Author: Andrew Rostan

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: A Throwback to the Fifties

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

This piece goes up the day after Thanksgiving. Chances are, fair reader, you’re home with your relatives or your relatives have come to you. There’s a few lazy days following the turkey consumption and people may feel like seeing a movie. However, almost every choice has pitfalls. You need a film that won’t provoke a rant from your relations, and doesn’t require watching three previous films, and isn’t from a franchise you find archaic, and is still new enough that people aren’t sick of hearing about it.

Brooklyn is 2015’s grand prize winner for “movie to see with your older relatives.” It is a movie with nothing objectionable in it. It is also beautifully made and a serious Oscar contender thanks to the figure at its center.

Romance

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Recapturing the Magic “W/ Bob and David”

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Poster

HBO aired the final episode of Mr. Show with Bob and David in December 1998, by which time, as the DVD boxes pointedly state, the network was regularly bumping it from the schedule in favor of Real Sex. Seventeen years later, David Cross and Bob Odenkirk are two of the most respected and influential people in comedy and Mr. Show survived early cancellation and a disastrous film version to become a beloved cult classic. Now the duo are on Netflix for the reunion sketch comedy series W/ Bob and David. At four episodes it is an easy binge-watch, but if it is a necessary binge-watch is a matter for debate.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Your SPECTRE Against Mine

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

o-SPECTRE-DANIEL-CRAIG-570

This review doubles as a response to our critical brethren, who have developed the most polarizing reactions to the movie in question. Here is mine. SPECTRE, the twenty-fourth James Bond film and one of the most expensive movies ever made, is not that good. It is, in parts, downright bad. But it instantly became one of my favorite 007 movies, and one I will giddily rewatch again and again.

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Mr. Rostan at “The Peanuts Movie:” The Mythos of Charlie Brown

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Peanuts!

The Peanuts Movie is a film I had the most mixed feelings imaginable about upon hearing of its production. One of the most unfailingly joyful parts of my childhood was discovering and devouring Charles M. Schulz’s world. This went beyond devouring the books and television specials. I would read out loud and give every character a distinctive voice, and some of the first stories I ever made up were further adventures for Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang, and as I grew older and learned more about the deeper philosophical meaning of Peanuts (most recently well summarized by Todd VanDerWerff in Vox), I fell in love with the strip more. Peanuts is a part of me.

The last film adaptation was released four years before I was born, and when I heard the new movie was a joint effort of BlueSky, 20th Century-Fox, Paul Feig, and the Schulz family, I felt a sense of promise. But it was also a 3-D movie for the most 2-D of characters, and the history of Peanuts in cinema sets a poor precedent for this film.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Enduring Stillness of “Room”

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

room_movie_poster

There are many words to describe Room, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her novel and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, but if I had to sum it up in only one, that word would be “still.” Room is a quiet, lingering, peaceful movie for the most part, and this tone serves to both make the moments of emotional crescendo all the more hard-hitting and allow the audience to enter the characters’ emotional states in the midst of the calm, thus allowing the story’s drama and power to overwhelm. Room is an unforgettable picture, and while credit is due to the entire team, the greatest masterstroke is the performance of Brie Larson.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: “In the Shadow of Women” and “Youth”

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Caine Dano

I have spent more time than I could add up at the movies in Chicago, but shamefully I did not go to the Chicago International Film Festival until its 51st program this year. (And as befits our home base’s culture, it is so terrifically run I will never make the mistake of skipping it again.) My two screenings were of new films not yet generally released in America. One is a small art-house picture, the other is expected to be an Oscar contender, and both are far from perfect…yet are both worth seeing for different reasons.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: A Well-Made Play

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Steve Jobs

During high school English, I learned the meaning of the term “well-made play:” an updating of Aristotle’s classical principles of drama that mostly came from the mind of French playwright Eugene Scribe. The well-made play is based around tight structure, plenty of off-screen action, a unity in time and place, key information that only certain characters know, and a fall-and-rise plot leading to a triumphant climax.

It may be about an innovator who helped build the world as we know it, but Steve Jobs is at its heart a filmed version of a well-made play, and this unusual choice makes it transcend the multitude of controversies concerning its journey to the screen, for the result is an unforgettable picture.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Remember When I Found Out I Had a Daughter?

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

 Moore Page

Carrie Nelson warned me about Freeheld.

Carrie and I have been friends since we attended Emerson College together, and among many things she is a terrific documentary filmmaker who is steeped in the language and lore of cinema. I say “among many things” because she is also a regular contributor to The Daily Dot and an outspoken voice on LGBTQ and feminist issues. She has taught me a great deal, and thus when she revealed she had seen Freeheld I eagerly asked her opinion on this early Oscar contender.

She looked at me with a grimace.

“It is such a bad film. I wanted to like it so much…but all the dialogue is pretty awful. Very literal and expository.”

I have now seen Freeheld…and it is even worse than that.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Cinematic Science of “The Martian”

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Last month, Travis wrote about staying up until four in the morning to finish Andy Weir’s novel The Martian in what could only be described as an endorsement for a compelling story. This month, 20th Century-Fox released their blockbuster film adaptation of Weir’s self-published debut, and the result is something more than compelling. The Martian is a triumph for not only science fiction cinema but cinema in general. It is a movie in which every part works, adding up to an extraordinary whole.

The-Martian-viral-teaser

For the purposes of this column, I don’t need to probe the plot (Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars and, with NASA, makes a plan to get home…what else do you need to know?) and will only briefly touch on the themes, which are most eloquently described by Devin Faraci in his review which I urge you to read. Suffice to say that The Martian made me tremble with joy as a film about the very best of humanity: if 2001: A Space Odyssey, my favorite sci-fi film of all time, uses space as a metaphor for the remarkable potential of human beings, The Martian is its natural sequel in its inspirational depiction of how humans use that potential in our gifts of intelligence, creativity, and problem solving. It would not have had such an effect had it not been so outstandingly made. Therefore, in something close to Watney’s philosophy, I’m going to concentrate on The Martian’s components and how they work together.

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A Mr. Rostan at the Movies Special: Olive Kitteridge

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Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Olive-Kitteridge

During the Emmys this year, a significant part of the conversation focused on both the wins of Jon Hamm and Viola Davis and the record-breaking haul for Game of Thrones. These were reasonable expectations. What surprised me and, I think, many others, were the eight awards given to another HBO program, the miniseries Olive Kitteridge. This was a show that received a great deal of advertising; but, as with CBS’s unrelenting line-up of procedurals, I didn’t know anyone who actually had watched it. Made curious by the Emmys, I fired up HBO GO and spent this past weekend viewing all four hours, and by the final shot I was a broken, sobbing heap who needed to call his parents to regain emotional equilibrium.

Olive Kitteridge joins John Adams, The Wire, and Deadwood as one of HBO’s greatest gifts to us.

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