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‘Black Panther’ cast pushes Wakanda forward after Boseman

Source image: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/black-panther-cast-pushes-wakanda-forward-boseman-92815309

LOS ANGELES — Letitia Wright hit the Marvel Cinematic Universe scene as King T’Challa’s joyfully witty younger sister in 2018’s blockbuster “Black Panther.” But in the new sequel, the actor’s usual easygoing character delivers a more serious tone while dealing with grief.

Wright’s character takes center stage as Shuri who ventures into womanhood after the death of T’Challa. She’ll be looked upon to take the iconic Black Panther mantle in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which releases in theaters Friday. Chadwick Boseman, who played T’Challa died in August 2020.

In between “Panther” films, Wright took on a few movie projects that exercised her dramatic acting chops.

“I always try to do things that are outside the box and what people wouldn’t expect,” said Wright, who starred in dramas “The Silent Twins” and “Aisha.” She also stars in “Surrounded,” which releases next year. The actor said each of those projects challenged her enough to “stretch me as an artist.”

“That naturally helped me grow a lot more,” said the actor, whose Shuri character also appeared in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” as Wakanda’s princess and chief scientist. “We know Shuri as the fun, vibrant sister of the first film. … But in the film, we really followed that journey of womanhood for her.”

Wright credits director Ryan Coogler for ushering Shuri’s maturation along in his rewritten script following Boseman’s unexpected death from colon cancer. The director carried an even heavier burden to deliver a strong script — especially after “Black Panther” broke box office records, earned $700 million domestically during its theatrical run and became the first superhero film nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards.

For the “Black Panther” follow, Coogler had developed a screenplay centered around T’Challa grieving lost time following Thanos’ snap in “Avengers: Infinity War,” which caused a five-year “blip.” But after Boseman’s death, Coogler and filmmaker Joe Robert Cole went back to the drawing board. They worked up a script that delved more into the concept of Wakanda’s grief in the wake of T’Challa’s death.

Coogler said Boseman’s family signed off on his character’s “respectful” death in “Wakanda Forever.” In the new film, the Wakandans are put in a peculiar spot to protect their nation without T’Challa against a new nemesis, Namor, a sub-marine Talocan leader who has extraordinary mutant-like abilities and can fly with the aid of tiny wings on his ankles. Namor is played by Tenoch Huerta.

“This script was born of the truth in our lives that we had lost Chadwick Boseman,” said Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Nakia, a war spy and T’Challa’s lover. She said the characters dealt with T’Challa’s loss differently in the film.

“For me personally, I was relieved that we got to speak our truth,” Nyong’o said. “We got to express the grief that we were feeling and put it to good use.”

Wright and Nyong’o said they used their grief over Boseman to fuel their performances, while Coogler said his mournful remembrance of the late actor helped motivate him through his writing and directing process. The director said several photos of Boseman were posted on set, and a prop master put inside Coogler’s trailer a shield and spear that T’Challa held during a duel with Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger at Warrior Falls in “Black Panther.”

Before filming the project, the entire cast — including the newcomers — visited Boseman’s burial site. It turned into a bonding moment.

“We tried to make a movie to honor the legacy of Chadwick,” Huerta said. “The movie is about grieving. It was happening at the same time as reality. They were able to integrate what was happening in real life into fiction. Art is kind of therapy. It helped us deal with the reality and things we can’t understand.”

The cast leaned on each other during the filming process, which had several setbacks and obstacles. Production took longer than expected after Wright was injured while filming a stunt, and several cast and crew members tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. Wright was attacked for sharing an anti-vaccination video, and Coogler was briefly handcuffed by Atlanta police after being mistaken for a bank robber earlier this year.

“We certainly had bumps in the road, but people pulled together,” said Nate Moore, the vice president of production and development at Marvel Studios. He was a producer on the “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Eternals” and executive producer on “Black Panther.”

Moore said the filming experience of “Wakanda Forever” was the toughest, but he said the whole cast and crew showed resilience through adversity.

“They didn’t pull apart,” Moore said. “If it were a different filmmaker, who didn’t have such great relationships with everybody, we would’ve seen a lot more partition from the crew, which we didn’t really. The cast could’ve gotten frustrated with the stopping and starting that we were forced to do, but they didn’t. They believe in what this movie was about and Ryan’s vision. As hard as it was, we had each other.”

Nyong’o said cast members comforted each other in grieving Boseman while attempting to keep the kingdom of Wakanda moving forward.

“It was joyful and sometimes it was hard,” she said. “But there was a lot of levity as well, because we had so many powerful, joyful memories of Chadwick to share with one another.”

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/black-panther-cast-pushes-wakanda-forward-boseman-92815309

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Book Review: Explosive debut novel ‘Fireworks Every Night’ is a bittersweet celebration of survival

“Fireworks Every Night” by Beth Raymer (Random House)

C.C.’s isn’t your typical rags-to-riches story. She remembers growing up in a single-wide with her older sister, stay-at-home mom and car-salesman dad. But she also remembers when they moved to Florida after everything in the car lot burned down — including their home — launching them into a comfortable middle-class life and a fresh start in a state her dad proudly brags has fireworks every night.

“Fireworks Every Night” is Beth Raymer’s debut novel, but not her first book. Following her 2010 memoir “Lay the Favorite,” she borrows from her life to create a deeply personal story of a dysfunctional family.

Having grown up in West Palm Beach, Raymer puts her local knowledge to use as her protagonist — a resident of Loxahatchee, Florida — rattles off the schools she plays basketball against, and how worn down or rich they are. She’s familiar with the Baker Act and who’s been institutionalized through its use. She knows all the neighborhoods and has eaten at Benny’s on the Beach.

If the gorgeous cover designed by Elizabeth A. D. Eno isn’t enough to draw you in, let the heartbreakingly determined main character and the promise of an earnest look at the skeletons in her closet convince you.

In adulthood, C.C. is engaged to a well-educated and absurdly wealthy man — a far cry from the childhood in which she learns what it means to fight for survival. Hopping between the two timelines in stark juxtaposition, the full picture of C.C.’s life emerges.

As kid-C.C.’s home life comes completely unraveled, the story morphs from tragicomedy to horror, revealing how her family fell apart and left her sister struggling with addiction, her mother chronically absent and her father homeless. All the while, adult-C.C. is juggling a host of modern stresses: the viability of having children, climate change, living in a world that makes it far too easy to compare yourself with the 8 billion others who inhabit it, and reconciling your self-worth with the balance in your bank account.

Raymer launches addiction, homelessness, neglect and poverty shamelessly into the lexicon, treating C.C. and her family with nothing less than respect.

A nature motif runs throughout the story, blurring the line between animal and human and calling into question what is “natural” in a world so unnaturally shaped by people. Animals play a quiet but pivotal role throughout “Fireworks Every Night,” shaping Raymer’s engrossing novel into a bittersweet celebration of the scrappy Americans who are finding a way to survive even as the elite push humans and animals alike out of their habitats.

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Book Review: ‘White House by the Sea’ tells storied Kennedy tale through family’s compound

“White House By the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port” by Kate Storey (Scribner)

The history of the Kennedy family is so well-chronicled — from the modern Camelot legend surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidency to the series of tragedies that marked the family throughout the 20tb century — that it’s hard to imagine new ways to tell their story.

But Kate Storey does just that in “White House By the Sea: A Century of the Kennedys at Hyannis Port” — revisiting the family’s history through their time at the famed Kennedy compound on Cape Cod.

Storey, the senior features editor at Rolling Stone magazine, weaves a fascinating narrative about the Kennedy family using Hyannis Port as the backdrop. The book traces the family’s ties to the compound back to the 1920s, when Joseph Kennedy bought Malcolm Cottage, what became known as the Big House.

Many of the stories feel so familiar, from Joseph Kennedy Jr.’s death during World War II to John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash in 1999. The compound was also the setting for much happier occasions, including John F. Kennedy’s presidential acceptance speech and the wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.

Storey gives them a fresh look with new details and well-sourced reporting that opens up a traditionally private community — “what’s left of Camelot,” she writes.

Storey’s research gives the book a more intimate feel than many other histories of the Kennedy family, introducing figures that aren’t as well-known but played a key role in the family and its compound. Fittingly, it’s written in an accessible way that makes the book a welcome beach read.

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Fox News unveils primetime lineup with Jesse Watters in Tucker Carlson’s former time slot

Jesse Watters will fill the Fox News Channel time slot left vacant by the firing of Tucker Carlson, part of a dramatic revamp of the network’s evening lineup announced on Monday.

Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show that combines news and comedy will move up an hour to start at 10 p.m. Eastern, displacing Laura Ingraham. She’ll shift to 7 p.m., the hour that Watters has occupied. Sean Hannity will stay in his 9 p.m. time slot, Fox said. The new lineup debuts on July 17.

The announcement comes roughly two months after Fox News fired Carlson shortly after settling a defamation lawsuit with the voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems on the eve of trial. The case, which centered on the network’s airing of false claims following the 2020 presidential election, exposed a trove of private messages sent between Fox hosts, including Hannity and Carlson, in which they criticized peers at the network.

Carlson has since begun doing occasional monologues for Twitter, although Fox is attempting to get him to stop the broadcasts.

Fox has seen its ratings tumble since Carlson exited. Carlson averaged 3.25 million viewers at 8 p.m. in the first three months of the year, and the string of guest hosts who replaced him the past two months usually reached under 2 million, making the network’s command more tenuous.

The lineup change signals that Fox is doubling down on its opinionated evening programming strategy, with three sharp-tongued men filling the prime-time hours. It’s something of a triumphant return for Watters, who got his start at the 8 p.m. hour, doing man-in-the-street interviews and other features for Bill O’Reilly before O’Reilly’s firing in 2017.

It also means double duty for Gutfeld and Watters, who are both panelists on “The Five” and will continue there. The late-afternoon political talk show has become Fox’s most popular program.

Keeping that show’s chemistry intact appeared to be a priority for Fox. Gutfeld said in a Wall Street Journal interview last week that he would no longer appear on “The Five” or do his late-night show if he were to get Carlson’s old time slot.

Trace Gallagher, who has worked at Fox since the network began in 1996, will host a news show at 11 p.m., filling the hour that Gutfeld is leaving vacant.

“The unique perspectives of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld will ensure our viewers have access to unrivaled coverage from our best-in-class team for years to come,” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said in a statement.

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