The Education of “The Hunting Ground”

rsz_the-hunting-ground-poster-691x1024Andrew: Annie Clark and Andrea Pino had two things in common when they met. One, they were very proud students of the University of North Carolina. Two, they had been raped on campus. Their accusers were never punished. And when they took a stand against UNC’s handling of the situation, the school’s chief legal counsel, a woman, emphatically declared they were completely wrong.

This story is that it is all too common across America, and this epidemic of sexual assault and institutional misogyny in our colleges is the subject of two-time Oscar nominee Kirby Dick’s new documentary, The Hunting Ground, which, for several reasons, is one of the most heartbreaking and important films to come out this decade.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Short Program

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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 either current pictures or important movies from the past.

The Outlier of the Oscars

The Short Films are the Academy Awards that too easily get overlooked. Casual moviegoers recognize the candidates in almost every major category and can often pick out most of the Animated Feature, Documentary, and Foreign Language Film nominees, but for the ten minutes the Shorts take over the program, 99% of the time movies people have never heard made my equally anonymous filmmakers receive the honor that has proved elusive to so many titans of history.

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The Grand Budapest Pharrell and Other Matters: The Best and Worst of the Grammys

This happened.

This happened.

One key idea I’ve always stressed in writing about the Grammys for the Recorder is that the awards themselves are nonsensical. Just go back to my Album of the Year reviews and tell me how to compare Ed Sheeran and Beyonce. It’s impossible. We care about these awards not for what gets given (as in the Oscars) but for the performance factor, the chance to see all the biggest names in music on one stage, seeing who rises to the occasion and who…doesn’t.

With that in mind, here’s our official recap of the best and worst moments of last night’s show. And congratulations to Beck for winning Album of the Year for the difficult, but lovely, Morning Phase! And for getting all Simon and Garfunkel with Chris Martin on a lovely “Heart is a Drum!”

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: “Red Desert” and the Formation of Self

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 either current pictures or important movies from the past.

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Right now, besides writing about movies for this site, I am working on my first screenplay since moving here from Los Angeles. It’s a script that I am immensely proud of but could never have imagined telling when I first set out on my path as a writer. Why that is, and why I write about the films I do on here, requires a small story.

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