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”.
-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.”
With Gen Con, the largest gaming convention on the continent, starting tomorrow, we thought it would be fun and fitting to pick a few comic series that would make fun role-playing games (RPGs).
This isn’t new ground — DC and Marvel have both licensed their universes to a number of different RPG companies in the last 30 years. And Atomic Robo, one of our favorite comics, was released as a critically-acclaimed RPG this past year. But if we could pick a few other comic books we want to play as RPGs, which ones would they be? What would we want to see in them?
We start with the series that nobody should be surprised to see on this list:
Steph: Rat Queens. Obviously.
-J.: Obviously. One: because we love it, and two: because it already reads like a fantasy RPG turned into an awesome comic book.
The first impression is a memory from high school. My mother and I attend a sold-out performance of Mamma Mia! and cursory examination reveals I am one of a dozen men in the audience. Rarely in my life have I felt like such an interloper.
Saturday night was this multiplied by fifty-five. Soldier Field is jammed with women and girls, wearing a mix of official merchandise, homemade T-shirts, and their finest dresses. There is plenty of red lipstick and homemade electric signs casting light in the darkening sky. This is Taylor Nation, and they have come to experience the biggest singer-songwriter in the world.
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.
Alex and Becky watch a lot of TV. Probably too much. But that means that they sort of know what they’re talking about when the annual Emmy nominations come out. For reference’s sake, Becky has seen most of the programs we talk about here. Alex has seen some of them. He may be talking out of his ass a lot more.
Will Win: Right off the top, it’s worth noting that this might be the strongest set of nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series in Emmy history. The voters done good! They can follow up on that by giving this award to anything not named Modern Family. ABC’s mainstay has won this award every year since it debuted, which would make it six if it triumphs again. There’s a chance that it happens, since it’s the only series in this lineup that we would call “traditional.” But five seems like (more than) enough and its relative lack of other nominations points to the voters agreeing. We think Amazon’s freshman dramedy Transparent is in the best shape to finally take the crown.
Should win: Speaking of Transparent, it’s a really great show! Problem is, it’s not very funny. It’s essentially a half-hour drama that is handled with a light touch, which is enough to be called a comedy. Still feels weird to us, but we won’t yell if it wins. Our personal pick is another new show: Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. We love its screwball energy and the wonderfully committed performances from its regular cast. Worth giving a shout-out to Parks and Recreation, which got its second Series nod for its outstanding final season. It’d be great to see Pawnee get some long overdue recognition.
WTF?: Modern Family needs to be stricken from the ballots. It stopped being even passably entertaining in its third season and its Emmy success has gotten more grating every year since then. Another win would be deadening. [Read more…]
-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.”
It’s been a while since we did a recap of recent #1 releases, in part because of the re-booting brought on by Secret Wars and Convergence. The summer has brought us a plethora of new and re-launched stories, and we start with a classic comic that looks very, very new.
Archie #1words by Mark Waid, art by Fiona Staples, published by Archie Comics
Synopsis: The reboot of Archie finds the titular character giving the reader a tour of his high school, introducing his friends, and now ex girlfriend Betty.
Steph: I loved this. The Waid/Staples combo is just so fun to read. [Read more…]
They were there for hours that hot summer day and I know because I was there for hours, too, walking through the greenery by the Field Museum and the south parking lot. I saw people begging for spare tickets holding up signs reading “I need a miracle.” I saw people in dirty khakis sitting on the grass playing acoustic guitars and selling everything from bottled water to jerk chicken burritos, from jewelry to bowls. I saw tailgaters who gave anyone who liked their little set-up a free beer. I saw elementary school girls bravely dressed in teddy bear costumes. I saw more tie-dye and vintage T-shirts (not thrift store vintage but owned and lived in for years, cherished vintage) then I’ll ever see in one place again.
It was the largest audience in the history of Soldier Field – 71,000 people – and they had gathered to see history that was not just Chicago’s but America’s. They came to see the last performance of the Grateful Dead.
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.
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.
