Everyone has their personal joys in the holiday season. Some enjoy the giving of presents. Some enjoy caroling. Some find great meaning in gathering with family and friends and celebrating simply being able to spend time with each other.
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.
Box office numbers are coming in for the past weekend, which saw the wide release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 2, the fourth and final installment of The Hunger Games film franchise. They’re typically ginormous – buoyed by hordes of fans who poured out for the latest event movie of the season (see Bond, James and that upcoming space opera movie for other similar event movies).
And yet, there’s already a sense of disappointment going around the Internet at the cumulative take.
Most cityfolk have a place to fall back on when things are bleak. For many, their venue of choice is a dive bar with worn out cushions in the booths, or a dependable diner with an extensive soup menu. My culinary cure for a bad day is a little unorthodox and a little spicy: I have a taco joint. Cookies & Carnitas is the local place where everyone knows my name, and I count my blessings to be able to fall back on their cuisine after a tough day. This is the type of place where the staff might sit down with you for a moment or two to catch up; the epitome of a good neighborhood restaurant.
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 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.
-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”
Steph: The last few months have a been a veritable smorgasbord of new titles. After weeks of bringing home dozens of number 1’s, it’s becoming difficult to keep up. Here’s a quick list of some of the most recent.
-J.: Before we get to the few new #1 issues that didn’t inspire a hearty “meh,” let’s talk about the sheer volume of #1 issues that have hit the shelves recently. It’s ridiculous. [Read more…]
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.
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.
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.
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.
-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”
Today is the release of the deluxe edition of the collected volume of the Sandman: Overture. The Sandman comics were an influential and formative part of creating the duo of -J. and Steph, so it was only fitting that they discuss the final Sandman story, which is also the first.
the Sandman: Overturewords by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart, published by Vertigo
Synopsis: it’s the story of what happened just before the sweeping saga that is the Sandman, where we discover why Dream was galaxies away and dressed for battle. [Read more…]
I wanted to write about the World Series on Monday. I wanted to write a wrap-up about the culmination of the Royals journey, a journey that started last October and ended on November 1st with Kansas City sitting on top of the world. I wanted to write about the sheer joy of seeing a team come together, about the sheer joy with which that Royals team played baseball, about the fact that even in the most dire of moments, this team always felt like they would rise above everything.
But I didn’t. Because my heart was broken a few days earlier when ESPN announced that they were shuttering Grantland for good.