Films – Page 3 – the Addison Recorder

Beasts of No Nation and How Western Cinema Sees Africa

October 20, 2015 by Alex Bean Leave a Comment

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Editor’s Notes: Beasts of No Nation is currently available to watch on Netflix.

Netflix’s first foray into the feature film market, Beasts of No Nation, has attracted a sizable amount of acclaim and anticipation this Fall. Directed by Cary Joji Fukungawa, who lent True Detective‘s first season its visual panache, and head-lined by rising international star Idris Elba, its recent release will be a test run for how much popular and awards attention Netflix can attract as a nascent movie distributor.

Beasts of No Nation is also being released in the midst of an on-going social and political maelstorm about identity politics. I’m not here to bury or praise the film as a part of that on-going discussion, that’s the purview of our reviewer. But I did think it was worth noting that Beasts fits into the long-standing Western perspective that Africa and its inhabitants as being unusually uncivilized and barbaric. [Read more…]

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

October 16, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

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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A Mr. Rostan at the Movies Special: Olive Kitteridge

September 30, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

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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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: This Column is Called “Electric Boogaloo.”

September 25, 2015 by Andrew Rostan 1 Comment

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.

Australian filmmaker Mark Hartley shot to notice with Not Quite Hollywood, his 2008 doc about his country’s run of over-the-top exploitation movies in their film industry’s nascent stage. Now, working with Warner Bros. and producer Brett Ratner, Hartley has created a hilarious, natural follow-up on an even greater scale about one of the biggest rises and falls in movie history with Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

With the 80s in Mind, Indeed

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Movies For Grown-Ups

September 11, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

One of the greatest moments of 2015.

The weather turns cooler, American football begins, and movie theaters transition away from four-quadrant effects-laden corporate blockbusters to more personal visions. The Oscar season begins in earnest, and I’ve often noticed how the first films to get released in the weeks after Labor Day are among the smaller, less sweeping pictures: films more Sundance than Telluride or Toronto and with less appeal for the younger moviegoer. These are movies for grown-ups, built around minutely observed characters and tight dialogue. This week I caught two movies of highly varying quality.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Power to Believe

August 28, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

Two of the finest documentaries released this year concern themselves with the power to believe, which is crucial to human existence. We believe in things instilled in us after being passed down through generations, and these things, be they faiths or ideologies, help us integrate into society. We also believe in ourselves, which on the one hand is vital to our well-being; self-confidence and finding a worldview that help us deal with existence are important. But it also can be dangerous to if we elevate our ideas too highly, for sometimes they have the power to infect society.

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City on the Hill: Living in Minas Tirith

August 14, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

So, by now, you’ve all seen the trending topic on Facebook/Twitter/theonering.net/wherever. Basically, a Lord of the Rings fanatic cum architectural profession has, along with a bevy of colleagues/friends, started an Indiegogo fundraiser titled “Realise Minas Tirith“. Their goal – to build a living, working real-live version of the fantasy city from Tolkien’s epic trilogy.

I’m sure this has raised some questions amidst the neophytes and non-architecturally inclined. Fortunately, as the Recorder’s resident Tolkien scholar (insert grain of salt here), I can provide answers to these questions.

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Conversation Piece: “The End of the Tour”

August 10, 2015 by Travis J. Cook 1 Comment

There’s a certain subset of the populace that The End of the Tour, a new movie from director James Ponsoldt, is specifically designed to appeal to. During one portion of the film, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) describes the ideal reader for his novel Infinite Jest to writer/reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg): white, male, upper middle class, and “obscenely well educated”.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Death Stories, or, “Amy” and “The Little Death”

July 17, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

Amy Winehouse was not talented; “talented” was too weak a word. She was a phenomenon, one of the most exceptional vocalists of our age, and a person not even the most gifted actress could imitate. Even in the steps of removal that film necessarily creates, Winehouse, both in public and private life, had a presence that could entrance anyone and make them feel she was the only other person in the universe. Asif Kapadia all but resurrects this presence before our eyes in his indisputably essential documentary Amy.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Restoration Dramas, or, Ten Picks for the Gene Siskel Film Center’s “Recently Restored” Festival

July 3, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

If the rest of the summer film season offers nothing that looks like it could match Fury Road and Inside Out, then the Gene Siskel Film Center at State and Randolph is here to help, with a festival whose calendar made me pant with excitement. The Recently Restored series, running from July 3 (or today) to August 16, showcases films from around the world, carefully returned to how both their original audiences saw them (in the finest picture and sound quality) and as their makers intended them to be seen (with the return of cut, damaged, or previously lost footage). It is a wonderful opportunity to see intriguing pictures you’ve never heard of before or check some masterpieces off your list.

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