Men In Black (4 Stars)

This is a film that I recently added to my rewatch list. I need to watch the first three Men In Black films before the fourth film is released next month. It's amazing that I've gone so long without watching the first two films. It's like I forgot they even existed. Yes, they're silly, but it's all good humour. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are the perfect buddy cops, totally unlike one another but perfectly complementing one another.

First the film introduces Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) on the Mexican border. Illegal aliens are being driven into the USA, but there's only one alien that K is interested in. It's Mikey, a visitor from another planet who's an undesirable citizen because he's been in jail.

Then we meet Agent J (Will Smith) before he becomes Agent J. James Darrell Edwards is invited to apply for membership of the Men In Black, a bureau that licenses, monitors and polices alien activity on the planet Earth. At any time there are about 1500 extraterrestrial beings on Earth, most of them in Lower Manhattan. After his initial scepticism he signs up.

Together the two agents have to prevent a galactic war after a member of the Arquillian royal family is assassinated. They have to retrieve something called "the galaxy".

The film is based on a Marvel Comics series, but only just. The comics were originally published by the Canadian company Aircel Comics. In 1988 Aircel was bought by Malibu Comics, who printed another Men In Black mini-series. In 1994 Malibu Comics were bought by Marvel. After only a few months Marvel cancelled all comics printed by Malibu, because Marvel was only interested in Malibu's advanced colouring technology, not the comics themselves. After the first Men In Black film was made the comic was revived.

A few days ago I was talking with a friend who reads my blog, and he asked me why I'm writing so many posts that aren't about films. My immediate reply was "Because I want to", but that was only because I didn't have an answer ready. My full reply, and I hope he's reading this, is that my blog is meant to give readers an insight into me and my raison d'être rather than being a pure film review site. I don't write emotionally neutral film reviews, I write about how the films affect me. Films are a big part of my life, so they're the main topic of this blog, but other things affect me as well. Marvel comics have always been a big influence on me, so they deserve to be part of my blog. For many years music was the biggest part of my life, now to a lesser extent, but it's still important enough that I should write something about it as well.

I'm making sure that I write more about films than I do about other topics. My Marvel Years posts are very time consuming, so it's doubtful that I'll be able to write more than two posts a week. My Klaus Schulze posts are shorter, so I could write about his music every day, but I don't want to flood my blog with music posts. I've actually written a few posts in advance, but I'm not posting them all at once. I'm spreading them out, about three posts a week maximum.

The music posts are a temporary subject. When I've finished writing about Klaus Schulze's albums, which will take me about a year, I doubt I'll write about any other artists. The Marvel posts are a different matter. When I started in January 2018 I thought I could write about all of Marvel's comics from 1961 to 1972 within one year. I underestimated the volume of the work. It's more realistic to schedule five years of Marvel comics per year, and I now intend to continue up to 1984, which means I'll be writing about Marvel for another four years, maybe longer.

My Marvel Years posts weren't very popular at first, based on the number of readers. Now they've become more noticed, and I usually have two or three of them in my ten most popular posts each day. I suspect that I have regular readers who wait for each new post. My Klaus Schulze posts are less popular, and none of them have entered my top ten popular posts list. Yet. I'll see how things progress.

Success Rate:  + 4.5

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