Avengers: Age of Ultron (9/10)

In a fastidiously chaotic movie, one of four new characters mutters, as if to himself, “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites.” This question of order vs. chaos, war vs. peace, good vs. evil, is standard comic book fare, but what makes Age of Ultron so deft and satisfying is the way it ties up all sorts of threads from previous movies to create a nearly seamless whole – chaos and order, personified in one movie.

Days of Future Past is Relevant, Savvy, Gutsy, Ridiculous, and Superb

It’s a great time to be a nerd, but we all remember X-Men: Origins: Wolverine: The Movie With Too Many Colons, the competent but unforgivably dull Superman Returns, the beginning of the slow death knell for the DC movie-verse, Green Lantern….heck even The Dark Knight Rises disappointed some hardcore fans. Then you’ve got Sony and their blatantly business-centric decision to reboot Spider-Man, just so they could keep the movie rights, which wouldn’t be so bad if the movie weren’t a desperate franchise-starting cash grab with poorly developed characters and redundant action scenes. With so much greed prevalent in the studios, it would seem pointless to hope that some quality, old-fashioned movie fun could be expected, but movies like The Avengers, and now X-Men: Days of Future Past, prove it is not.

The Marvel Movie Character Rights
That link succinctly summarizes the post-millenial movies which feature Marvel characters, and which studios own which ones. Here’s a breakdown: Sony owns Spider-Man and Ghost Rider, 20^th Century Fox owns X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Marvels owns Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, and many more besides, and it all started in 2002 when Spider-Man ignited a whole new era of superhero flicks and studios taking their moneymaking potential seriously. Directors who had never been given access to big budgets, like Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, and Ang Lee were given free reign of the comic book movie world. Raimi breathed new life into Spider-Man, Singer knocked X-Men out of the park, and Lee…well he managed to resurrect and kill the Hulk’s film potential in one go. Two out of three ain’t bad.

An Avengers Christmas

What does Christmas look like in Benin? Well, in the big cities, it is starting to become more Westernized. Zimidjans (motorcyle-taxis if you’ll recall) ride by, sporting Santa hats ; a restaurant by the beach displays a life-size Santa statue in the window, holding that classic Saint Nick instrument, the saxophone ; you’re far more likely to see a painting of a white Santa Claus in store windows, though the occasional black Satan does pop up ; those street merchants walk by hawking giant blow-up lawn ornaments, often in the shape of a snow globe, even though it’s doubtful most Beninese will ever see snow in their entire life.