Author: Alex Bean

Recorded Conversations: Drink of Choice

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. For today’s conversation, J. Michael Bestul looks forward to a few drinks over the Labor Day weekend, and wonders aloud what might be drinking.

Prompt: You’re at a bar, restaurant, or pub that you’ve never been to before. The place has a pretty good drinks list, and on it, you notice ____________. And because this is one thing you always have to try when you’re at a new place, you order it.

Question: What is ____________, and why is it the libation you order?

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To be honest, I don’t know what that libation is until I see it. Which is strange, I realize, but I don’t have a set cocktail or drink that I must try at each new establishment. Being a lover of beers I have not tried, my instinct is to order whatever is coming out of the tap I find most interesting. Now, there are certain restrictions placed upon this, and of course I have a list of them.

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Best of TV 2011-12: Number 2

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Hey, remember this? I have no explanation as to why it has taken me a month and a half to finish off my list of TV’s best, but here we are. Having previously listed my Honorable Mentions, Standout Performances, Episodes, and Moments, as well as spots #10-#3 on my list, it’s time to finish the whole thing off and reveal my top two shows from the 2011-12 TV season, each of which will get an entry. Today:

2. Mad Men
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Alex and Andrew Debate the Sight & Sound List: Part Two

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Picking up where we left off two days ago, Alex and Andrew continue to debate Sight & Sound’s list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” Be sure to check out Part One if you missed it.

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Alex, I grant you every single point about Citizen Kane…I find the story as compelling as you do, and the idea that it takes an entire cast of characters to make an individual life is a profound one which may never have been as fully realized as Welles and Mankiewicz realized it. This being said, your description of Kane could just as easily be applied to Jay Gatsby, Julian English, even Michael Corleone in his way…and I have felt much more emotionally overwhelmed by The Great Gatsby, Appointment in Samarra, and even the two Godfathers (even though I’m not a giant fan of part one) than by Kane. Maybe my problem is I always come at film more from the writing/story perspective than the pictorial/mise-en-scene perspective. I hold both as the two equal standards of judgment, but the story takes precedence only because of my turn of mind. (And I’m not saying you discount story…I know you and your love of movies too well to make such a horrid and untrue claim…but you and I see movies from slightly different angles, just slightly, but still.)

Anyway, my point: with Gatsby, English, Corleone, Scottie, I see them as Shakespearean tragic heroes, good men brought to death, be it actual or spiritual, by a flaw. Kane is never presented that way, which makes empathy for him harder to obtain…and on the one hand, this may part of the brilliance of Citizen Kane, that the protagonist is so down-to-earth and recognizable and presented without either endearing or purely villainous qualities…Kane is neutral, is Everyman despite being the MAN among men, is recognizable. But at the same time, Welles’s refusal to give the adult Kane, his Kane, any character trait I can relate to beyond his very human ambition, anything which makes me feel involved with him, means that I only appreciate the film for that intricate and dense plotting. Don’t get me wrong, I love a film, a novel, anything with a whirling story like Kane which is so well-told. And I will never deny Kane’s greatness for an instant. You will see it appear on my own top ten list at the end of this reply because I know how much we all owe Welles. I am simply trying to understand why people are now disinclined to rank it as number one, and I think it is because it lacks the pull on the heart, even though it may be the darkest corners of our heart, which is found in Vertigo.
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Alex and Andrew Debate the Sight & Sound List: Part One

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The list is out. For a certain brand of cinephile, yours truly very much included, that can only mean one thing. Once a decade the British Film Institute’s  Sight & Sound magazine polls the world’s leading film critics and directors, and compiles their list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” This tradition started back in 1952, and has continued apace since then. Sight & Sound takes the measure of the cinematic canon every ten years so as to avoid momentary effusions and measure long-term trends. Other groups, most notably the American Film Institute, have crafted rival lists that hope to match the original for prestige and influence. The explosion of the internet has also created a surge of lists, from the venerable like They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They, to the ridiculous, such as the IMDb Top 250. But the Sight & Sound list rises above them all, and today it unleashed something of a sea-change.

For the first time since the inaugural list in 1952 (which crowned Bicycle Thieves), Orson Welles’ landmark debut feature Citizen Kane has not been voted into the top spot. Instead, Alfred Hitchcock’s lurid and mysterious Vertigo has ascended to the pinnacle, rising from a second place finish a decade ago. I’ll get to the importance of all this in just a moment, along with the myriad other interesting tidbits raised by the new Top Ten, but first the list. (Please note, I will be referring to the Critics’ List unless I note otherwise. I like and respect the Directors’ lists, but I tend to think of it as being akin to the Coaches’ Poll in college football: interesting but perhaps not as well informed.)

1. Vertigo (1958, USA, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock)

2. Citizen Kane (1941, USA, Dir: Orson Welles)

3. Tokyo Story (1953, Japan, Dir: Ozu Yasujiro)

4. La Règle du jeu (1939, France, Dir: Jean Renoir)

5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, USA, Dir: F.W. Murnau)

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, USA/UK, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)

7. The Searchers (1956, USA, Dir: John Ford)

8. Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR, Dir: Dziga Vetov)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, France, Dir: Carl Theodore Dreyer)

10. 8 1/2 (1963, Italy, Dir: Federico Fellini)

So, Andrew, what are your thoughts on Kane being dethroned by Vertigo? Or is that not even where your thoughts landed when you saw the list?

– Alex
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Lost in a Fantasy: Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, and the Appeal of Virtual Worlds

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I have been disappearing a lot lately, slipping off by myself for hours. My wife has definitely noticed, and I know that some of my friends have taken note. It’s hard to reach me when I disappear, and ever harder to drag me back to the rest of my life and my roles and responsibilities. The place I’ve been disappearing to? It’s the northern-most province of the continent of Tamriel, a land a mountains ,mist, snow, and stone. Its rivers run clear and fast; its weather is frightful and harsh, surpassed only by its ever-present predatory fauna. It’s a place called Skyrim, and it is entirely fake. Like many others in the past several months, I have flung away untold hours—hundreds and hundreds of hours—to Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. A single-player role-playing game (RPG) set in the above-described land during a period of political strife and apocalyptic tidings, Skyrim is in many ways an archetypical American fantasy RPG.

I’ve always enjoyed video games, and in my first few years in high school, I was an enormous fan of high fantasy of this sort, but things change. I left behind fantasy at some point, enjoying The Lord of the Rings when it came on TV, but devoting more of my interest to the generic pleasures of art cinema and Westerns in recent years. Video games have remained a constant, but in the past few years my gaming time had been more or less exclusively devoted to three product types: NCAA Football from EA Sports, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and Rockstar Games’ open-world action games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.Why I wanted to try out Skyrim I cannot precisely say. The TV ads were well made, but so are those of many other video games, and this material did not intrinsically speak to me. There I was on a random evening in December though, walking a few blocks to rent Skyrim from a Redbox stand. I have been missing real life on and off ever since that night.

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Recorded Conversations: Comic Books in Class

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:

Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?

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I have to admit that I am not nearly so versed in graphic novels and comics as J. and Andrew. Certainly, I enjoy them, but I have never made it a point to explore them in full. Thankfully, I actually do teach courses where I would encounter just such an predicament as J. laid out in his prompt, so I have an answer all ready to go.

My choice if I were to teach one graphic novel in a course would be Ghost World by Daniel Clowes. It’s the story of two disaffected teenage girls, Enid and Rebecca, drifting through their post-graduation life with an excess of ennui and a distinct lack of direction. As written and drawn by Clowes it’s the type of works that feels at once deeply personal and surprisingly universal. Certainly, not every  student is going to see a direct reflection of their dyspeptic suburban environment, as I did when I first read it. But the feelings of discontent that both girls feel are undoubtedly universal, especially at that stage of late adolescence.

Neither Enid nor Rebecca have big dreams in Ghost World, just a desire to find something meaningful to do, and maybe someone to care about without a protective layer of irony. Not exactly the Jay Gatsby-types, but Ghost World is a much more grounded work than Fitzgerald could have dreamed of. Ghost World isn’t set in the here and now anymore (it was published almost 20 years ago, ye gods…), but it depicts universal emotions in such a specific manner that I think it would resonate strongly despite any initial skepticism towards the form or its content.

That reluctance plays into my decision as well. In my teaching experience, it has been a repeated delight to push new materials on my students when they expect not to like it. Screening films like The Tree of Life, Gegen die wand, or even Young Mr. Lincoln is met with groans and eye-rolls. Most 19-year-olds aren’t terribly interested in pushing their own cultural boundaries, and don’t expect to ever like anything they encounter in a classroom. Introducing a graphic novel that is not about superheroes, and which doesn’t make up for that with romance or drama, seems like a sure way to engender grumbling. 

So when it comes time for class discussion, it is deeply gratifying to hear “I expected to hate it, but that was really interesting.” Not every reaction will be like that, obviously, but I fully expect that Ghost World would earn the remark from someone. Other graphic novels would do much the same, of course. But Ghost World means a lot to me, and half the fun of designing your own curriculum is making others experience things you enjoy, so it wins.

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Read the responses from the other editors, J., Andrew, and Travis, as they are published throughout today

Traveling Towards Eternity: Death and Myth in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

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“Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence.” – Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

How does one deal with eternity?

Time’s irresistible march forward is the defining aspect of the universe as we know it, a constant that outlasts all other constants. Even without understanding the exactitudes of the time-space continuum, humans have known it  since our very beginnings. Time was relentless and punishing, offering no chances for our ancestors to go back and correct their mistakes. Looking at structures from pre-historic peoples all across the globe we see monuments to the seasons and the stars. These were aspects of the eternal that humanity could understand and put into order. Dawn struck at precisely the same spot at Stonehenge each solstice, and so a temple was built there and rituals were performed because those ancients understood just a sliver more of the universe’s mysteries.

Each religion and every civilization has endeavored to accumulate or illuminate more and larger such slivers, because understanding more might eventually lead us to understanding it all. As more knowledge is accumulated and recorded human existence gets easier and we progress towards greater knowledge and organization. Farmers learn the rhythms of the seasons, fishermen come to understand the tides, and life is that much less a hardscrabble struggle for survival. Eternity seems less daunting as we master more and more, even if the individual people within each society will never know what lies beyond our their inevitable doom. Knowledge gets passed along, and life gets better, but it still ends. The void still looms, even for the denizens of the richest and most advanced nations. One of the most common efforts to deal with that gnawing uncertainty is to mark death. Memorializing someone’s expired form with a headstone, remembering the past we knew with them, and making an effort to live better in their honor, is perhaps our only way to indicate anything to the void.

Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is about just such an effort. Set in the borderlands along the Rio Grande, its tells a story about death and redemption that resonates with the mythic power of the best Westerns. Jones plays the lead role, a rancher named Pete Perkins, whose friend, the titular Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), is found partially buried in the wilderness in the film’s opening moments. All signs seem to point towards new Border Patrolman Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a cruel hothead recently relocated to West Texas from the Midwest, being behind the apparent murder. Not wanting to stir up trouble with the powerful Border Patrol over an illegal immigrant’s anonymous demise, the local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) refuses to press the case any further than he has to and quickly reburies Estrada in an undistinguished lot. Perkins responds to this miscarriage of justice by kidnapping Norton, forcing him to dig up Estrada’s body, and lashing both men to some horses in order to bring Estrada’s body back to his homeland across the river.

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Best TV of 2011-12: 80% of the Top Ten

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Picking up where we left off last week, I am continuing my run through the best that TV had to offer this past year. This week I am listing off spots ten through three from my top ten list. I tried to write out what made each of these shows special and worthwhile, though none of them got the space for consideration and praise that they truly deserve. That being said, I realized before I even wrote this that the two shows that top my list will need a ton of space just to get all my thoughts about them into coherent order. So they will get their own posts in a few days. Until then, enjoy this section and take a guess as to what my top two are.

Oh, and if you haven’t yet, check out my Honorable Mentions and Individual Citations list first. Enjoy!

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Best TV of 2011-12: Honorable Mentions and Individual Citations

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TV cannot be more charming

I watched more great TV in the past season than I can ever remember doing before. This is a big, bold statement, essentially saying that the best of TV in the past 12 months stands up to the best of any other such period, ever. But, hey, I lead with it, so I stand by it. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of what is current, great, and vital to American popular culture right now, turn on your TV (or download lots of videos off the Internet, as I too often did).

So, without much ado I want to get on to the listing and such. There will be two distinct parts to this article: first, the list of my picks for the top ten programs that aired from June 2011 to June 2012. Each show will get a brief write-up arguing my case for it, and the top two will get another, longer article devoted to them soon. I will also call out what programs deserve an honorable mention, and those that I missed and should not have — you can all take me to task for that. After that I will go through and list of some of the individuals or specific episodes that deserve a special mention outside of the list. Enjoy!

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