Author: Alex Bean

A Song of Human Empathy: Reflecting on The Apu Trilogy’s Restoration

Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

How Does This Hold Up?: 10 Things I Hate About You

Leave a Comment

REX_10_things_cast_jtm_141117_16x9_992

How Does This Hold Up? is a series where Alex and a guest check out a movie they haven’t seen in ages or that they’ve always been meaning to watch. They’ll compare the experience of watching these movies now to when they first saw or heard of them and explore the differences there-in. [Read more…]

The End of an Era: Reflections on the Mad Men Finale

3 Comments
A fitting end.

A fitting end.

Alex:

Mad Men is over. This is still a difficult idea to process. When Becky and I did our binging re-watch a few months ago I kept trying to remember where and when I was as each big episode queued up on Netflix. I originally watched the premiere on a friend’s couch, because that’s where 20-year-old Bean lived in the summer between his Sophomore and Junior years of college. I caught up on seasons two and three in my apartment in Hyde Park in between sessions of frenzied Master’s Thesis writing. Season 4 was in a crappy starter apartment. Season 5 was in a high rise I always sort of felt like a tourist in. I moved in the middle of both the 6th season and the first half of the 7th. On Sunday night, I watched the series finale from the living room of the grand condo that Becky and I bought six months ago. [Read more…]

A Stranger in a Strange Land: Alternate Glimpses of Our Past in The Moor’s Account

Leave a Comment

MoorsAccount_Cover-687x1024Last month Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s second novel, The Moor’s Account, was announced as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In their citation the Pulitzer committee said that the novel was “a creative narrative of the ill-fated 16th Century Spanish expedition to Florida, compassionately imagined out of the gaps and silences of history.” That second clause ran through my mind as I raced through the novel a few weeks after its citation. The Moor’s Account is Lalami’s imagining of the famously doomed Narváez expedition to Florida that began with 600 Spanish conquistadors and settlers landing near Tampa Bay and ended 8 years later when the only four known survivors stumbled across some Spanish soldiers in what is now northern Mexico. Cabaeza de Veca would become the most famous of those survivors when his La Relación became the official royal account. Lalami, as you might have guessed, moves the narration from de Vaca to Estevanico, a Moorish slave owned by one of the other surviving Spainards and the first known African (and African slave) to land in what is now the United States.  [Read more…]

How Does This Hold Up?: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Leave a Comment

zhang_zi_yi_michelle_yeoh_crouching_tiger_hidden_dragon_001How Does This Hold Up? is a series where Alex and a guest check out a movie they haven’t seen in ages or that they’ve always been meaning to watch. They’ll compare the experience of watching these movies now to when they first saw or heard of them and explore the differences there-in. [Read more…]

Our Month in Pop Culture: May 2015

1 Comment

We here at The Addison Recorder read stuff. We also watch stuff. And play stuff, even. Sometimes, that stuff is interesting. Sometimes we just need to talk about whatever pop culture ephemera occupies our time.  Soar on. [Read more…]

How Does This Hold Up: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Leave a Comment

rabbit_bannerHow Does This Hold Up? is a series where Alex and a guest check out a movie they haven’t seen in ages or that they’ve always been meaning to watch. They’ll compare the experience of watching these movies now to when they first saw or heard of them and explore the differences there-in. [Read more…]

Ranking World Football Leagues by How Interesting They Are

Leave a Comment

The Champions League quater-finals are this week and most domestic leagues are heading towards their finales. In light of that, our friend Luke De Smet is back to comment on what football leagues are most interesting.

So with beIN Sports now playing a bunch of random games, I’ve decided to pick teams in a bunch of different divisions. Let’s see how many of them win trophies! I’ll rank them from those I have the least interest in to those I have the most: [Read more…]