This will be the first time my wife and I have gone to the theater together. In the past nearly-decade that we've known each other, we've never gone out to see a movie. We're just not big movie people. I've seen about half of the Marvel movies, about half of which at home, and most of those were out of some sort of "professional" obligation -- i.e. I felt like I had to see them because my status as a comic book fan invariably means someone's going to ask me about them... despite the fact that I'm generally more interested in the medium of comic books than the characters that debuted in them. But whatever. The point is that, even with my interest in the source material, I don't go rushing out to see all the Marvel movies. And my wife, who's not really a comic book fan and certainly not a superhero fan, has even less interest.
But we're going to see Black Panther. On opening weekend. Repeatedly.
Partly to lend out support to a major motion picture that, if it succeeds financially, will lead to Hollywood maybe reconsidering that a movie can't have any people of color or it won't sell. And partly because my wife hasn't seen a Black woman as a kick-ass role model on-screen since Pam Grier was the female star of blaxploitation films in the 1970s. And here in Black Panther, we've got Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Florence Kasumba, Sydelle Noel, and Angela frickin' Bassett! Not to mention the rest of the women portraying the Dora Milaje!
I have never, in all the time that I've known her, seen my wife this excited for something like this. She was thrilled when Barack Obama was elected President, she's always excited for a new Beyoncé album, she looks forward to any time we have a relative that has a destination wedding and gives us an excuse to travel, she even fangirl-squeed when she met Pam Grier... but I've never seen her like this.
She has a co-worker who's a big Marvel fan and he's tried to insist she watch Captain America: Civil War so she can see T'Challa's debut. No interest. She knows full well that I actually appeared in the first Avengers movie and she's never watched that either. Black Panther we're seeing.
Because my wife shouldn't have to go several decades between her heroes.
Because any Black women younger than my wife shouldn't have had to wait until 2018 to see themselves represented as a hero on-screen for the first time.
Because the people who worked on this movie shouldn't have had to bust their collective ass eight times harder than any other crew of a blockbuster just to be treated only half as good.
Because it's about damn time!
1 comments:
You told people this would be big!
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