Andrew Alvarez ‘15
Born and raised in a rural southern Michigan town, I used to spend an obscene amount of time watching television as a child. I remember, for a stretch of time, waking every weekday at 5am (now well-nigh unimaginable) to watch the obscure cartoons that didn’t play at any other time of day and carefully scheduling my time on Friday evenings to catch that week’s newly released episodes. I had the entire process down to a science as these seemingly trivial things took on some degree of importance in my childhood world. The love for a good story, that more recently led me on a treacherous and lengthy winter quest in search of the latest Quentin Tarantino production, must have taken hold of me back then, sometime around my hundredth viewing of My Neighbor Totoro.
Now a senior working on an economics degree, I still make time for good stories of any genre or era whenever I can. I am particularly impressed by the power of movies to amuse, enlighten, and inspire viewers, and I would love to contribute to that process in some way after graduating. In the meantime, at the airport, at the gym, or, once in a blue moon, at an actual movie theater, I do my best to squeeze in films from a long list I hope to see before their plots are spoiled. On television, I indulge in only a few crude but clever comedies, like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I have yet to give shows with well-developed plots a proper chance. However, once I have finished taking in the last hundred years or so of cinema’s finest offerings, I have every intention of learning whether Breaking Bad really lives up to all the hype!