Logo designed by Owen Williams.
We are happy to announce the latest extension of our site: The Addison Recorded, the official podcast of the Addison Recorder. Season one of the Addison Recorded starts Tuesday, March 10, when the first episode drops that morning. Meryl Williams and Gina Watters will discuss the premiere season of the new Netflix original series, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
The Oscar Season proper runs from about mid-December to whenever the actual ceremony gets up and going. However, the movies it celebrates come out (sometimes) year round. Below is a collection of Recorder articles about many of the various Oscar films, centralized for your reading pleasure before the big event!
(photo by Stephanie Vera)
For this segment of Unscripted Moments, we sat down with playwright Ray Nelson and director Alexander St. John to talk about the world premiere of the new play of Norma and the Maniac. The show is being produced by The Orchard, in association with Red Twist Theater’s guest company series.
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 have weight. 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 Alex can’t help himself and has to respond to the other writers. It’s just something Alex does when shaken. [Read more…]
Photo Credit – AP/Michael Perez
Unfortunately, in the time since my most recent post, college basketball lost two giants. Former University of North coach Dean Smith passed away on February and former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian passed away on February 11. I encourage you to read others’ magnificent words on Dean Smith, civil rights hero, and Tark, an all-time great coach and character.
On March 24, 2013, Andy Enfield’s Florida Gulf Coast University Eagles captured the hearts and imaginations of tournament-watching America with thunderous dunks, bizarre celebrations, and a set of relatively easy tournament victories over Georgetown and San Diego State University. They became the first 15-seed to play in the tournament’s second weekend, and their success landed Andy Enfield a lavish contract from USC only weeks later. The list of memorable NCAA Tournament Cinderella stories doesn’t begin or end with Florida Gulf Coast. Last season, Mercer upended Duke. George Mason stormed to the Final Four as an 11-seed in 2006. Butler, VCU, Wichita State, and Gonzaga have all established themselves as formidable programs after years of winning tournament games from lower seeds. You can bank every year on a low-seed mid or low conference team making tournament headlines and busting brackets. As thoughtful analysts, it’s our job to ask, “Are these occurrences completely random?”
Kickstarter has been a mixed blessing for the tabletop gaming industry. It provides a platform for small publishers and indie designers to get their game in front of more eyes than previously possible. It can give bigger publishers and distributors a barometer of how popular a game might be. It can give creators of any background to fund a dream project.
Or it can be a platform that enables unprepared creators to crash and burn while trying to handle thousands of dollars of other people’s money.
With a recent influx of board game Kickstarters that have recently launched, funded, or fulfilled their rewards, it’s a perfect time to look at not just the games, but how they utilized this platform. [Read more…]
Just like last year, I am going to make my best guess about what will win at the Oscars this weekend. I’ll provide commentary for the major categories and then just highlight my predicted winners on the rest of the ballot.
You have no idea how much I would prefer this Birdman sweeping towards Osar glory.
Don’t let the self-congratulatory nature fool you, the Oscars really do matter.
Most dedicated moviegoers can agree that the Oscars are the film industry’s most high-profile and solipsistic exercise in self-promotion. Their whole existence is transparently crass and has been from the start. They were initially conceived of as a marketing ploy by industry bigwigs. The annual awards, are a reward for “merit” after a race dominated by tens of millions of dollars in “campaign spending.” Perhaps worst of all, they have given rise to a whole industry devoted to awards-centered navel gazing that takes up nearly half the year. Even if one did ignore all of those sins and just viewed them as a reflection of the taste of Hollywood’s elites then…ye gods. Every year they find new ways to ignore great movies and reward bland or mendacious crap. To view them with disdain is probably the only rational reaction.
And yet, I think the Oscars really do mean something and hold an important place in our cinematic culture. Almost in spite of themselves, the Oscars matter. The more easily defensible reason to love the Oscars is because they encourage the general public to engage with the quality of movies. The Oscars taste may tend towards middlebrow melodramas and biopics, but they still ask anyone watching to ask what movie they preferred and why. Actual critical analysis, of course, should not be based around a horse race mentality. And it’s even more reductive to presume that there can even be a “best” movie. Personal opinions and judgments cannot be reconciled with a term that absolute. [Read more…]
This year has already been a great one for new music, with the release of new work from Belle & Sebastian, Sleater-Kinney, and the Decemberists. The force of nature that is 2015 music continues tomorrow, with a new release from Jose Gonzalez. Vestiges and Claws is currently streaming on NPR First Listen, along with the latest from Public Service Broadcasting. But it doesn’t stop there — Here are some of the new albums coming out in the next few weeks for which I can barely contain my enthusiasm. [Read more…]
They all look so young!
Mad Men will begin airing its final episodes on April 5th. Both of us Beans have been fans of the series since it premiered way back in 2007, so we’re going to re-watch one season per week before the final season begins. Each of us will put together their own reflection about what makes each season special, and what aspects stick out on the umpteenth viewing.
For Season One, we decided to concentrate on the pilot episode. Becky will dive into how the costumes instantly establish the personalities and aims of the major female characters. Alex will examine how the pilot’s plot sets up the series’ main themes for the long run. [Read more…]
