Manuel first African-American woman to win individual swimming medal; ties with Canadian Penny Oleksiak

Once again, Black Girl Magic was on display at the Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

American swimmer, Simone Manuel, collected a gold medal in the 100m individual freestyle swimming event at the 2016 Summer Olympics on Thursday night.

Manuel became the first black woman in Olympic history to earn an individual swimming gold medal.

"It means a lot [to be the first black woman to earn gold in the pool]," Manuel said after the race. "I mean, this medal is not just for me. It's for a whole bunch of people that came before me and have been an inspiration to me. Maritza [Correia], Cullen [Jones], and it's for all the people after me, who believe they can't do it. And I just want to be inspiration to others that you can do it."

Canada's Penny Oleksiak touched the wall at the exact same moment to tie for gold in one of the Games' most nail-biting finishes. Their winning times were an Olympic record -- 52.70s.

Sarah Sjostrom of Swedish took the bronze with a time of 52.99 seconds and Australian Cate Campbell, who was favored to win, came in sixth place clocking in at 53.24 seconds.

It must be noted that Manuel is not the first Black woman to win a Summer Olympic swimming medal; that honor goes to Enith Brigitha of the Netherlands. Brigitha won a pair of bronze medals in 1976 in Montreal, Canada.

#BlackGirlMagic

We all need some downtime and in The Shallows medical student, Nancy Adams (Blake Lively) decides to get away from it all and ride the waves at a secluded beach in Mexico. Once in the water she guides her surfboard out to a very dead and very bloody whale, only to discover the killer, a large vicious shark, lurks nearby. The seafaring killer apparently thinks that Nancy's fate should be the same as the whale's. And her "downtime" should be permanent.

The Shallows is an intense battle between human and beast. However, this is a story that we have seen over and over. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, The Birds, actress Tippi Hedren comes under attack by a flock of birds gone mad. We saw it in Stephen King's Cujo, where lead character Donna Trenton does battle with a rabid St. Bernard.

Also, as is often the case in horror films or these types of dramas, characters find themselves in these nightmarish situations due to a series of bad decisions. Like here a young woman goes to an isolated beach, in a foreign country, all by herself.

Another problem with The Shallows is the writers try too hard to make Nancy a sympathetic character. She's a medical student which implies she's both smart and caring. She calls to check in on her little sister from the beach. And there is also a subtext that her mother is dead and might have been killed at that very same location!

While Blake Lively serves the purpose of the beautiful young heroine who is fit and athletic, her character is supposed to be from Galveston, Texas, which is in the southern part of that southern state, yet Lively who grew up in California doesn't have the slightest regional accent.

The positives are The Shallows dramatic and intense scenes. There are some edge-of-your- seat clashes between Nancy and the shark. We are accustomed to superhuman male protagonists, so it's good to see female leads showing that same type of credibility-stretching strength and vitality.

Shot in Australia, there's beautiful scenery – but frankly not any better than you'll see on HDTV. That's the problem; with so much entertainment available on big screen TVs, at our fingertips on our laptops and phones, movies have to offer us something exceptional. And The Shallows simply doesn't. And it's a Rent It – engaging but not worth the trip to a theater.

The Shallows is rated PG - 13 for bloody images, intense sequences of peril, and brief strong language and appropriately timed at 87 minutes.