My Own Little World

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 ...

Let's wind the clock back just a few weeks to the 89th Academy Awards ceremony. My girlfriend and I were watching them, having seen the front runner for Best Picture,   La La Land , and desperately wanting it to win. For two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, it did. Then, chaos ensued. In an unprecedented gaff, the wrong card was handed to Warren Beatty and he announced the wrong film as the winner. In its place was Moonlight , a low-budget indie film based on an unpublished play that chronicles the life of a gay black man in the projects of Miami. Nobody saw this coming, including us. I'm not going to lie: I was a little devastated that one of my favorite films of all time, let alone last year, did not win Best Picture. That being said, the fact that Moonlight  won Best Picture made me want to see it more than I already did, so I made a point of seeing it over spring break. And it was brutal. I usually don't struggle with giving films scores and ranking them, but Moonl...