The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Malick seems to be interested in what is outside and underneath and around the framework of our lives. He’s not interested in the stories we tell as much as the moments that cause us to throw our hands up into the air.
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I grew up in Hawaii, so I have no concept of going away on “spring break”, but Harmony Korine has clearly schooled me in what I seemed to not have missed in his raunchy, pulpy, neon-fueled reflection of young America, Spring Breakers.
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Anisse Gross talks with Joshua Mohr about his latest novel, “a call to arms against complacency, a rally towards reclaiming one’s own individuality.”
...moreToday we’re running five essays on Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained. The intention of running so many was not to give Django a disproportionate amount of coverage, but to reflect the controversy and conversation the film has sparked: I’ve overheard 80-year-old men in Speedos talking about it at my swim club, and a thread on my own Facebook page got so heated that I almost quit social media entirely.
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The problem with Tarantino’s Django Unchained is that it’s a very good movie. Wildly entertaining, expertly made, and very fun to watch. I loved almost every second of the watching of it.
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I’m going to go ahead and spoil the entire plot of Bart Layton’s documentary The Imposter, but only because the film does in its first opening minutes. Why? Because the plot, as balls-out-crazy as it is, is not even the most compelling aspect of this film.
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Andrew McCarthy, likely best known to you as a member of the iconic Brat Pack, with his roles in Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire, has forged a second career as a travel writer. Out with a new memoir, The Longest Way Home, about traveling as a way to settle down, McCarthy touches on issues of fatherhood and commitment.
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The skillfully understated filmmaker Kelly Reichardt joins up again with screenwriter Jon Raymond to give us Meek’s Cutoff — a portrait of the Oregon Trail as both a place and an idea, back when the west was an uncharted strange land off in the distance, waiting to be found.
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Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction.
...moreFrancis Ford Coppola’s latest film TWIXT opens in San Francisco this Friday, August 10th. Written, directed and produced by Coppola, this film represents his new code of personal filmmaking ethics: the film must be an original story; it must have a personal component, and it must be self-financed.
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Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965 on an isolated New England island, at the waning end of summer, which as it turns out is the perfect setting for a Wes Anderson story.
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One of the highlights for me of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival was hearing novelist Jonathan Lethem deliver the festival’s annual State of Cinema Address.
Lethem, an exuberant and insatiable cineaste, managed to cram mumblecore, the Occupy movement, and even neotony (you’ll find out), into a wildly adventurous, spirited discourse on cinema today.
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UPDATE: We have a winner! Ryan Van Meter of San Francisco! Congratulations!
The recent film We Need To Talk About Kevin starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray today, and its distributor, Oscilloscope Labs, sent us a copy to give away to one lucky Rumpus reader!
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“It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” This the opening line of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, but isn’t it also the first line of all of our lives?
Walkabout, first published in 1959, is a petite book with a classic premise: two white children from Charleston, South Carolina are traveling when their plane crashes in the Australian outback.
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Travis Mathews is a San Francisco based filmmaker whose movies focus on the emotional and intimate lives of gay men. With both a masters in Counseling Psychology and a background in documentary film work, his films take a humanistic and natural approach to their subjects.
Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
The opening image is of a young girl, twenty going on twelve, pale enough to make you worry if she’s ever seen the sun. She’s sitting in an antiseptic lab having a tube shoved ever so slowly down her mouth, inch by inch.
Set in a dive bar, Joshua Mohr’s new novel, Damascus follows a weird gang as their lives crumble. Somehow it’s still life-affirming.
I basically hurt myself with excitement when I read that the San Francisco Film Society was presenting Mauritz Stiller’s 1919 silent film classic Sir Arne’s Treasure with live musical accompaniment by indie rock icon John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.
...morePlease enjoy the 2010 Miss TSA Calendar.
After you’re done laughing, why not purchase a Rumpus Women Literary Calender?
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Arthur Ganson is referred to as a kinetic sculptor, but I think his machines are more like spiritual beings. He largely makes what’s known as Rube Goldberg machines, overly complex machines that execute simple tasks.
To Humbert Humbert of Nabokov’s Lolita: “Hey Humbert, How’s jail? I hope it’s as bad as they make it out to be in those undercover exposes. I mean, I really hope you’re suffering, I want to be clear on that from the outset.”
To A.A.
...moreWoman at Taco Bell on 14th Street. Man Sleeping on a bench in Madison Square Park, May 30, 2010. He is wearing 3-D Movie Theatre Glasses. Lewis Lapham. Three people out of the current 8,008,278 people of New York City.
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If films were fighters, Mike Ott’s second offering, Littlerock, would weigh in at 123 minutes, placing it in the featherweight division, a deft, gentle movie, lithe and light during its two hours in the ring. Not to suggest that it’s diminutive — this indie sleeper is rich and moving and packs an emotional left hook.
We keep reading tributes to Salinger by famous authors or, more worth noting, written by adults. But what about teenagers, the main readership of Catcher in the Rye?
Over at The New York Times’ Room for Debate a discussion panel recently focused on the role of Cather in the Rye with young audiences today.
...moreIt might be new news or old news to you, but Amanda Palmer is engaged to Neil Gaiman, and because Coraline (based on Gaiman’s book) was nominated for best animated feature, Amanda Palmer ended up walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes.
...moreAs we mentioned earlier this morning, Dave Eggers, arguably one of the most actively engaged and socially involved writers (almost the living antithesis of Salinger) paid tribute to Salinger for The New Yorker, probing the question of why Salinger retreated so deeply away from the public eye.
...moreCuba’s progressing fast when it comes to recognizing the rights of transgendered peoples. First the ban was lifted on sex-change operations in 2007, and now not only are the surgeries being performed in Cuba, they’re being paid for under the government’s universal health care plan.
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