Reviews – Page 2 – the Addison Recorder

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Your SPECTRE Against Mine

November 18, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

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Mr. Rostan at “The Peanuts Movie:” The Mythos of Charlie Brown

November 13, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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, 20^th 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.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Enduring Stillness of “Room”

November 6, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: “In the Shadow of Women” and “Youth”

October 30, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

I have spent more time than I could add up at the movies in Chicago, but shamefully I did not go to the Chicago International Film Festival until its 51^st program this year. (And as befits our home base’s culture, it is so terrifically run I will never make the mistake of skipping it again.) My two screenings were of new films not yet generally released in America. One is a small art-house picture, the other is expected to be an Oscar contender, and both are far from perfect…yet are both worth seeing for different reasons.

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Paved With Good Intentions: Beasts of No Nation

October 26, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

Last week, Alex wrote an enlightening article about the traditional portrayal of Africa in Western Cinema here. The impetus of the piece was the arrival of the film Beasts of No Nation, adapted and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga from the novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala. It’d be a lie to say that many of Alex’s thoughts and observations about the Africa of Western cinema didn’t color my reading of the film, but as with all good writing, it helped me to take notice of several things that might have been missed.

What was unmistakable to me, however, is the fact that Beasts of No Nation, in spite of its ambitions, fails to succeed on several different fronts. It is not without merit – but there’s a great deal missing that could have made this a great movie instead of another mediocre portrayal of an often-overlooked region of the world.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: A Well-Made Play

October 23, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

During high school English, I learned the meaning of the term “well-made play:” an updating of Aristotle’s classical principles of drama that mostly came from the mind of French playwright Eugene Scribe. The well-made play is based around tight structure, plenty of off-screen action, a unity in time and place, key information that only certain characters know, and a fall-and-rise plot leading to a triumphant climax.

It may be about an innovator who helped build the world as we know it, but Steve Jobs is at its heart a filmed version of a well-made play, and this unusual choice makes it transcend the multitude of controversies concerning its journey to the screen, for the result is an unforgettable picture.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Remember When I Found Out I Had a Daughter?

October 16, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

Carrie Nelson warned me about Freeheld.

Carrie and I have been friends since we attended Emerson College together, and among many things she is a terrific documentary filmmaker who is steeped in the language and lore of cinema. I say “among many things” because she is also a regular contributor to The Daily Dot and an outspoken voice on LGBTQ and feminist issues. She has taught me a great deal, and thus when she revealed she had seen Freeheld I eagerly asked her opinion on this early Oscar contender.

She looked at me with a grimace.

“It is such a bad film. I wanted to like it so much…but all the dialogue is pretty awful. Very literal and expository.”

I have now seen Freeheld…and it is even worse than that.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: This Column is Called “Electric Boogaloo.”

September 25, 2015 by Andrew Rostan 1 Comment

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.

Australian filmmaker Mark Hartley shot to notice with Not Quite Hollywood, his 2008 doc about his country’s run of over-the-top exploitation movies in their film industry’s nascent stage. Now, working with Warner Bros. and producer Brett Ratner, Hartley has created a hilarious, natural follow-up on an even greater scale about one of the biggest rises and falls in movie history with Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

With the 80s in Mind, Indeed

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Movies For Grown-Ups

September 11, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

One of the greatest moments of 2015.

The weather turns cooler, American football begins, and movie theaters transition away from four-quadrant effects-laden corporate blockbusters to more personal visions. The Oscar season begins in earnest, and I’ve often noticed how the first films to get released in the weeks after Labor Day are among the smaller, less sweeping pictures: films more Sundance than Telluride or Toronto and with less appeal for the younger moviegoer. These are movies for grown-ups, built around minutely observed characters and tight dialogue. This week I caught two movies of highly varying quality.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Power to Believe

August 28, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

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.

Two of the finest documentaries released this year concern themselves with the power to believe, which is crucial to human existence. We believe in things instilled in us after being passed down through generations, and these things, be they faiths or ideologies, help us integrate into society. We also believe in ourselves, which on the one hand is vital to our well-being; self-confidence and finding a worldview that help us deal with existence are important. But it also can be dangerous to if we elevate our ideas too highly, for sometimes they have the power to infect society.

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