The New Yorker:

The film represents a departure for the “Black Panther” director, and a creative risk; it grapples with ideas about music, race, family, religion—and vampires.

By Jelani Cobb

The decade-long dominance of Marvel Studios in American popular cinema has insured that, among other things, we all recognize an origin story when we see one. To the extent that such neat inception points exist in real life, an afternoon at an aging movie palace on the corner of Lake Park and Grand Avenues, in central Oakland, California, provided one for the filmmaker Ryan Coogler. The Grand Lake Theatre, which opened in 1926, to showcase vaudeville acts and silent films, still retains a neoclassical majesty—a crystal chandelier, frescoes, a Wurlitzer organ that is played on Friday and Saturday nights—that’s a holdover from the era when theatres were meant to project the grandeur of Hollywood itself.

Coogler’s formative moment at the Grand Lake came at a different time for the movies, in the summer of 1991, when “Boyz n the Hood,” John Singleton’s landmark coming-of-age story, set in South Central Los Angeles, opened there. Ira Coogler, a youth guidance counsellor who had grown up in Oakland, went to see the film, and he took along his son Ryan, who was then five years old. The boy watched the entire movie cradled in his father’s lap. The subject matter—gang violence, emerging sexuality, the persistent salience of race in American life—is not typically considered appropriate for the kindergarten set, but Ira had his reasons. “He was in his twenties,” Coogler told me. “He’d lost his father and his father-in-law right after he got married.” Those losses weighed on Ira as he began his own journey as a parent. “Any movie he heard was about Black fatherhood he would take me to see. So he took me to see ‘Boyz n the Hood,’ even though I was five,” Coogler said. Were this story a screenplay, it would now cut years ahead to a scene in which Coogler enrolls in the prestigious graduate film program at the University of Southern California, Singleton’s alma mater, and eventually meets and befriends the older director, who becomes a mentor to him. This is, in fact, what happened.

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