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”.
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.
Everything I’m going to write here pales in comparison to Roger Ebert’s great insight in that clip above. He calls movies “a machine that generates empathy.” That’s an idea that’s stuck with me for a long time and through many movies. It might not be the first thing that leaps to mind when I consider something like Mad Max, but it’s always there. No matter how poorly crafted or cynically conceived, every movie has the capacity to connect us with the experiences of others. Most of the time that’s engaged simply to get us cheering for the protagonist and jeering at the antagonist, but our capacity for empathy can go far beyond that. It can make us stare without blinking at our own awful past. It can make us consider the furthest stretches of our capacity for love and connection. Or it can make us sit down, eat some popcorn, and see a way of life that is both utterly foreign and thoroughly recognizable. That’s exactly what I did last week when I took in the sterling 4K restoration Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy at The Music Box Theatre.
I wrote the above paragraph on the night of Tuesday, June 16th. The next night a white supremacist terrorist took nine innocent lives in Charleston, South Carolina because he hated them for their skin color. That attack has shaken me up and brought about a significant rewrite to the rest of this piece.
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.
One of the most indelible memories of childhood moviegoing was twenty years ago, watching a cartoon the likes of which I had never seen before called Toy Story. Since that day in 1995, Pixar has given the world a gift of extraordinary all-ages films from studio chief John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and others that have redefined both the style and substance of modern filmmaking. However, Pixar post-2010 has fallen into a rut, mostly producing films of lesser quality. Inside Out, the new feature from Docter (who also helmed Monsters, Inc. and Up), is a sign that this trend is about to change.
First of all, spoiler alert.
The Jurassic Park franchise has historically been a major draw. The original 1993 film was the largest grossing movie of all time until Titanic came along four years later. The second film, though largely sub-par when compared with the first, held the record for the largest opening weekend until 2001, when some movie about a little boy wizard came along and took over. These were original event pictures, massive draws that were required summer viewing for the young millennial generation. Dinosaurs are cool, and people love seeing dinosaurs.
That seems to be holding true for Jurassic World, the latest entry in the series. Originally forecast to make something in the vicinity of $125 million in its opening weekend, the movie made nearly that on Friday alone. Early reports have the movie taking in an opening weekend haul of $204 million, which puts it at the third best opening of all time. Meanwhile, across the world, the film took in a staggering $511 million dollars, an all time world record. People still love their dinosaurs.
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.
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.
(Here there be spoilers!)
The Marvel movies keep getting it right. They’re not perfect–there are things I would love to see done in a different way, and movies I want to see that aren’t being made (Black Widow), but what they are doing, they’re doing better than anyone else.
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.
One 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.
Andrew: Annie Clark and Andrea Pino had two things in common when they met. One, they were very proud students of the University of North Carolina. Two, they had been raped on campus. Their accusers were never punished. And when they took a stand against UNC’s handling of the situation, the school’s chief legal counsel, a woman, emphatically declared they were completely wrong.
This story is that it is all too common across America, and this epidemic of sexual assault and institutional misogyny in our colleges is the subject of two-time Oscar nominee Kirby Dick’s new documentary, The Hunting Ground, which, for several reasons, is one of the most heartbreaking and important films to come out this decade.
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.
This is a Great Chicagoan.
In 1969, the directories of Chicago counseling services began including a group known only as “Jane.” Jane did not provide psychiatric help or twelve-step programs. Jane—organized by UChicago student Heather Booth—was a network of sympathetic doctors and trained women who provided safe abortions, operating in various apartments, ready to flee at a second’s notice. Jane performed 11,000 abortions, and potentially saved and improved as many lives, by the time of Roe v. Wade.
This was a story I’d never heard before.