Author: Andrew Rostan

A Well-Oiled Machine: “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful”

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2015 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival - Weekend 1 - Day 3

Florence + The Machine have not released an album since before The Addison Recorder was founded, and anticipation for their third long-player has built over that four-year stretch thanks to a smattering of hit singles and live performances. If there were any fears that the long wait might have resulted in disappointment, I am happy to report that such worry is groundless. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful is a sterling, entrancing collection of powerful songs.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: “When Marnie Was There” and the Studio Ghibli Legacy

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

whenmarnieposter

Last August, one month after they released their twentieth feature film, Studio Ghibli announced they would be taking a hiatus in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement. Miyazaki has insisted that the studio will go on without him helming features, but this did not stop many fans from fretting that one of the most exceptional production companies of all time is done for. I’m inclined to believe Miyazaki, but if Ghibli indeed shutters for good, that twentieth film, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There, which Disney has now released in the United States, would be a beautiful and fitting finale.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Cannes and Canon

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

Carol

Right now, one of the largest events in the movie world is happening across the ocean. The Cannes Film Festival is where lots of deals are made for lots of schlock, but also where the world’s greatest filmmakers have long chosen to showcase their newest work. The news filtering over to America has mostly been underwhelming: snippets of The Hateful Eight and Steve Jobs apparently made no one present start talking Oscar. But some films have been getting a memorable reaction, and I’d like to highlight five that we should pay attention to in the next few months.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies (and Music): All Or Nothing with Ol’ Blue Eyes

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

Capitol Sinatra

His mother spoke over fifty dialects of Italian and helped neighborhood girls with abortions. His father was a barkeep who boxed under the last name O’Brien because people thought only the Irish could fight. His voice teacher was a drunk ex-opera singer who lived over a restaurant in New York. He was friends with lawbreakers and Presidents. He was a teen idol who became an institution.

Charlton Heston said at a testimonial dinner that every one of his songs sounded like a four-minute movie. Frank Sinatra, who celebrates his centennial this year (and died seventeen years ago today), had a past that fueled a lifetime of stories.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Age of Overstuffed Blockbusters

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

rsz_avengers_age_of_ultron_team-hdOne of the questions I wrestle with as both a creative writer and Recorder critic is what makes a story work; determining what a story wants and needs to give its audience and how well it fulfills those objections. The Avengers: Age of Ultron, which for many was the most anticipated film of 2015, offers a complex answer to these questions. The movie has several flaws, ranging from glaring to subtle, that keep it from being fully successful…and I have to balance these flaws with the knowledge that I had a hell of a good time at this movie.

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C2E2 Panels – Bad Comedy and Great Wisdom

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Panel

Attending comic convention panels is a mixed bag of an act. I have been to some wonderful and informative ones in my time, and also ones in which a publisher simply read off a list of every single title they’ll be releasing in the next six months. The two panels I went to at C2E2 were a prime example of that mixed bag. One was ultimately disappointing, the other wonderfully illuminating.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Summer of ’65, or The Global Blockbuster

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

rsz_gonewiththewind1

Next week, there’s a movie opening in which James Spader takes on eight or nine lost creatures in a duel for the fate of humanity. I kid because I know Age of Ultron will rake in more than the entire Recorder staff will make in our lives 100 times over. Thinking about this sure thing, however, led me down one of my inquisitive rabbit holes. What in a movie attracts the mass audience to go see it? What is the nature of the blockbuster?

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A Harp Playing at the Crossroads: “Ireland 1690-1840” at the Art Institute of Chicago

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Many of the recent major exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago have been retrospectives of individuals: Matisse, Lichtenstein, Picasso, Magritte. However, the current show takes a look at an epoch of an entire country. Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design examines the aesthetic output of the Emerald Isle from 1690 to 1840. At first glance, this seems a strange choice, for Ireland is not historically important to art history as France, Italy, and Japan are, but a tour through the galleries reveals many unimagined delights and powerful statements.

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A Pasture of Desire: The Promise of Ryley Walker’s “Primrose Green”

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Primrose

Ryley Walker is a 25 year-old from the Chicago suburbs by his birth certificate and a time-traveling folk-rock spirit by his career. One look at the cover of his sophomore album, Primrose Green, is enough to make anyone think they’ve stumbled across a lost classic from the late 1960s, what with the ethereal photography and Walker himself in long hair and vivid-colored blazer. The music within reinforces such an impression, as it draws so heavily on the styles of some of the era’s most acclaimed records. Walker is definitely not in that league yet, but Primrose Green suggests a fruitful career is in store.

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A Short Guide to Grief: Sufjan Steven’s “Carrie and Lowell”

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Carrie and Lowell

I’ve long been a Sufjan Stevens fan. He is an intelligent, clever songwriter who seems to enter every record with an ambitious plan and the determination to carry it through, and his finest songs are charged with the strongest emotional resonance, especially “Chicago,” which with its anthemic strings, inviting mass choir, and straining but hopeful lyrics, is a soundtrack for new beginnings. This is why it is all the more remarkable for me that Stevens, has made the finest album of his career and one of the best of 2015 with Carrie and Lowell, a record about the ultimate ending.

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