In their trips in a boat out on the lake, Esi’s father would tell her stories that only made sense if you knew the ending. In The Burial of Kojo , Esi tells us a story that we already know the ending to, by virtue of its title -a way of keeping her father’s spirit alive even through the structure of how she presents his narrative. It’s a perfectly poetic choice in a very poetic movie. The Burial of Kojo was the feature debut of Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule, before he became a creative partner to Beyonc é , directing her visual album Black is King -a companion to her Lion King soundtrack, and subsequently the movie musical version of The Color Purple . Those almost certainly wouldn’t have come without this film though, a much more interesting movie (at least compared to The Color Purple ) that infuses a sense of grand spiritualism and magical realism into a story of some grit and grounded circumstances. A beautifully haunting and enigmatic parable of a movie. It gets a lot of tract...
Supergirl has always been essentially just a female derivation of Superman. From back in the days when just a bland gender-swap was deemed enough in the comics industry to make up for a lack of female characters -Batgirl is just the same. There is something inherently condescending about the character’s existence, and it does feel especially so when she is the subject of the sophomore feature for a new cinematic universe. It is weird that James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC would jump to her this quickly as opposed to someone like Wonder Woman. Supergirl has evolved of course into more of a distinct character over the years but that is not known to general audiences who see the name and iconography as merely piggy-backing off of a more successful entity. This movie, Supergirl , acknowledges that throughout, whether by ham-fistedly commenting on the laziness of such a designation as mere counterpart to a man (and referring to Kara Zor-El as a ‘girl’ despite being an adult in this universe...