It’s an exciting, confusing, and scary time to be a film lover. Director Steve McQueen has decided to hasten the blurring of the already very fuzzy line between cinema and television with his Small Axe anthology of films. He’s done it with the help of a global pandemic. McQueen began working on the idea for Small Axe as early as 2010, and he had the project in some form of development since 2012. Originally conceived as a more conventional television series for the BBC, McQueen realized that he had enough material to make five distinct, standalone movies.
When the premier of the first picture in the series, Mangrove, was cancelled because of the 2020 Cannes film festival shutdown in the spring, due to COVID, the director decided to try a hybrid approach to distribution. Small Axe would run on BBC One, as originally planned, but it was also featured in the fall at the virtually held 2020 New York Film Festival. The film community got a collective case of the vapors trying to decide how to classify Small Axe. Is it television? Is it cinema? After seeing Mangrove – and being highly anxious to visit the rest of the films in the series – I am coming down firmly in the camp of, “when the movie is this damn compelling and well-made, who the hell cares what you call it?”
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Those of us who didn’t grow up reading the source material, who can’t recite chapter and verse the labyrinthine backstory for the dozens of characters integrated into the MCU, can sometimes feel like outsiders. As one of those outsiders, my first instinct is to focus on these films’ over-reliance on Earth-in-Peril (and more increasingly, Universe-in-peril) scenarios, the deadening effects of pixelpalooza CGI battles, and the constant hype machine always building towards the next movie.
While the criticisms are valid – especially in the weaker MCU entries like Avengers: Age of Ultron – they cause me too often to overlook the moments of emotional resonance that these movies contain, and the connection that their most loyal fans have to the characters. With Avengers: Endgame, the grand finale and culmination of over 20 Marvel movies spanning more than a decade, it’s impossible to overlook the emotional resonance. Screenwriters Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely and sibling directing team Anthony & Joe Russo made a film rich with human drama.
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Ten years ago, Marvel Studios launched its “cinematic universe,” using crossovers and tie-ins to connect every property under its umbrella. The strategy has shaken the entire entertainment industry. Any extended universe of characters – from rival DC’s effort at playing catch-up, to Universal Studios’ so far disastrous “Dark Universe” – is a naked attempt at copying Marvel’s lucrative success. To celebrate their decade of dominance, Marvel changed the “i” and “o” in the word “studios” to the number 10 in the Marvel logo at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, the 19th feature film release in the MCU.
It’s become harder and harder to think about each of these movies on its own merits, because Marvel’s apparent plan is to work its audiences into a constant frenzy of anticipation for what’s coming next.
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If you suffer from the condition known as Superhero Fatigue Syndrome, as I often do, you might be hesitant to see the latest Marvel movie, Black Panther. There’s no reason to be hesitant. In fact, Black Panther works as an antidote to the feeling that you’ve grown tired of just about anything based on a comic book or that is incorporated into Marvel’s sprawling, at times unwieldy, Cinematic Universe. Black Panther might just be the best Marvel movie yet.
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