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 ...

In all my years of watching movies, I have never waited so long and with such great anticipation for a conclusion to such a mediocre series as I have for The Battle of the Five Armies . To be honest, I didn't love the first two films of Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy all that much. They were overly long and quite poorly paced, making the short length of its source material obvious. However, they were good entertainment and definitely deserving of being seen in a theater, and because I loved Tolkien's novel so much I decided to give this final installment a chance. Similar to both An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug , The Battle of the Five Armies is well-written and almost replicates Tolkien's novel on screen. However, Peter Jackson has added a lot of material and back story to the original to fill in the two hour running time; but this does not distract from the story as much as the previous films. This is mostly because this inst...