So, I watched BLACK PANTHER again this week. I wasn't and am no one fo those who had some sort of religious experience over this film. I've been reading comics for decades so, as with all the Marvel movies, I regarded it as an excellent riff on a character I knew well.>>

But I want to make it clear that this movie affected me. Deeply. It's a complex work of fiction that uses the motifs and tropes of mainstream super-heroics to get at a slew of feelings and issues that other movies, often those whose SOLE intent is to do so, fail to achieve. >>

Who are we- both as humans and as black humans? What do we owe our pasts, our ancestors and those who desecrated their lives both while living and in death? where do we break the chains that shackle us to our justifiable anger over these events? Can we?>>

There are moments in this film that had me choked up, had me raging, had me nodding my head in a deep and aggressive, "YES." This film had me thinking and rethinking aspects of my artistic life that I'd taken for granted for all of that life.>>

The Black Panther grapples. It confronts. In short it does the work ANY "serious" film should do when addressing these subjects and it does so while dropping some SERIOUS super-heroics and, god forbid, effortlessly presenting its female players as equal to the men in every way.>>

I reject anyone who casts aspersions on these films as thin, as substandard. I was a child when I saw STAR WARS and it had a deep, even transformative effect on me. Ditto RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. I was fundamentally changed, i think for the better, by seeing them>>

as a child. White heroes are the default in Western culture, meaning, whatever our ethnicity, we're all working from the same lexicon when we go to the movies. People of Color somehow manage to find personal meanings in white icons like Superman or Katniss Everdeen>>

People on the Queer Spectrum manage to find resonance in films like When Harry Met Sally or Sleepless in Seattle. Even when they are nowhere near the center of those narratives. We all teach ourselves to do this early because, until relatively recently, those were the only>>

images and models available and part of our social survival is living off the cultural land. Black Panther flips that script. It takes for granted that its target audience is working from a slightly different lexicon, one we don't need to discuss with one another to know.>>

It's a serious film. it is a reasonably complex work of political fiction. It is a mainstream, mega budget, popcorn-selling, amusement park ride of a movie as well. All those things can be true of a single piece of art and are. A movie can entertain, teach and expand the minds>>

of people not generally privy to some lexicons not generally presented as valid or even existing.

Which, at their core, at their best, is precisely what super-heroes are for.

My hat is off to the women and men who created this film. It'll only grow greater with time. -END FILE