My Own Little World

Infinity War is the Empire Strikes Back of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a comparison made quite often – not just for this film, but for nearly every franchise. At some point, every gritty sequel will be likened to the practical perfection of Empire and its usurping of its predecessor’s formula. Whether this is deserved or not is a contentious subject with the fans of whatever franchise falls prey to the discussion. With the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, Infinity War fits the mold perfectly. For the first time in these nineteen films, the stakes are real and not contrived by an incompetent villain. For the first time, the villain is a true psychopathic terror that gets true sympathy that can even approach empathy. For the first time (at least in an Avengers film), this group of god-like beings feels truly threatened by the antagonist, incapable of stopping them. There’s other parallels to be made for sure – like how both Infinity War and Empire split up ...

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 ...