission.
I also thought Michael B Jordan did a fantastic job bringing the humanity and pathos to a comic supervillain role.
I liked Ryan Coogler's comment about casting him.
The big thing was the casting ...casting is mad important in these movies. You have to sit with that cast for two years." "I wrote the script with certain actors in mind," he said. Michael B. Jordan, who starred in both of Coogler's previous films, plays T'Challa's opponent, Erik Killmonger. But he had something else in mind as well. When he was growing up in the 1990's, the three most successful black actors were Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Wesley Snipes. "They could front any kind of movie. They were funny, they were sexy, they could do action." But they never appeared together on screen. "For me, it was like an opportunity to make that Denzel/Will Smith movie I never got to see."
Lupita Nyong'o now has TWO Lego figures based on different characters she's paid.
It just doesn't seem fair. She's so young. And, me, still stuck at 0 Lego figures. Where's the justice?
Here's the justice. Problem solved.
45. Has anybody been watching American Gods? Is it any good?
66: Wow, I didn't realize that show was out and (wiki...) done with a first season. I've barely heard anything about it, guessing it's making little cultural impact.
I'm not a superhero movie person either.
I've heard good things about Lady Bird. Has anyone seen that?
67. That's because the lead character is a black superhero.
Waiting around for the second post-credit bit as one does at a Marvel movie, it was revealed that filming occurred in Atlanta, Busan South Korea, and at a cool waterfall in Argentina. What's missing from the list? [google says there were a few aerial establishing shots from Uganda, Zambia, and South Africa, apparently no actors.]
Great crowd at the Cherry Hill (NJ) multiplex, the closest theater to Camden, on opening weekend. Some little girls were dressed up African, flowing white cotton robes. In the movie several male Wakandans had that style, but the main women preferred impossibly tight black leather jumpsuits.
I saw the first few episodes of American Gods and wasn't impressed. The Gods are constantly overacting, which makes sense for older character actors who have had comic bit parts for decades, and are suddenly Gods. Shadow does have the perfect look -- mixed race, tall, muscular, beautiful. He's mostly standing around in the middle of all the magic and barely reacting. Special effects on the low budget side, not in a good way.
68: Yes, I really liked Lady Bird. Beautiful coming of age story about a young woman trying on different aspects of identity to figure out where she fits into the world, and a visual love letter to Sacramento, the city she can't wait to get away from.
the Cherry Hill (NJ) multiplex, the closest theater to Camden
49: I don't think so. Nia has outgrown her old quest for micros like Shoni's a few years ago, and Nakia's bantu knots were Mara's signature style for a long time. They all have locs now and I'm not totally sure where they get inspiration or their sense of self-assurance for that matter.
68.2 Not yet but I've been wanting to see it. Also heard really good things about The Florida Project.
And go see Phantom Thread, it's wonderful.
...but the main women preferred impossibly tight black leather jumpsuits.
Dayum.
73: $5 toll (yes I know movies cost more than that), and not enough parking when you get there.
I am certain the crowd was not from Cherry Hill.
I think Florida Project was my favorite movie of last year. Ladybird and Get Out were my other two favorites.
Forgot about another favorite - "Columbus" . Although it seems a little disloyal since it's about Columbus, Indiana.
Jelani Cobb's article in New Yorker about Black Panther and the idea of Africa is very good.
I feel like I should watch this film, because there's just so little about Africa in American culture (or so little that isn't racist, patronising, colonialist, etc.). At the same time, though, I basically never watch superhero movies, because that sort of film just doesn't make sense to me.
Coogler on finding his African roots. I'll write more stuff later, but I'll just note for now (1) he's finding his roots in South Africa, at least 2,000km from his ancestors' actual origins; and (2) literally nothing he describes is distinctively African. I could claim to be African based on the exact same argument he gives (I'm going out on a limb and guessing black people in Oakland don't slaughter goats in their backyards and drink bootleg beer from calabashes).
Killmonger was obviously from the Legion of Unimaginatively Named Supervillains. I believe it was founded by Evilo and Evilina, a husband and wife team devoted to, yes you guess it, evil.
Actually, it was the Comics Code that required the bad guys to be plainly marked. Every page of the books had to get approved or the book wouldn't have the Comics Code seal of approval on the cover and no drugstore or five and dime would carry.
Knowing nothing about the Marvel universe, I was initially excited to learn there was going to be a movie about the Black Panthers.
"the main women preferred impossibly tight black leather jumpsuits."
Not a style normally associated with energetic physical activity in a tropical climate.
the Comics Code that required the bad guys to be plainly marked
They didn't subscribe to the Merchant of Death theory?
I could claim to be African based on the exact same argument he gives
Well, I mean, you are African, aren't you? At least in some sense. (I haven't watched the video.)
87: Watch it, it's short. I bet you would qualify as African too.
I'm disappointed to learn the Killmonger's first name is "Erik". Why do you even need another name with Killmonger?
It's like learning Batman was fighting Kevin Riddler.
(I'm going out on a limb and guessing black people in Oakland don't slaughter goats in their backyards and drink bootleg beer from calabashes).
Sure NOW they don't, after two decades of gentrification.
90 - you know that the Riddler's actual name is E. Nigma, right?
Other characters and their secret full names
Tim Joker
Jeremy Juggernaut
Gertrude Catwoman
Jubilee Steinhauser
Thanos Jefferson
Drax "the Destroyer" McGee
Mustafa Batman
Gus Wolverine
Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi Green Lantern
Dr. Stephen Strange
I'm not going to google those in case they aren't true.
So, following on from 25, what do we conclude about the political economy of Wakanda? Depending on the size of the rhino force, they may need between 30,000 and 300,000 acres of prime grassland just to support it. Are we looking at:
a) an oligarchy where the landed class who can support a rhino force provide it? (~17th-C France)
b) a highly compact society whose tax base and state capacity is enough to maintain a professional military establishment that the government can send whereever it wants? (~post 18thC Britain)
c) an unstable military aristocracy where the equestrian class impose on everyone else, which requires constant warfare to quarter the rhinos in conquered territory? (~Imperial Rome)
d) a state built on a universal service system for all-round defence that still seems to end up invading its neighbours an awful lot? (~Prussia or maybe Shaka's kingdom)
If you were its neighbour, which would make you spend more money on guns?
(trick question: all of them are pretty much terrifying)
You mean spend more money on rhinos.
I haven't seen the movie, I'm working off what Coogler is saying about it. That said:
Coogler says earlier in the same interview about African-American culture (paraphrasing):
We're taught that we lost the things that made us African [...] we have to make do with the scraps.Boseman in Rolling Stone, prepping for his role:
Shaka Zulu and Patrice Lumumba, Mandela speeches and Fela Kuti songs. He read about Masai warriors and talked to a Yoruba babalawo. For his fight scenes, he trained in African martial arts - Dambe boxing, Zulu stick fighting and Angolan capoeira. He also made two trips to South Africa for research.In other words, assembling scraps. Put more charitably, in The Atlantic:
One perhaps more controversial element of the film is how Wakanda itself must be built out of whole cloth by borrowing from a spread of distinct and very different African cultures.Which appears to be what it's actually about. Rolling Stone again:
[...]
the fictional African nation of Wakanda is the same Atlantean archetype that has always haunted this diaspora. And like all variations on that archetypal story, Black Panther is a fantasy about black power.
Jordan, like Boseman, drew from real-life figures for Killmonger: Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton, Tupac Shakur.Not a conversation about Africa, but about African American Nationalism. Which, like all nationalisms,* is a bag of lies and half-truths hacked together into a story to indoctrinate children with. Of course nationalism isn't necessarily bad: children once successfully indoctrinated can be mobilized for anything; and I have no wish to run down the movie or concern-troll. My point is just that, on the face of it, this movie is African-American, not African.
[...]
For Boseman, Killmonger and T'Challa are two sides of the same coin. Not quite Malcolm and Martin - because T'Challa is down to fight, too - but something similar. Radical versus diplomat, revolutionary versus peacemaker. "Those ideas, that conflict - I've been having that conversation almost my whole life," he says. "But it's never actually happened on a stage where you can hear it. So the fact that we get to have that conversation, and you get to hear it - and have to deal with it? That's what makes this movie very different."
Never bring a gun to a rhinoceros fight.
Well, it's an American movie based on an American comic book. Of course it's about America. What makes it noteworthy is that it's about black America rather than white America, unlike every other movie of its genre. (I haven't seen it either.)
Columbus and Ladybird were my two favorite movies of the year. I had thought Columbus was first, but then I saw Ladybird a second time and it was even better than the first time, so now I'm not so sure. Probably need to watch Columbus a second time.
(I'm really enjoying having venture capitalists buy all my movie tickets for me. Makes it really easy to just go see Ladybird a second time.)
105: Sure. I'm pushing against articles like the one in 43, JPJ at 81, and apparently Coogler himself.
87: I don't identify as African in any way (where Coogler certainly does). And I'm guessing he would at the least be uncomfortable with my doing so.
108: I don't think you read the Jelani Cobb article. It's all about the various myths of Africa.
109: The only way Coogler's riff makes any sense at all is in so far as we're all African. In that sense, what he's saying is that what the hundreds of years of slavery couldn't take away from black people is their humanity. But that's certainly not what he's intending to say.
So, following on from 25, what do we conclude about the political economy of Wakanda?
Putting together pieces from movie, not comics:
* There is a brief TV news spot establishing that the rest of the world thinks Wakanda is extra-poor and isolated, with B-roll of huts to underscore this.
* They have arbitrary levels of energy and mechanization thanks to phlebotinumvibranium.
* The big capital city is cloaked, but before you get there there is a lot of sparsely-populated open country, with some herding visible.
* The area with the rhino pen appears low-tech.
My synthesis is that most of the population lives in the big city (or cities), but rotate out occasionally to do the minimal work of farming, herding, rhino-minding, etc. that has to be done outside the city. While doing so, they also maintain the Potemkin villages for the outside world's unsuspicion. Except for this corvée (either legal or cultural), the society is post-scarcity.
110: I did read it, and it bugged me, and is the only reason I bothered with the spiel above. What really stuck in my craw:
a Senegalese guide casually informed us that we were neither their siblings nor even distant kin to Africa, implying that the greetings in the market had been merely a clever sales tactic directed at gullible black Americans who travel to the continent in search of roots, as if they were abused foster kids futilely seeking their birth parents. "You are Americans. That is all," she said.This is a fair point, but strikes me as profoundly patronising. Cobb is a lot more subtle than Coogler, and doesn't quite show his own hand, but as I read it is likely drinking the same kool-aid.
[...]
On Gorée Island, I patiently listened to the guide's argument, before pointing out to her that we were conducting our conversation in English, in a building constructed by the French, in a country that had been a colony of France, and that the issue was not whether black Americans retained any connection to Africa but whether history had left anyone on the continent still in a position to pass judgment on that question.
I understand this story intuitively and personally.And that guide evidently stung him pretty deeply. Cobb bugged me, by frequently talking of "Africa" as if it is or was a single entity, not just in the imagination, but in reality.
[...]
I dropped my given middle name and replaced it with an African one, in an effort to make transparent that sense of connection.
Africa, a continent that has been grappling with invented versions of itself ever since white men first declared it the "dark continent" and set about plundering its people and its resources.He also frequently conflates the experience of African slaves with the experience of "Africa", which ties him into the same follies as Coogler.
the two characters are essentially duelling responses to five centuries of African exploitation at the hands of the West.When the West didn't exploit Africa for five centuries; it exploited African slaves for four centuries. The vast majority of the continent was virtually untouched, and saw in that same period the development of numerous complex societies, many of them grown rich from selling slaves. The vast majority of Africa was only conquered by Europeans in the late 19th century (after the end of the slave trade) and held for less than a century. That vast swathe of African experiences, before, during, and after colonialism, goes unmentioned. I expect Cobb understands all that; as I say, he's subtle, and that's the reason I directed my spiel at Coogler. Cobb just bugged me, tonally rather than substantively.
113: Ok, that's fair. Except, well -- I don't know the percentages, but there was a lot of Western colonizing and exploitation going on, no?
114: When and where and what exactly do you mean by colonization and exploitation? In terms of actual rule of Africans by Europeans you have before 1850 Cape Verde, coastal Algeria, most of present day SA, and IIRC Saõ Tome. Beyond those you had coastal forts, mostly on offshore islands.
When and where and what exactly do you mean by colonization and exploitation?
I have no idea! I should shut up!
You could maybe count Egypt, depending on how European you like your Europeans.
117: Good spot! I'm not sure the Albanians ever became white though.
MoviePass. For $10/month they buy up to one ticket per day for you. They haven't negotiated a deal with theaters or anything, they're just buying the ticket for you at sticker price in an attempt to one day take over the world.
114: In terms of slavery,* I'm not up on the numbers. AFAIK it was certainly huge, but no-one knows how huge, or what the demography of the source societies looked like. My point isn't that slavery wasn't major, just that it wasn't the defining experience for the majority of Africans over the past 500 years.
*Including Muslim slavery, another thing Cobb doesn't mention. Not that he needed to, but that's another major difference between African and African-American experiences.
I didn't feel the movie had much to say about Africa itself, though some about the Africa envisioned by black Americans and a lot about black American identities. I liked that each of the main characters got an individual moral stance, an uncrossable line in a different place and for a different rationale than either of Panthers.
119 You're going to have to explain this slowly, as if to an inattentive 5 year old. Are they picking the movies, and so are they buying you tickets to the same 6 movies for an entire month? Does the theater only charge them if you go to the movie? Is this some kind of scam like Hollywood accounting? Are they paying a nickel a seat, through some kind of national volume discount with the theater chains?
Knowing nothing about the Marvel universe, I was initially excited to learn there was going to be a movie about the Black Panthers.
That was my initial reaction too.
I had that experience with The Last Panthers (highly recommended).
I would also be into a movie about just plain old panthers.
As long as we stay away from Pitt Panthers. They're not having a good year.
Yes, very good point. panthers, Pantera, the Black Panthers, the Pink Panther, from what I hear Black Panther, all good subjects for movies. I can't think of a bad panther movie. I also like movies about Panzers even though Panzer doesn't actually mean panther.
T129 before 128. But I think the Pitt or even Carolina Panthers could make an OK movie. Definitely the bottom tier of panther movies though.
Strike Of The Panther and Day Of The Panther sound pretty awesome although I haven't seen them. Panther Squad starring Sybil Danning - same deal. Joe Panther, maybe not so good.
Plain Old Panthers would be an excellent movie title.
I didn't feel the movie had much to say about Africa itself, though some about the Africa envisioned by black Americans and a lot about black American identities. I liked that each of the main characters got an individual moral stance, an uncrossable line in a different place and for a different rationale than either of Panthers.
I agree with both of these statements!
I enjoyed this conversation between Karen Attiah (who I think is the American child of Ghanian parent/s) and Kenyan journalist Larry Madowo about the movie's relationship to diaspora vs. non-diaspora ideas and experiences of Africa.
I thought "cougar" was just the European word for "moose."
Was just reminded that Black Bolt's actual name is Blackagar Boltagon.
The Black Cougar would be a very different movie.
All panthers are black - some are black leopards and some are black jaguars. Thus "black panther" is tautologous.
||Wait, I can't set my TV to record remotely because TiVo has a patent on that idea? Tech patents are the stupidest.|>
You can't reset your Tivo remotely because the iTunes store is very much opposed.
122: They give you a mastercard. You go to a theater (almost any theater) and on the app you say which movie you want to go to (again almost anything, but e.g. no IMAX), they put the cost of the ticket on the credit card, you pay for the movie with the credit card. So for $10/month they pay the full cost of basically any movie anywhere (but a max of one movie per day). The theaters can't block it because they have an agreement with mastercard to accept payment.
(The main catch is you have to actually be at the theater when you use the app. So it won't work at a theater so remote that there's no internet, and it won't work for buying tickets early remotely.)
The link in 133 is good.
It was a complete aside to the conversation, but it helped me figure out the #1 reason that I so deeply resent the "How dare Americans complain about election interference?" line. First of all, as we all know, poetic justice is not fairness, but people who spout that line really seem to think it is. Second, using it to dismiss what happened seems to suggest that it's actually OK? Like, either what the CIA has done is bad and so is Putin, or they're both fine; you can't say that Putin is in the clear because he did the bad thing that the CIA did.
But anyway, what I finally realized is that what's absurd about the karmic argument is that the beneficiaries of the election interference are precisely the Americans most likely to fuck with other countries. Yes, Dems were/are also to blame, yes HRC is/was hawkish, but come on: you're exulting over a "revenge" in which the bully won. And of course the liberals angriest about what happened are 90% aware of and unhappy about what the CIA has done through history.
143 In some forum where it's not banned you get to say 'so, since the US dropped a nuke on Hiroshima, it's perfectly ok for Al Qaeda to nuke your city today, right?'
The Black Cougar would be a very different movie.
Sequel. Also the Purple Serval, the Taupe Lynx, the Eau-de-Nil Smilodon, the Ultramarine Caracal, the Charcoal Colocolo, the Magnolia Kodkod, the Maroon Jaguarundi, the Fluorescent Ocelot, the Electric Blue Oncilla and the MacLeod Tartan Flat-headed Cat.
On a very loosely related note, it is slightly annoying that the name of the country is Wakanda when it feels like, etymologically, the country should really be Bakanda, and its inhabitants Wakanda, or rather waKanda. cf. Botswana/Motswana.
Probably the greatest pseud of all time.
I am camouflaged for hunting mice in Scottish baronial halls.
Its physiognomic peculiarities allows it to disguise itself as an occasional table or decorative plinth until the moment comes to pounce.
I am pretty sure that Magnolia Kodkod is a Pynchon character.
One thought does come to mind about Black Panther:
So, there's this country. It's isolated - not so much geographically, though its geography is certainly difficult, but as a deliberate act by its government, which has decided that the best way to protect the country is to cut it off from the outside world as far as possible. It's a priority to keep the country pure, by which we mean unaffected by corrupting outside influences.
It's got a hereditary ruler. He got the job at a remarkably young age when his father died. (His father got the job when his father died.)
The population is, almost without exception, intensely loyal to the ruler (though there are a few traitors, affected by foreign imperialism, who are plotting against him). To the population, the ruler is not just a politician or a head of state; he's close to being the embodiment of divinity. He and his family have held this status pretty much since the country was founded.
Though the country's small, and isolated, it is extremely technologically advanced; it's kept the details of its weapons secret, and the rest of the world thinks that the country is poor and hungry and backward. Recently it's started exporting weapons to a few allies in other parts of the world.
The young ruler is the hero. He's not just a wise and benevolent ruler, he's impressive on a personal level too; he's literally superhuman. And he cares for nothing more than the welfare of his people. But heaven help you if you're his enemy. His own uncle turns against him, in league with evil imperialist Americans, and the young ruler kills him personally in a particularly brutal fashion.
I can think of one chap outside the film's most obvious target market who is absolutely going to love it.
His own uncle turns against him, in league with evil imperialist Americans, and the young ruler kills him personally in a particularly brutal fashion.
Not really a spoiler to point out that this is wrong. The hero's father kills his brother, the hero's uncle.
Not really a spoiler to point out that this is wrong. The hero's father kills his brother, the hero's uncle.
What? I was talking about North Korea. Kim Jong-un killed Jang Song-thaek. Who did you think I was talking about?
152: Oh, well. I guess I do need to head over to Crooked Timber.
You thought he was comparing it to The Lion King, didn't you.
There's a "Lion King, Jr." so that even 11-year-olds who are still basically adorable can be Scar.
154: What? In the Lion King the uncle kills the father. I'm not that confused!
156: OTOH the son kills the uncle, and the whole part about the uncle killing the father could just be propaganda.
||
As early as the Qing Dynasty, China has had a tradition of entertaining mourners at funerals. Especially among certain ethnic minorities, such as the Tujia people, there is a tradition of "being happy at the funeral but sad at the wedding."
But the striptease was only added to the funeral entertainment menu in the 1990s. Experts partly attribute such a phenomenon to fertility worship. "In some local cultures, dancing with erotic elements can be used to convey the deceased's wishes of being blessed with many children," Huang Jianxing, professor of Fujian Normal University Sociology and History Department, told the Global Times.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1089905.shtml
||
There's over a billion people in China. I don't think we need to feel like we're falling behind just because they seem to have all the good ideas lately.
Peep, why do you have a Google alert set to "Chinese stripper funeral"?
161: Should have given a hat tip to Saiselgy in the other other place.
162; That too.
You'll miss things if you don't have it set for "stripper funeral".
165: that's kind of impressive. It makes me feel better about "Braveheart" because if they'd done Braveheart like they did Black Panther then we would presumably have had a 13th century Scottish noble wearing not only 1st century face paint and a 17th century kilt but also a beret, toreador pants, a Cossack tunic and a salwar kameez.
One of my committee members just sent me the Chinese funeral stripper article.
I just saw Black Panther. It's quite a movie. Definitely recommended even if you don't like superhero movies.
I wonder if any funeral strippers perform dances meant to represent "'the flight of the soul' as it leaves someone's body at the point of 'clinical death.'"
I'm dying to see Annihilation here but it looks like it's not going to get an international release.
If you piss on the right part of Niagara Falls, you've had an international release.
Peep has separate alerts for "Chinese", "stripper", and "funeral". This is just the first story that triggers all three.
Kareem Abdul-Jabaar interviews Ryan Coogler (ignore the headline).
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/kareem-abdul-jabbar-black-panther-all-fuss-a-superhero-movie-1084545
173: Abdul-Jabaar:
It's a little like witnessing the unveiling of an enormous statue on the public square -- with the public square being the world -- of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela dressed in bright dashikis.Spot the odd man out. And note that people don't wear dashikis where he came from.
Doesn't it seem vaguely apt given the mash-up Wakandan culture?
Also, to be entirely pedantic, people don't wear dashikis where any of those people come from!
Mossy may not identify as African, but he's taking a decidedly African perspective on this American movie and the reaction to it by (African-)American intellectuals.
176: Emotionally that's maybe true, but intellectually it's just anti-bullshit. And apparently the movie is doing gangbusters business in Africa.
175: Yes, it's totally apt, and that's my point: it isn't about Africa, it's about African-American mythologizing about Africa.
Also, to be entirely pedantic....
Go ahead. It's within local norms.
176/8: I don't disagree that the movie mythologizes Africa from a specifically African American perspective. The quote makes sense in the context of an opinion piece written by Abdul-Jabaar. I assume Mossy knows the context of how that image would read in the US (black heroes, one African-African, dressed in what would be clearly understood as radical/nationalist gear to a US eye) and is basically saying that it's a poorly thought out thing to write.
I don't think the image is poorly thought out. I also think that the comment about having one of those heroes being actually African (and the irrelevance/inappropriateness of dashikis) misses the point both of the symbolism and about why they're pretty much secular saints in the US. Hence the bit of snark that if we're being literal, a dashiki on Rosa Parks is pretty much just as (more?) shocking.
174: Trick question, Rosa Parks wasn't a man!
Pwned, I suppose. Though my friend who's back home in Barbados went to see it with friends this weekend, all of them in dashiki minidresses.
180: I do get the symbolism, and I don't think the image is ill-thought out. I think that the image, insofar as it incorporates African (as opposed to African-American) elements, is fake. It represents an idea of an Africa that has never existed; the symbols don't represent anything in reality. As I said above, nationalist mythmaking isn't necessarily bad; but we should be aware that myths are myths, and Coogler at least isn't displaying that awareness.
It's a goddamned superhero movie*, of course it's chock-full of fantasist myth-making. It still strikes me as more innocuous than Agents of Raytheon/Blackwater.
*Did I mention I don't care for the genre?
Thor...
183: More precisely, the African elements are used as symbols of African-American nationalism, as you say.
I guess I should read/watch the takes Mossy is responding to to better understand what he's saying, because my reaction to most of his comments is to wonder who is making the claims he is arguing against.
Which I am interested in doing at some point, but not tonight because I have to get up very early to catch a plane.
I still haven't seen it, is it Garveyist?
188/9: Coogler. That interview is literally 5 minutes.
190: The movie? No, the Garveyist is the villain, though he's portrayed fairly sympathetically.
OT: I just saw eight deer feeding in my neighbor's (very small) front yard. I was able to count because they were very much not the kind of deer that runs away from people. The biggest one, I assume a buck but whitetail don't have antlers this time of year and I didn't want to take the time looking to see if he had nuts, glared at my so much that I crossed the street so I could pass them without going near.
I watched the clip. Coogler's specific argument there certainly doesn't stand up to any rigorous examination, but it's not clear to me how seriously he takes it himself. He initially responds to the question about the relationship between Africans and African-Americans with a pause that makes the point that it's a really big, complicated question that he can't possibly answer in this context, then the audience breaks out laughing. Then he tells the story about going to South Africa, in a kind of jokey way, and that serves as a sort of a response the question that works well enough in context. In any case I don't think any of this has much to do with the movie.
Coogler's specific argument there certainly doesn't stand up to any rigorous examination, but it's not clear to me how seriously he takes it himself.
Fair. I think it's perfectly clear though that he believes the conclusion, if not the premises, very sincerely. I also note that both he and the interviewer refer repeatedly to "the continent" as a single entity. Granted in that context there wasn't much room for complexity, but Coogler's comments in the Rolling Stone piece
"We were making a film about what it means to be African," Coogler says. "It was a spirit that we all brought to it, regardless of heritage. The code name for the project was Motherland, and that's what it was. We all went to school on Africa."suggest to me that he doesn't actually see the complexity; that he saw what he wanted to see and took what he wanted to take. The grab-bag production design is linked above, just for one. (As I said at the outset, I haven't seen the movie.)
The link in 173 is quite good. And pace Mossy in 183, here's Coogler on myth-making:
"Right now, superhero stories are kind of the modern myth-making," says Coogler of T'Challa, his African protagonist. "He has a timeless quality to him because he is a king."
I think it's perfectly clear though that he believes the conclusion, if not the premises, very sincerely.
He may well, but if so it doesn't show up in the movie in any obvious way. You could probably make a reasonable argument that it's in there as subtext, at least in the sense of why this movie and character exist at all, but in that case I'd say it's generalized to the point of just being a claim that there is some sort of "African" identity that persists in African-Americans, which I don't think anyone would really deny.
I was going to read the Cobb piece mentioned above, but it's long and I really do need to go to bed, so it'll have to wait.
"Also, to be entirely pedantic, people don't wear dashikis where any of those people come from!"
Sure they do. Lots of people wear dashikis in the US. I mean, yes, dashikis didn't originate in the US but then neither did trousers.
"It's a little like witnessing the unveiling of an enormous statue on the public square -- with the public square being the world -- of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela"... all with rabbits in their earholes.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/22/nelson-mandela-statue-hidden-rabbit
201: "Lots" is a stretch. And pre-1965ish, it would have been a very unusual wardrobe decision.
201.2: We had a statue thing, too. MLK, Jr. with the inscription "I was a drum major for justice." Original:
"If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."
Possibly worse than the rabbit thing, which doesn't seem so bad to me.
https://www.cnn.com/2012/01/13/us/mlk-memorial-inscription/index.html
Trouser are great. Kind of uncomfortable in hot, humid weather, but still really convenient.
I find they work even better in pairs.
Isn't Black Panther inherently about African-American mythologizing about Africa? Like this isn't special to the movie, it's baked into the whole enterprise.
an Africa that has never existed; the symbols don't represent anything in reality.
High Noon depicts an America that has never existed; the symbols don't...
It's remarkable how much latitude cops give Trump that they won't give to BLM. He can shit on the FBI as much as he want, he can shit on the local sherifs in FL as much as he wants, he can pretend he's way tougher than the cops, and apparently cops don't care. But if Obama once says it's bad for a cop to arrest a Harvard professor on his own front porch, well that's unforgivable.
211 Bad faith, all the way down.
Over the War on Christmas holiday, my cousin, who is a recently retired cop, said he regrets voting for Trump on the grounds that Trump is obviously fucked in the head. I didn't have time to ask him why he thought it was a good idea in the first place.
One difference is that Trump is criticizing the cops for being insufficiently willing to run into buildings and open fire, and lamenting that the number of cops is insufficient to do their job properly. They would be happy with the sort of police reform that follows from these criticisms.
I'm not sure they'll be that happy about a draft dodger telling them that he would have ran after the shooter even if he was unarmed while criticizing an officer with a pistol who didn't run after a guy with an AR-15.
|| I've lately taken to humming/singing "I like New York in June" fairly loudly at work. Completely fed up with this abusive dysfunctional place. Fire my ass.
|>
I've never been to New York in June, but in my experience, the whole Mid-Atlantic is stupidly humid by June. Fall is better.
Finally saw the movie yesterday, and I thought it reflects the tension between whether the concept of Africanness is only for Africans or whether it also belongs to the diaspora. On one side are the traditional Wakandan isolationists; on the other are Killmonger's world revolution and later T'Challa's and Nakia's peaceful aid (whatever that means in practice). The traditionalists have clearly lost by the time T'Challa revives, the only question is the form interaction will take. but that doesn't mean much given it was coming from a diaspora director. On the other hand, the videos of jubilant crowds leaving South African theaters leads me to believe it's not an unpopular view there, either.
218: This is probably right except that the Wakandan isolationists aren't just separating themselves from the African diaspora - they are also separating themselves from the rest of Africa.
219: True, but I think given how absent non-Wakandan Africa is in the movie Wakanda is in many cases a stand-in for the continent as a whole. See the stuff above about Coogler viewing it as a single entity. More specifically, a lot of what Killmonger says is within African-American discourse and could just as well have been said to leaders of a real African state whose politics aren't seen as sufficiently revolutionary.
On a less serious note, I wondered how they aged down T'Chaka for the flashback scene--fancy computer graphics like in Guardians of the Galaxy 2? Really good makeup? Nah, turns out the actor's son is also an actor.
220.1: I mostly agree, but there is the one scene with Nakia rescuing the girls from the Boko Haram-like group.
Also I don't think anyone would talk that way to leaders of any real African state, because none of them are technological-military juggernauts like Wakanda.
Forrest Whittaker's son is also in that scene. Which I somehow saw during the credits.
Finally saw the movie yesterday, and I thought it reflects the tension between whether the concept of Africanness is only for Africans or whether it also belongs to the diaspora. On one side are the traditional Wakandan isolationists; on the other are Killmonger's world revolution and later T'Challa's and Nakia's peaceful aid (whatever that means in practice). The traditionalists have clearly lost by the time T'Challa revives, the only question is the form interaction will take. but that doesn't mean much given it was coming from a diaspora director
I still haven't seen the movie, but I liked the description of the conflict in this article
The reason once again stems from the villain, Erik Killmonger, played with mesmerizing bravado by Michael B. Jordan. Where the titular character, Wakandan King T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), is hesitant and uncertain of how to proceed, Killmonger is brash and certain. He's confident that his plan -- to overthrow the existing world order by arming oppressed peoples around the world and bringing every nation to its knees before Wakanda's might -- isn't just the right one but the sensible one. No matter what horrors Killmonger commits in the process of building his new world order, it's hard to disagree with him that the current one is hopelessly broken.
On a purely structural level, screenwriters Ryan Coogler (also the film's director) and Joe Robert Cole have balanced these two characters by giving each what the other most wants. T'Challa lacks certainty and purpose, which Killmonger has by the boatload. But T'Challa has his people's loyalty, a loving family, and the throne, all of which Killmonger desperately craves. If nothing else, it's smart screenwriting.
...
...Coogler and Cole finally decide that the proper answer to this question is synthesis: Killmonger's aims but T'Challa's methods. The movie's final scene, with T'Challa opening the first Wakandan outreach center in Killmonger's hometown of Oakland, is a lovely one, but its change is incremental. Wakanda will open its borders, but only a little bit. It will still be the world's wealthiest, most advanced nation, but it will primarily use those qualities to promote its own sovereignty and greatness.
As a fictional construct, that's more than wonderful. Wakanda is a fantastical kingdom unlike any other fantastical kingdom, built atop cultural, philosophical, and mythological traditions very far from the Western European ones we're more familiar with from our fiction. It's a place American stories have long needed, and one that I hope future films (and maybe even a TV series, please?) explore in much deeper detail.
221: African states have been known to export rebellion elsewhere (although I can only think of Libya right now), or at least subscribe to a revolutionary ethos; others have been strongly supported by Western capitalism. In the best tradition of lazy internet arguing without evidence, I'm sure someone in the black liberation movement has criticized US-allied Cold War African leaders for not working with the cause.
And yes, the rest of Africa exists in the movie (and the wider MCU), but it's so barely there, literally just that scene. Wakanda is doing all the work of being a fantasy Africa.
222: Wikipedia claims Denzel Whitaker is not actually his son. Weird! Not sure whether Denzel Whitaker or Michael B. Jordan is a more oversubscribed name.
Huh, well that's weird.
Wanna guess Michael B. Jordan's dad's name?
Michael A. Jordan
224.1: Most notably Tanzania. On the other side, Mobutu's Zaire, Malawi, Kenya.
http://africasacountry.com/2018/02/africa-is-a-country-in-wakanda/
Some bits from actual Africans:
From Nigeria, Why Marvel's Black Panther Matters, saying that representation is good.
Review from Kenya:
What impressed about the movie is that the traditions and costumes that are being displayed on the screen are not fantasies made up in Hollywood about what they think might be 'African-like' customs. Writer and director Ryan Coogler said they did a lot of research and it shows. They are collected from different cultures and designs: shukas, kentes, kitenges, and even the blankets and kangas from Swaziland. Even the city's imperial building has a structure resembling the Aksum obelisks.In the same paper:
I don't deny that this is a great movie and a great first step in the direction that we want to go in the representation that black people need globally. But Africans need to start making global blockbuster movies for themselves, because how we are drawn in movies by Hollywood is always just an amalgamation of what Hollywood thinks Africans are like - from the terrible accents, to the mishmash of tribal cultures across the continent and the duplicate Lion King soundtracks.Senegalese summary of the (liberal) US press reaction, including some of the pieces in this thread; but apparently no commentary of its own (maybe someone who can actually read French will see more).
In short, I love that Black Panther is about Black Power, but I am ready for African Power now.
Macky Sall appeals:
- to the Chinese to save the groundnut countryside and the rural world;
- the French for the water plant of Keur momar Sarr;
- Germans and the EU to audit the corrupt electoral register;
- the French to extinguish the "Pak 'Lambaye" fire,
- to the Turks to finally finish AIBD;
- the Qataris to unravel the Karim Wade affair;
- to the Malians for confiscated identity cards;
- Again to the French for an overcharged TER;
- to the Israelis, it would seem, for a telephone tapping system ...
I would not be surprised if he one day calls on the kingdom of Wakanda to save the school year. Incompetence screaming.
232: That's an interesting read and definitely a fair critique. I had been wondering about the language; if it really is just Xhosa that's a missed opportunity to do something innovative in the tradition of cinematic conlangs. (A related point that the authors don't make but that is consistent with their argument is that the Wakandans all speak English, and use it not just with outsiders but among themselves, for no apparent reason.)
"And, in all fairness, "Black Panther" is not meant for Africans."
234: I've also heard that it's Xhosa, and John Kani helped Boseman with it, but I suspect it's more a variant of it to be more pleasing to Anglophone ears. Although Xhosa is a Bantu language, it's picked up clicks by areal contact; in this example they're quite frequent. I didn't hear a single click in any of the Wakandan scenes.
As for the English, that doesn't really make any sense in-universe and can only really be explained as a cinematic convenience; I don't know if English-speaking audiences would put up with subtitles in a conlang or even Xhosa for most of the movie. It's unfortunate. (As a side-note, the one time that non-Wakandan Africans appeared, I read them as speaking with Franco-African accents.)
(As a side-note, the one time that non-Wakandan Africans appeared, I read them as speaking with Franco-African accents.)
Like the Stop eating my sesame cake accent?
Although Xhosa is a Bantu language, it's picked up clicks by areal contact; in this example they're quite frequent. I didn't hear a single click in any of the Wakandan scenes.
Yeah, me either, though Coogler uses one in the clip in 82 and the audience loves it. I figured it was either a real or invented Bantu language, but I was thinking more eastern or central rather than southern, based on both the general sound and the apparent location of Wakanda within the continent.
As for the English, that doesn't really make any sense in-universe and can only really be explained as a cinematic convenience; I don't know if English-speaking audiences would put up with subtitles in a conlang or even Xhosa for most of the movie.
Right, it's obvious that this is the real reason. But I did find it notable that there wasn't even any attempt to give an in-universe explanation.
As a side-note, the one time that non-Wakandan Africans appeared, I read them as speaking with Franco-African accents.
The girls in the truck in Nigeria? That also wouldn't really make sense, unless they're supposed to be kidnapped from Niger or Chad or something.
It's kind of hilarious that because Black Panther is seen as an epochal historic cultural event, it's being graded on an insanely steep curve compared to any other comic book movie.
We're seeing all these comments that movie critics used to make before they gave up in despair in the 1990s, like "Wait, how do the society's economics work", and "Actually the villain... may have a point?" and "The characters shouldn't be speaking English, the entire movie should be subtitled".
238.last: I can only remember how the soldiers sounded; I think they said something like "position" with a (I think! Not actually good at phonetics!) [ʒ] instead of a [ʃ] that I read as French. if they're from Boko Haram they could be from anywhere in the greater Lake Tchad area, which is all French-colonized except Nigeria. I recall there being a lot of recruitment from the tip of Cameroon that goes up that way (although, hrm, that area was partially colonized by the Brits), but I might be misremembering. Anyway, I'm massively overthinking something I might have imagined in a throwaway line.
I agree with 239. It has things to say about colonization, but it's a work in a blunt medium trying to say things to people affected by it, not perfectly world-building a society without it. There's probably worthwhile comparisons to make in The Years of Rice and Salt, but I'll leave that as an exercise to another reader.
On the other hand, I did have extreme reservations with how The Last Jedi portrayed gravity*. Nerds should never watch movies.
* [five paragraph screed redacted]
240.1: Ah, okay, now that you mention it that sounds familiar.
233. The review was published in Le Point Afrique, written by a French journalist. She writes that the film is a rallying event for getting POC to register to vote, and writes that the film and its extreme profits weaken the american president.
http://afrique.lepoint.fr/culture/black-panther-un-coup-de-griffe-dans-l-amerique-de-trump-21-02-2018-2196725_2256.php
I'm watching a new Bezos Prime show set in Britain 1st century CE, and when people start doing magical chants and whatnot, the actors shift from English to what is reportedly modern Welsh.
So I just watched Black Panther and I quite enjoyed it as these things go. The "bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships..." line was moving and choked me up. As for the rhinoceros cavalry, I don't think there were more than a dozen of them if that so contra Alex above I don't think the issue of finding enough forage for them is all that much of problem.
re: 245
I suppose what they spoke at the time was ancestral to modern Welsh.
I'm assuming that's 'Britannia'? I couldn't get into it. I couldn't suspend disbelief enough, even over stupid things like the countryside of the south Downs of England supposedly looking like Bohemia.*
* I'm familiar with both. Bits of it are filmed in landscapes I'm familiar with from round my wife's village (although actually shot further along the same valley)
"bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from the ships..."
Who what now? Mate, they didn't jump. They were thrown. It's demeaning to their memories to claim it was some sort of noble Roman gesture, qui morire dicere servire dedidicere. It was mass murder.
248, No, many were murdered but many jumped. Enough that the slavers had to put up netting to stop suicides. https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/dying-their-own-terms-suicides-aboard-slave-ships
It is stunning how brutal and capitalist the founding of America was.
247: Indeed, and it would do a good job of capturing the differentness of it from Latin or English. Probably easier to get good dialect coaches, or even native speakers, for Welsh then trying to use a reconstructed Cumbric or Proto-Brythonic.
Human brutality is pretty much a constant.
Speaking of which, this map, and the one for Yemen, are a damn site better than anything our pathetic mainstream media are serving up.
The nice thing about Welsh is anything can be translated as "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu."
252: I don't think that's quite right. Constantly high, but not a constant.
253: Guessing from the little bit of Welsh I've done on Duolingo, you're not in the office at the moment?
From the link in 255: In the same year, a sign for pedestrians in Cardiff reading 'Look Right' in English read 'Look Left' in Welsh.
This is just Cardiff Council's subtle way of trying to get rid of Welsh speaking peasants.
Things have moved on but boy do I want to complain about the Oscars.