"Sinners"
"Black Panther" auteur Ryan Coogler is back with an ambitious period horror musical.
From my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
April 23, 2025
Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18.
Ron Shelton, director of the baseball movie Bull Durham, played five years of minor-league ball. Richard Linklater pitched in college until an injury switched his career trajectory from the athletic to the aesthetic. And Ryan Coogler, director of the giant Marvel hit Black Panther and now Sinners, caught 112 passes over four seasons as a wide receiver at mid-tier Sacramento State.
Coogler brings a jock’s conservative, focused mentality to his features, such as Creed, in which he deftly revived the Rocky franchise and gave Sylvester Stallone his best role since the original, by casting his serviceable leading man Michael B. Jordan, a theater kid who played basketball in high school, as the son of Rocky’s late rival and friend Apollo Creed.
Coogler’s next project is rebooting the right-coded The X-Files.
Granted, the hoopla during the Great Awokening over Black Panther’s portrayal of a comic-book black utopia was absurd. The New York Times burbled:
To the politically minded, the Wakanda of ‘Black Panther’ offers an almost too perfect rebuttal to President Trump’s comments in January in which he referred to African nations with a disparaging expletive.
Still, in extolling the virtues of an absolute monarchy tempered only by the right of other princes of the royal blood to challenge the king to a duel to the death, it was perhaps the most reactionary movie of the decade.
Coogler’s new Sinners is, in many ways, an admirable film.
Read the whole thing there.
> "in extolling the virtues of an absolute monarchy tempered only by the right of other princes of the royal blood to challenge the king to a duel to the death, [Black Panther] was perhaps the most reactionary movie of the decade."
Don't forget this scene:
https://youtu.be/ev_RUKS8u6k
"If you let the refugees in, they bring their problems with them. And then Wakanda is like everywhere else."
Ryan Coogler = Black Trump?
It seems to me that far to many (almost all?) explicitly black movies inevitably fall into some lazy racist white plot points. Accordingly, I basically skip all of them even when I know the director, like Coogler or Peele, is a genuinely talented guy. I cannot decide how sincere they are in this belief or how much of it is because they have a subconscious impulse to include it because it garners approval from whatever studio and audience they pitch their ideas to. It could also be black nerd trying to show he's still a conscious brother so don't pick on me, which is basically TNC's disease.
As a brief anecdotal aside on the blues in response to Steve's lack of interest, I have a black friend who is an amateur musician with a broad range of artistic/genre interests and he absolutely cannot stand the blues either because he considers it boring. I personally do enjoy it a bit because it reminds me of a long-dead uncle that I loved hanging out with when I was a young adult, and I remember many summer nights walking up to his house and hearing John Lee Hooker or Buddy Guy drifting out into the street through his screen door. I wish I could still do that.