Friday, December 30, 2022

Delayed Reaction: The Bob's Burgers Movie

Premise: Bob's Burgers, but longer.


I like Bob's Burgers. I've watched it for several years now, but - like - not as a priority. Like The Simpsons, it sort of fell into my Sunday habit. I like the show. The characters are enjoyable. It's smarter than I give it credit for. I'm just not a big animation guy overall. It never does as much for me as it seems to do for other people. Beyond that, it's hard to make something designed for 22-minute chunks into something over 90-minutes long. And it has to overcome the question of why this wasn't just an episode or maybe a special two-part episode.

 

The Bob's Burgers Movie never overcomes the question of why this isn't just a long episode of the show. It does play like and enjoyable episode. The main difference is in the number of stories. With a weekly episode, there's time for an A, a B, and maybe a C story. If someone doesn't get much focus one week, they will the next. The movie basically gives everyone a story and connects them pretty well. So, I did like the movie. However, I'll put it this way. If I'm binging Bob's Burgers episodes, I might throw this movie on as part of the binge. However, I'd never think to watch this when I'm in the mood for a movie. In that way, this fits in a respectable group with El Camino and The Deadwood Movie, not a Star Trek movie.

 

And I lot of people like to binge Bob's Burgers. And now there's a movie to reproduce the experience of that.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Spirited

Premise: Imagine if A Christmas Carol was something a magical group did every year and this year, they might've met their match.


Christmas just isn't a very malleable sub-genre. It's virtually impossible to break into the cannon with something new. You're pretty much doing a Jesus Christmas, a Santa Christmas, a Christmas carol, or a movie that really isn't about Christmas but uses it heavily as a backdrop. It's painfully hard to break into it with something new, so I've accepted that as long as I'm going to like Christmas movies, I'm going to see a new take on A Christmas Carol virtually every year.

 

All things considered, Spirited is an inventive enough slant on the story. It applies Santa's Workshop logic to A Christmas Carol by creating this group of - I guess - ghosts who bring Christmas cheer one curmudgeon at a time. And if that's not enough, it's a musical too. Will Ferrell gets to dust off a lot of his Buddy the Elf charm. Ryan Reynolds gets to do that smarmy Ryan Reynolds thing that I never really get tired of. And I continue to love how Octavia Spencer has built her career over the years. She was a character actor for years, then turned one big break (The Help) into something more sustainable that anyone imagined. She'll show up in Oscar nominees while still doing comedies that don't tarnish her reputation.

 

A Christmas Carol has been so thoroughly explored over the years that no one is coming up with anything truly clever about it anymore. The ins and outs of this magical world in Spirited are thought out to an extent, but it never makes total sense. You do hit a "just go with it" point. The movie gets way too lost in trying to prove that it's clever. Individual elements like Ryan Reynolds' ability to break through the facade, Will Ferrell's origin, and the switcheroo at the end are all good ideas, but there are too many of them. This movie doesn't breeze by. It's over 2 hours and feels like it. To put it another way, did the intricacies of this movie mean it had to be 20 minutes longer than the puzzle box that is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

 

The songs are pretty good. I doubt the soundtrack will become a sensation, but there are a lot of earworms. Sean Anders has a special gift for making this kind of pleasant family comedy. All things considered, this could end up being a good third or even second tier Christmas classic.

 

Side Note: I always have Stranger Than Fiction on the brain, so the end of this movie was an odd experience for me. Stranger Than Fiction ends with Will Ferrell's Harold Crick getting hit by a bus, but in a bout of a writer relenting, he survives miraculously. In Spirited, Ryan Reynolds pushes Ferrell out of the way of a bus and dies. I believe they even point out that of course he would die. I highly doubt this was any sort of commentary or allusion to Stranger Than Fiction, but I'm going to treat it like it was.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: See How They Run

Premise: There's a murder on the set of a murder mystery play.


Did you know that The Mouse Trap is the longest continuously running play of all time? That's the subtext of this entire movie. I don't know much else about the play, but I really needed to know that. And it plays into a lot of it.

 

I appreciate the idea of See How They Run. They assemble a great cast, in particular letting Sam Rockwell be drunk and annoyed and letting Saoirse Ronan be silly and earnest in a way she doesn't get to do enough. The meta nature of the story invites cleverness and wit. And it knows that it's a comedy first, mystery second.

 

It just...doesn't add up to much. I don't know how else I can say it. I have no ill-will toward the movie. It's just, sort of there. Nothing about it stands out. I'll sometimes talk about how if a movie does everything at a B- level, the cumulative competence where nothing in it is truly weak can push it to an A overall. See How They Run is the opposite. Every part is a C average. Nothing wrong with that. But watching something where nothing stands out pushed the experience altogether down to a C- simply by blending in too much.

 

I can already tell it's going to be one of those movies a decade from now, I'll think about it and decide to rewatch because the cast is good and I don't carry any strong negative feeling about it. I'll convince myself that maybe I just didn't give it a fair shake or missed some of the humor that my wiser, older self will now get. I'll watch it, then come away with the same empty-calorie response.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Stars At Noon

Premise: An American journalist-ish is stranded in Nicaragua, before she meets and falls for an Englishman who could maybe help her get home...or make her problems worse.


I've been on the Margaret Qualley bandwagon since The Leftovers. She was also great in Maid and Fosse/Verdon more recently. She's a standout in The Nice Guys and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and has hit the indie scene with force. Stars at Noon is from that latter category.

 

I like Stars at Noon as an exploration of this part of Central America. I've heard about how rough Nicaragua can be, and it's interesting to see a depiction of it, even if it was actually filmed in the relatively safer Panama. I'm intrigued by stories of people who just get stuck somewhere. It seems so foreign to me. Qualley's character loses her journalism job. Her money is exchanged in Nicaraguan dollars that she can't exchange back. She's stuck and hooking to get by.

 

While the world of the movie is intriguing, I never got that hooked by the story. Qualley and Joe Alwyn aren't a smoldering screen pair. There's a lot of sex and nakedness, sure - it's rare that a movie has so much nudity that I get bored by it - but their attraction wasn't something that sustained me when the film otherwise turned dull. The film has some good ideas for locations, situations, and casting yet didn't have a story I cared enough about. The 90-minute Sundance version of this would've done a lot more for me, I feel.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Delayed Reaction: Enola Holmes 2

Premise: Enola finds another mystery to solve.


I don't remember the first Enola Holmes super well. I recall that it was fun. Mostly, it convinced me that Millie Bobby Brown had star potential beyond Stranger Things. It fit in that subgenre of anachronist, askew takes on classic literature or stories. Rosaline on Hulu is another good example of this. So, I had no reason to skip the Enola Holmes sequel.

 

For the most part, the movie delivers what it promises. Brown slides through the film of movie star charisma. The stellar older cast of Henry Cavill, Helena Bonham Carter, and David Thewlis happily defer to and prop up Brown. The mystery itself is entertaining enough turn of the century fiction.

 

It does suffer some from the Netflix style of these teen movies. I often comment on Netflix teen movies how they start like we're three episodes into a TV series the rest of the audience has already seen. The familiarity is more implied than I'm expecting. It was there in the first Enola Holmes as well, but in that case, I actually was familiar with the backstory (the Sherlock Holmes story). The flashbacks and 4th wall screen addresses were there to link the known stories with this one. However, I've also noticed with these Netflix sequels, the tone is that the audience remembers the previous film intimately; not like someone who watched the original and never thought about it again. That led to more things like the 4th wall breaking being used for callbacks rather than as a clever narrative tool.

In other words, Enola Holmes plays like it was designed for me to enjoy it even though I wasn't the target audience. Enola Holmes 2 plays much more like it was only concerned with the teens watching it. That's fine. Not everything had to be made with me in mind. It does mean that I'm more likely to come away underwhelmed. Which is what happened. Still entertaining enough though.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Confess, Fletch

Premise: Fletch gets mixed in with the art world as he tries to clear his name for murder.


 

Fletch is an 80s movie with a passionate although smaller fanbase. It's a very specific Chevy Chase humor that doesn't work much for me. I do get why his mix of silliness and deadpan has enticed funny actors for years. And, the specificity is why it was so hard to pull off.

 

Overall, Confess, Fletch feels like a worthy revival attempt. Jon Hamm is ideal casting for this version of Fletch. You see, Hamm is an excellent dramatic actor. He's a willing comic actor. As Fletch, his comedy is in obliviousness or certainty. His best running gag is his insistence that he knows Italian when he's actually quite flawed. He'll judge the foolishness in others and miss it himself.

 

I get why this movie was a hard sell, even though, they nailed it. Comedies aren't going well in theaters. Fletch is a known brand but not a remembered brand. The comedy is mostly in its wit. There isn't much of a market for films that feel like some people wanted to work on something together and had fun doing it. I tend to like the results of those movies, much like I liked Confess, Fletch. But really, what is there to say about a movie that you don't need to see, but if you watch it, you'll probably like it (or realize very early that it isn't for you?

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Fabelmans

Formula: Cinema Paradiso * Take This Waltz


 

It's hard to overstate Steven Spielberg's significance to American cinema. He's been making major films for nearly half a century, putting them out at about 18 months per movie. He's worked in most genres. He's won nearly every award (yet not as many as he probably should have). He's had the highest grossing movie of all time twice. And this doesn't even get into his work as a producer. So, while I'm getting a little tired of this trend of filmmakers who think we need to know about their childhoods, if anyone has earned this kind of movie, it's Spielberg.

 

The Fabelmans isn't directly a Spielberg biopic. Character names have been changed. The events don't match up exactly. If you've seen the HBO Spielberg documentary though, you'll quickly recognize similarities between the Spielbergs and the Fabelmans. Consider this my warning that I may refer to Steven Spielberg and Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) interchangeably at times. It's that kind of movie.

 

The Fabelmans is two central stories told concurrently. The larger of the two is Sammy Fabelman's development as a filmmaker. It starts with him as a very young child, making films himself as a way to process what he saw in other films. It establishes him as someone who would rather examine something than experience it. As he moves into his teenage years, he becomes more talented and realizes that his hobby may actually be his calling. The most impressive part about all this is how Spielberg refers to his innate talent for filmmaking without it feeling self-congratulatory. By all accounts, Spielberg himself is an exceptional talent as a filmmaker. He has a natural skill at it that sets him apart. I've often heard people say "he sees things cinematically". There's a version of The Fabelmans that comes off as bragging about himself. Instead, Spielberg applies the "it's a gift and a curse" aspects of it skillfully.

 

The other main plot is about Sammy's parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano). They are opposites who really love each other. Mitzi is a free spirit who in modern times likely would've been diagnosed as something like bipolar. Burt is a science and numbers man. It's hard to get into this story without spoiling some, and if you know much about Spielberg's history, then you already know what happens anyway. Basically, Mitzi, with Sammy's accidental help, comes to realize she's in love with Burt's best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen). This discovery causes the two parts of the film to clash. Sammy's filmmaking is what leads him to this truth about his mother, and he looks at his filmmaking as more curse than gift. He does eventually come back around on filmmaking, but it's with a realization of the power that it can bring.

 

It's a long movie, so there's more to all of that, like a Christ-loving girlfriend fascinated by Sammy's Jewishness and some bullys at school Sammy handles in very different ways. If I had any complaint about the movie, it's that it plays a lot like Spielberg adapted his favorite journal entries rather than a focused, structured film. Spielberg really applies his Spielberg magic to this though. The movie is fun, funny, and heart-breaking in good balance. The man just plain knows how to make a watchable film. I heard one time that when Chris Rock is working out new stand-up material, he'll deliver the jokes with low energy that's unrecognizable to his comedy specials. His reasoning is that he knows how to make a joke work in the delivery. He wants to see if the jokes are actually good on their own. Spielberg is like that. He can make pretty much any film watchable. He brings those powers to turn The Fabelmans into a really entertaining movie rather than just a therapy session brought to film.

 

It helps that the cast is really tremendous. Gabriel LaBelle, in additional to being a convincing young Spielberg stand-in gives a great performance as well. Sammy easily could've been a whiny teen role, but LaBelle always keeps the audience on his side. Based on the material and Williams and Rogen in the cast, I couldn't stop thinking about Take This Waltz; also a film about a woman who leaves a good marriage for another relationship. Williams, Dano, and Rogen play the complicated dynamics really well. No one is the good or bad guy in this. They are just people who, too late, realize they are in a shitty position.

 

The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg at his most Steven Spielberg. It feels like the film he's been trying to get out of his system for decades. Not his greatest film. Certainly his most heartfelt. Maybe his most impressive, given how little it relies on effects or a compelling pitch.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Movie Reaction: Bones and All

Formula: Romeo & Juliet + Raw


You know, the A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name Luca Guadagnino is fun but the Suspiria and Bones and All Guidagnino is even funner. Bones and All is a fairly ridiculous idea (adapted from a book): two cannibal drifters fall in love and travel around the Midwest in the 80s. It's a lot, especially when you consider that it had awards potential in the buildup. For the most part though, it works. I like that the story is episodic. Taylor Russell plays Maren, a girl whose father abandons her after her latest flesh-eating outburst; not because he doesn't love her. He just doesn't know what to do anymore. Maren ends up meeting other cannibals like a creepy older one, Sully (Mark Rylance), and a younger, dreamier one, Lee (Timothee Chalamet). The film moves through Maren figuring out the ins and outs of her life as a cannibal. Her main mission is to find the mother who she never met and see if she can learn anything about her...condition.

 

Unfortunate haircuts aside, the whole cast is pretty good. Russell and Chalamet have good chemistry. I like that I can imagine a relationship between them even if there was not cannibalism. Granted, the cannibalism pretty much shapes everything about them. Rylance is creepy, veering into unintentionally comical. It's a fine line that he likes to ride with his performances and he mostly pulls it off. A few other Guadagnino regulars show up for a spell, like Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny.

 

Bones and All falls into that "I liked it more than I expected but not enough" space. While I liked the decision to tell it episodically, none of the episodes were particularly great. It revels in the white-trash Midwest aesthetic a bit too much for my taste. The movie is a bloody mess, literally. The cannibalism felt like a poorly defined metaphor though. Like the movie was being smart despite not being sure what point it was making.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Movie Reaction: Glass Onion

Formula: Knives Out + location scouting

Can I just say this movie is really fun and leave it at that?

 

I mean, I guess, I can. This is my blog and my rules. No one is forcing me. So, you know what? Partly because I'm behind on these Reactions anyway, I'll keep this one briefer than the movie deserves.

 

Knives Out was a blast. It capitalized on the idea that a strong cast, a proper mystery, and a ton of levity is a very winning formula. Glass Onion absolutely follows up on that with a worthy second outing.

 

To start, the cast is possibly even better this time. Daniel Craig is more of a goofball than Bond has people thinking he is, and he leans into all of Benoit Blanc's peculiarities even more this time. Kate Hudson is possibly the awards stand out for this one as a vapid former model turned designer. She's big and fun throughout the movie. Janelle Monae, without spoiling anything, gets to really show off some range in the film. Edward Norton is ideal as a prickish and possibly stupid billionaire. And there's Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr, Dave Bautista, Jessica Henwick, and Madelyn Cline too, all playing to strengths. It's the kind of eclectic cast that feels like it was put together first and the screenplay was written second.

 

I won't get too deep into the plot, since a lot of the fun of this is finding everything out as you go along. The basics though are that Norton plays a billionaire who invites his group of high-class friends to his private island for a weekend murder-mystery party that turns into a real murder mystery. Writer-director Rian Johnson is so good at writing these movies, because he lets the audience complicate things. This mystery feels slightly sloppier than Knives Out. It uses red herrings as an excuse to be a little sloppy. The film feels a bit like a clock I put together that works but I have a few pieces left over. That’s me searching for anything to complain about though, not a strong indictment. Overall, the movie couldn't be more entertaining. The film is a comedy first, mystery second. So, I'm never bored, even when the mystery part gets more tedious. Johnson has made a film that is smarter than most things you'll watch but feels effortless. Like, I want there to be a new one of these movies every year, but I know it's not that easy to make something that's such popcorn fun.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Rosaline

Premise: It turns out before Juliet, there was her cousin Rosaline dating Romeo, and she won't let him go without a fight.

Like most people, when I first heard about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, my first thought was "why can't it be a teen RomCom instead?" Because that's what Rosaline is. It's the Romeo and Juliet story we all know from an outsider's perspective. I'm a fan on this kind of story. I like the challenge of finding something new within the bounds of something that already exists. It's an impossible challenge, but when it works, it's so satisfying. Just look at Better Call Saul.

 

Really though, Rosaline works because it has a good enough lead to make it work. Kaitlyn Dever is the 'it girl' of the moment and I'm all for it. She's been working forever despite only being in her mid-20s. She's good in everything. She can work in any genre. So of course she'll work well in anachronistic Shakespeare. It helps that they got Isabel Merced as Juliet. She's putting together quite the filmography too at a young age. The male love interests, Sean Teale and Kyle Allen, are less remarkable, but perfectly fine. They surround the core characters with over-credentialled older actors. I especially liked Minnie Driver as the nurse. I'm sure she had a written character and all that, but it really feels like she just showed up on set and they told her to do the role however she wanted.

 

There is nothing groundbreaking about this movie. It won't heal any Shakespeare burnout you may be facing. But, as a light 90 minutes of clever enough jokes and low stakes, it's a pleasant watch.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Movie Reaction: The Menu

Formula: Ready or Not * Burnt


 

I'm naturally suspicious about movie meant as commentary about the 1%. It's too easy to be very lazy with an "eat the rich movie". Money doesn't make a person evil any more than being poor makes one noble. What I've found is the best way to go after upper-crust people is to make them fools rather than villains. The truth is, few people are masterminds but almost everyone is stupid. What makes the rich different is that their stupidity has more significance; not inherently, just circumstantially.

 

The Menu is a black comedy about high dining. A group of people including a wealthy foodie, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), have reservations at a very exclusive restaurant run by chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Each reservation is over $1000 per person for only a dozen people a night, who are taken to the chef's island for a multi-course meal. Only, something isn't right this night. The chef has malevolent plans. As the trailers make no secret, the patrons that night are there to die, they discover.

 

This is an extreme movie. It's not about subtlety. Fiennes plays the over-the-top caricature of a famous chef. His staff's devotion to him is comically extreme. The patrons that night run the spectrum of people who would be found at a place like this: couples who go so often that it's commonplace (Judith Light, Reed Birney), pretentious food reviewers (Janet McTeer), celebrities using this as a status symbol (John Leguizamo), tech bros who think these experiences are their right (Arturo Castro, Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr), and exhausting foodies (Nicolas Hoult). What I ended up appreciating the most about the movie is that it's not directly making statements about any of these character types. Fiennes' chef is the one making the judgments, and since he's an exaggeration himself, it never feels like the film is yelling at me. The movie is just having a good time letting these extreme characters play off each other.

 

Fiennes has embraced that he's a master of comic pretension. He carries himself like a Bond villain. At times as his plan unfolds, he seems like one. In the end though, he's not that difficult to figure out. Anya Taylor-Joy is great as a last-minute replacement invitee and the wrench thrown into the story. She is the true outsider looking into this world. I really like that the film doesn't have her quip about the lunacy. She just plain doesn't play along with it and that becomes her superpower.

 

The Menu is very darkly funny. It invites a lot of commentary without demanding that you buy into it. A character like the food critic should annoy me, because critics in films are often used as a way for filmmakers to vent. Director Mark Mylod doesn't have that kind of agenda though. He's just there to have fun with the idea. This film is less about the surprises than I expected, which is its own kind of surprise. It's much more about having fun along the way. If it happens to make a point in the process: great.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Movie Reaction: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Formula: Black Panther - Chadwick Boseman


A lot of movies have production issues that they have to work around. All the Money in the World had to fully replace Kevin Spacey. Furious 7 had to restructure around the death of Paul Walker. I don't know what the exact plans for The Dark Knight Rises were, but I have to assume not even being able to mention the Joker had to affect it. However, I struggle to think of a movie with as big a challenge as Wakanda Forever. The film lost the centerpiece character. A machine like the MCU has contingencies to everything except that.

 

Wakanda Forever doesn't make a seamless transition into a post T'Challa (Boseman) world. The film begins by quickly establishing his absence/death and shifts to Letitia Wright as the new lead. There's no perfect way to do this, but the film does well enough getting over with it respectfully before moving into the proper plot. That plot is that a secret civilization living under the sea with access to their own vibranium deposits reveal themselves to Wakanda. An American scientist built a device that can detect Vibranium which threatens to expose Namor (Tenoch Huerta), their leader, and his people. They threaten Wakanda with war against the surface world unless the Wakandans bring the scientist to them so they can dispose of her. In all honestly, that story is a little rough. Namor is appropriately powerful, but the logic of why his people are so militant after years of hiding is weak. And I don't think that could be blamed on Boseman's death.

 

The dirty little secret of Boseman's death is that it does give Wakanda Forever something of a free pass. Any criticism lodged at the film has that as a caveat. Throughout the film, I couldn't stop my brain from guessing about changes necessitated by Boseman's death. For example, with Shuri moved to the lead role, they introduce this scientist character (Dominique Thorne) to fill Shuri's old role. Killmonger destroys the plant that gives Black Panthers their strength, so they have to make a synthetic version of the plant. That doesn't mean every issue I had would've been solved with Boseman still being alive, but it's hard to untangle it all.

 

The film does OK rebalancing things without Boseman. He wasn't the most compelling of the MCU heroes. His greatest value to Black Panther was as the stabilizing force for the stacked cast. He could do the boring hero stuff that let Michael B. Jordan, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, and others let loose. That makes him more replaceable in his franchise than, say Tony Stark in Iron Man, but it does throw off the equilibrium. Wright steps up nicely as the new center, and Nyong'o, Gurira, Winston Duke, and Angela Bassett all step up their roles to help. I was disappointed that a lot of the fun of Shuri was sanded down and replaced with grief and vengeance. I get why. I just wish I could see a little more of the character that became a fan favorite in the first place. I imagine she'll shine in the next Avengers movie though. Tenoch Huerta is fine as the main antagonist. Namor has some silly looking visuals; namely his winged feet*.

 

*They repeat a few times how he's so different because of the wings on his feet and his pointed ears. I found it funny every time, because the ears are barely even noticeable. You can stop with the winged feet part. You don't need to keep mentioning the ears.

 

I was down on the first Black Panther movie versus the consensus. While acknowledging its greater overall significance, I was annoyed by the number of people talking about it like it still wasn't fundamentally still a MCU movie. Wakanda Forever feels less like a MCU movie to me in that it is much more somber and less quippy. There's still the silly mythology, people in super suits, and the somewhat forced conflict though. The costuming remains amazing. The film struggles to make the underwater world as compelling, but Ryan Coogler still has unrivaled world-building above water. There are some very cool effects using water bombs throughout, although the action sequences did feel surprisingly small at times; especially in the climax.

 

In what is becoming a trend this season, the movie is absolutely longer than it needs to be even though it flew by. Kind of like Tar, weirdly enough. Coogler is a great filmmaker. I like seeing his work. Wakanda Forever passes the Blade Runner 2049 test of being a world that I'm happy to hang out in for as long as I can. The movie does drag at points though. It's an understandable challenge. When a character dies, you need to pause to pay respect, but how can you do that where it doesn't feel like the entire movie is being put on hold? Wakanda Forever, while entertaining, doesn't know how to fill that hole.

 

Side Thought: Am I alone in thinking that had Killmonger not been killed in the last movie, they would've found a way to rehabilitate the character and make him the new Black Panther and lead of this movie after Boseman's death? Michael B. Jordan is a superhero in waiting at all times. The character has a claim to the throne. He was a great villain because he was right about a lot of things. There must've been a meeting at some point to see if they could 'Captain Barbosa' the character for this movie before Coogler or Jordan or someone shut it down.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend