My Own Little World

Biopics typically err in one big way: they don’t feel true to the characters they portray and have that typical “Oscar-bait” tone. Films like The Imitation Game , The Theory of Everything , and even Hacksaw Ridge have all fallen into this mold; it’s not that they’re bad films, but they just don’t try to do anything but tell a positive story about their main character’s life. They are bland, plain and simple. Thankfully, I, Tonya doesn’t fit this mold at all. It follows more in the vein of The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short in how it treats its subjects: there’s a lot of witty dark humor, and the tone is very much snarky sometimes but then gets a lot more serious as the story does. My problems with those two films I mention is that they can’t find the balance between the comedy and the drama, Wolf of Wall Street erring towards comedy and Big Short towards drama. I, Tonya has a smoother transition between those two tones, but it still does feel a bit abrupt, and ...

Comic book films have begun to vary quite a bit in the past couple of years. Deadpool opened the doors to R-ratings in the genre, Logan showed how emotionally compelling and tonally focused those films can be, and Wonder Woman brought a strong female presence to the genre for the first time. In Black Panther , we have yet another drastic change; this time, though, it is to more than just the superhero genre. Sure, we do finally have a properly fleshed-out black superhero; but the bigger thing here is the subtext. There is so much to this film’s major themes that make it one of the timeliest comic book films ever made. This is rooted in the film’s villain Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. Besides Jordan’s great performance, this is a highly and uniquely motivated villain. His core motivation is to flip the narrative of blacks worldwide and to leverage Wakanda’s (the African nation at play) premier technology to do so. He wants to oppress their oppressors and demand ...

Today, I’m ashamed that someone was proud of me. Felicia and I had just seen Black Panther (which I’ll talk about in another post) and were walking out of the theater toward my car. During the movie, it began to snow a lot, so afterwards I had to brush the snow off of my car. Next to me, a woman who had just came from the same showing as us was doing the same thing I was doing. We struck up a conversation about how some kids in her family had never seen snow because they were from Florida and when they visited here it had never snowed for them, how she had a friend from Africa who marveled at snow when she saw it for the first time, and how one of the first presents my dad ever got my mom was a brush for her car. I also offered to help her brush her car off, but she said she was fine and didn’t need the help – which I knew would be her answer because she seemed like she had a good handle on what she was doing. Felicia (my girlfriend, for those of you who don’t know) said she ...