Arts

In Search of Lost Time: Looking at the Small Stuff in The Grand Budapest Hotel

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In the very best films there are always a handful of quiet things that insist on the large-scale completeness and grandeur of the filmmakers’ vision for their work. The big scenes are always there to be commented upon and picked over regardless of how good or bad a film might be. To me, though, the very best filmmakers often leave their mark in the quieter or more subdued moments. Perhaps the classic example of this is the story of the girl with the parasol in Citizen Kane. That little moment remains with me as much as anything else in that masterpiece, but it has none of the showmanship and chutzpah that Orson Welles’ work is so renowned for. It’s just a quiet moment of grace and insight which subtly illuminates all the rest of the film’s emotions and themes upon reflection. I am not bold enough to say that The Grand Budapest Hotel,  the new film from my favorite director, Wes Anderson, has anything on the level of that immortal parasol story (or Citizen Kane in general). But I do think this is a wonderful film that is brought to most vivid life and vibrancy by such small moments illuminating the larger construct.
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Field Dressing: Costume Design in Hannibal

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WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD!

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Do not attend this meal.

 

Hannibal is a show with amazing aesthetics that not only look enthralling , but also serve to give insight into the personalities and hidden desires of the characters.  Most television shows put costumes on their characters by simply choosing something that will look good, not bothering to use costumes to enhance the show’s storytelling.  There are a select few costume designers who are working at such a level,  namely  Janie Bryant, who has designed for Deadwood and Mad Men, among many other shows.  Christopher Hargadon, the costume designer for Hannibal, is the latest to join this rank. Taking a look at the first episode of the second season offers a prime examples of this once the meaning and usage of the costumes is deconstructed.

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The first scene of the new season is a brutal fight between Hannibal Lector (Mads Mikkelsen) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne); a shocking and unexpected opening that leaps far down the narrative road within the series. But if we look beyond the action sequence, we can look into the minds of the characters (and pretend that we’re just like Hannibal! In that we will have psychological insight… no eating people…). In this scene, Hannibal is wearing a simple white striped shirt.  This is a stark change from the bright jackets and ties that were his common look in the first season.  He is in his kitchen, probably the room where he feels the most comfortable being himself (which is unsettling). He is not expecting anyone and is therefore dressed down. White is usually used to show youth and innocence. But in this scene, where we see Jack’s (eventual) knowledge of his crimes come to a climax, any semblance of innocence or tranquility comes crashing down around him. His white shirt becomes covered in blood, blotting out (forever?) the facade of guiltless detachment Hannibal has carefully cultivated.
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Inhabiting Carcosa: 5 Things You Ought to Know About the ‘Yellow King’

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Congratulations! If you’re anything like me, you heard about how great this True Detective show was halfway through its 8-episode run. Like any rational person, you then marathoned a bunch of episodes to get caught up. You’re now ready for the season finale on Sunday.

Or are you?

Before we all gather ’round to watch what fate befalls Rust and Marty, let’s take a stroll down the weird mythos underpinning the series — Carcosa and the King in Yellow. Since I have some expertise on the source material, I figured it was the perfect time to put that knowledge to work. (While other folks were getting marketable degrees, I was comparing the meta-narrative structures of Robert W. Chambers and Luigi Pirandello. I’m not exaggerating; that was a project for my graduate Modernist Theatre class.)

The professor for that class — I kid you not — was coincidentally the son of a man named “R.W. Chambers.” Just not THIS particular R.W. Chambers.

Here are five things you’ll want to have rattling around the back of your brain when the chords of “Far From Any Road” kick up Sunday night for the last time this season (minor spoilers, naturally). And we’re going to start with the big one: [Read more…]

On “Parenthood,” Children Come To Know Their Folks as Friends

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Parenthood is on NBC Thursdays at 9 Central. (Source)

Parenthood is on NBC Thursdays at 9 Central. (Photo source)

About a year ago, a friend told me I needed to be watching “Parenthood.” She told me it was payback (in a good way) for convincing her to watch “Friday Night Lights,” and she has successfully paid it forward. The two NBC critically-acclaimed darlings share a showrunner in Jason Katims, and there’s a lot of actor overlap between the shows. If you liked “Friday Night Lights,” there’s a good chance you’ll be into “Parenthood” — especially if you’ve lost a parent. Or unless, depending on how you’re dealing with it.

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Rumor-Mongering: A Few Brief Words on “How I Met Your Mother”

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I don’t watch much TV. This is partly because my schedule is so out of whack with normality that it’s difficult for me to regularly keep up with any television show. I will marathon the shit out of TV series when I am given the opportunity – which is what shows like Breaking Bad and True Detective are destined for…one day. The other factor is that it’s hard for me to put that much emotional investment into a serialized form of media – I end up caring way, way too much about what I’m watching – and don’t deal well with not knowing what’s going to happen. (I’ve already had ONE Lord of the Rings series in my life, thank you very much. I don’t need it twenty-four times a year for five to seven years running)

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Which is what’s caused me to feel such immense outrage over How I Met Your Mother today.

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The Live Oscars Blog

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It’s a quiet night at one of the Addison Recorder headquarters, Alex and Becky’s home, but a tempest so mighty not even Russell Crowe and some CGI ark-building-action could withstand it is potentially brewing. And oh the eruption if American Hustle wins awards. There will be paroxysms of annoyance, laughter, and clever insults during the musical performances and the more groan-worthy moments, but how much hellish inferno and celebration there shall be is still to be determined. And my job, as one of the resident cinematic experts, is to both put all of this into perspective and document the reactions here.

We’ve seen seven Best Picture nominees and two other probable big winners, Frozen and The Great Beauty, and we’ve written a great deal already. We thank you for paying attention to all our opinions, and your indulgence as we express our final opinions as it’s too late to do any darn thing about it. Not that anyone was paying attention to us, although who knows…maybe somehow along the way, these links turned up on the Facebook page or inbox or Google search of the Academy voters and they thought, “Hey, Alex and Andrew and Karen and Travis really know what they’re talking about, I didn’t think about this movie that way, I should vote for it/him/her!”

Though probably not. YET. We can still dream.

And here is the required-by-law picture of Jennifer Lawrence.

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The Addison Recorder’s 2014 Big-Deal Ultra-Insider Oscar Preview

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The Addison Recorder has a lot of movie nerds on staff. Not all of us, of course, but enough to make the others bend to our will. So in anticipation of this week’s Oscar ceremony the staff is going to do their Will/Should/Dream winners picks for the category we care most about with some brief accompanying comments. The cinema nerds will have seen enough (or feel self-righteous enough) to really make it seem like their opinions and guess have weight and meaning. The others have said they are throwing darts. Either process is as valid as actual Oscar voters filling out a ballot proclaiming one work of art objectively better than another.

Also, sometimes an Alex can’t help himself and has to respond to the other writers. It’s just something an Alex does when shaken.

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A Cinderella Story: The Addison Recorder’s Brief Tribute to Harold Ramis

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Hollywood has sucked hard so far in 2014, in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of movies. The best are dying and dying so fast.

In the aftermath of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, so eloquently memorialized here by Alex, the number one clip I kept seeing over and over on the Internet was of the Lester Bangs scenes in Almost Famous, the scenes that made Hoffman feel like our cool older brother or uncle. In the same way, Harold Ramis, native of Addisonian territory, graduate of high school in Edgewater, former member of both the Second City and the Chicago Daily News, could truly be seen as a father figure for our generation.

Two examples from my personal life: I got my first pair of glasses just after I turned four years old in 1988 and I’ve worn them ever since. Back then, I had all the action figures and the Ghost Traps AND the firehouse headquarters playset for Ghostbusters. I watched the movie over and over and never missed the Saturday morning cartoon show. And Dr. Egon Spengler–Harold Ramis–was my hero. Venkman and Ray got the laughs, but Egon knew all the science. Egon came up with the plans that worked and kept the team together. Egon wore glasses and it didn’t keep him on the sidelines or make him be treated like a nerd the way all the other characters I saw who wore glasses were treated. 

And in my family, every time somebody says the line “I just talked to her last week…she was going to make a pot for me!” we all crack up.

But I need to take this beyond me. All of us who write for The Addison Recorder exercise our purely creative muscles beyond non-fiction in one way or another. Harold Ramis’s work shaped our ideas on how to be entertaining. How to be hilarious. How to tell the truth in an inventive way.

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“The Smell of Old People’s Houses” : The Great Beauty

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After the first woman he ever loved broke his heart, Jep Gambardella wrote a novel called The Human Apparatus. It won major literary prizes and everyone alive in Italy seemed to have read it and been inspired by it. Jep then moved to Rome, became a journalist and an even bigger celebrity, and never wrote another word of fiction. Now he’s just turned 65. His two best friends are a playwright lusting after a college girl and the foul-mouthed dwarf woman who edits his newspaper. He interviews performance artists who shave their pubic hair into Communist symbols and run headfirst into aqueducts. His upstairs neighbor in their apartment complex across the street from the Colosseum intrigues him. He’s unexpectedly connecting with a 42 year-old stripper. And everyone around him is starting to die. Not in a supernatural or murder mystery sense, but simply from aging, decaying, leaving only traces behind.

Paolo Sorrentino’s magnificent The Great Beauty is a film full of dichotomies, and here is the key one…

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Philomena and the New Oscars

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I.

Miss Williams and I agreed this scene is one of the diamonds of the film. Not saying anything more…

It may surprise you that Philomena has outgrossed both Dallas Buyers Club and her at the American box office. It should not surprise you that Philomena is an excellent movie. Like Gravity and Twelve Years a Slave, it is perfectly executed in that it fully works out its theme, never wastes a minute of its running time without feeling too short or too long, and has a marvelously constructed screenplay by Steve Coogan (who also produced and starred) and Jeff Pope. It’s the sort of script where the setups and payoffs are both logical and emotionally earned. There is one scene near the end, for instance, where the action takes a turn I initially thought was far too abrupt; by the end of that scene, however, I understood why the characters were acting the way they did at the beginning and what made them change. And the overall effect of these setups and payoffs was enough for it to be the first Best Picture nominee this year to make me cry. (I saw this with fellow Addisonian Meryl and she basically concurs on these opinions.)

(Editor’s Note: As someone who sat next to Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, this is definitely not the first Picture nominee of 2013 to make him cry. – Alex)

(Editor’s Note 2: As someone who sat down aisle of Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, I decidedly have to agree. Although he wasn’t alone in the crying. No sir. – Travis)

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