J Jagannath: Strange & insecure

I won’t delve too much into my wasted adolescence but the fact of the matter is that my entry point into the world of Marvel Comics is through cinema. Apart from the first Iron Man and Captain America movies, which were industrial amounts of fun, I didn’t find rest of the cinematic adaptions worth my time. The just-released Doctor Strange is quite possibly my most favourite movie made out of the Marvel source material.
 
Most of my exuberance stems from Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous character Doctor Stephen Strange, a celebrated neurosurgeon. He was ho hum in his recent movies but here’s something that he could sink his ravenous teeth into: his stiff British upper lip and po-faced sense of humour are just what the movie needed to get going.
 
The movie’s about Strange’s hands losing their vitality due to an accident and after searching high and low in vain, he reaches Kathmandu for the all-elusive cure. A chance encounter with Karl Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) takes him to The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) who puts him through the wringer, while espousing some highfalutin stuff about saving three sanctums from Dormammu, the villainous entity who offers eternal life. Dormammu’s stooge Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) does most of the battling on his boss’s behalf though.
 
Ben Davis, the master lensman who has done enough superhero movies to claim that world as his natural habitat, has done some amazing work, be it the accident or the vertiginious swoops undertaken by Kaecilius and Strange and The Ancient One of Manhattan in an engrossing face off. Scott Derrickson made one of those rare movies that justify their eyewateringly expensive IMAX ticket and popcorn prices at a Delhi multiplex.
 
Unlike its predecessors in the Marvel universe, Doctor Strange has its proceedings suffused with enough humour for the audience to soak in the prattling by Tilda and co about spirituality, chakras, karma et al. The scenes that Cumberbatch shares with Rachel McAdams, his colleague and supposed love interest with whom he’s equally standoffish and affectionate, are super charming. Other standout sequences are the ones where Ejiofor reveals the wi-fi password and Cumberbatch shows off his pop culture knowledge in front of a dour, monastic Chinese librarian.
 

Speaking of pop culture references, I am floored by the way they pop up in the new HBO series, Insecure, about a 20-something black woman (show creator Issa Rae) in Los Angeles who’s stifled in a monotonous relationship and a dead-end job at an educational NGO. Yvonne Orji as friend Molly is her soul sister. The series partly shares its DNA with Lena Dunham’s Girls considering how the girls here also are either obsessed with men or themselves. But Issa, who wrote Insecure based on her web series Awkward Black Girl, ensures her characters have problems that aren’t quintessentially first-world problems like in Girls.
 
“Every black girl that went to college likes Drake. He just really gets us,” says Issa to her ex-flame. The series is five episodes down and I am yet to experience a single dull moment that brings Issa and Molly together. The latter, after a series of dating mishaps, starts believing “you gotta kiss a lot of frogs to get a good frog”. Their conversations might get a “D” in the Bechdel Test but when taken in the current context of online dating and hook ups, Insecure has an absorbing take on these topics.
 
Sample this monologue by Issa:
 
“My boss founded a nonprofit to help kids from the hood, but she didn’t hire anybody from the hood.
I’m torn between the Booker T method and the DuBois method.”
 
This is the kind of stream of consciousness soaked in black American riffs that got Paul Beatty’s The Sellout a Booker prize this year. Issa’s impromptu raps in front of her bathroom mirror are blisteringly dark and I hope she makes a mix tape out of them all.
 
But then, looking at the way America chose to elect a seemingly racist, xenophobic, misoynistic, foul-mouthed, philistine like Donald Trump as its president, I am starting to wonder if blacks will be allowed to have their fair cultural say in a country so torn apart. People like Issa Rae are the tiny specks of sunshine on this otherwise doomed US landscape.
 
jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in