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From Stephen Elliott
In America, good dinner etiquette entails avoiding certain contentious topics, particularly politics. Whether it has more to do with possible digestive disorders developing from unpleasant –isms or a predilection towards harmonious dining, I do not know. …more
In December 2010, The Museum of the City of New York made available over 100,000 digitized images, many of which had never been seen publicly before. …more
A review of The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller — a live documentary by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green, with performance by Yo La Tengo, Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at SFMOMA. …more
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having once again boozed through last call and beyond, upon my wobbly return home I would drunkenly sink into a hot bath and read Adventures of Tintin comics. …more
There are certain places in the world that conjure an almost universal sense of longing; places that seem to carry a palpable sense of themselves in the air, and places whose tumultuous histories have created masses of displaced persons who feel as though they might never go home again. …more
A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track. …more
Mehreen Jabbar is a young South Asian filmmaker, whose debut feature film Ramchand Pakistani has impressed audiences and juries around the world, receiving the FIPRESCI prize among others. Understated yet emotionally powerful, it’s an essential film about the region, …more
I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong. …more
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. …more
Husband-wife team, Tim and Erin Archuleta of ICHI Sushi, a tiny sushi bar in San Francisco, review a film about sushi legend Jiro Ono. …more
Brian McGreevy has had the kind of dizzying career assent you usually only see, well, in the movies. At 28, he’s already been a working screenwriter for years and had two scripts* on Hollywood’s coveted Black List. This month his first novel, Hemlock Grove, was published by FSG and it’s already on it’s way to becoming an original series for Netflix …more
In the fall of 2008, I wrote a screenplay I intended to film entirely in an Alzheimer’s Unit. After many weeks of rehearsals, I arrived at a troubling realization: I was not just making a challenging film—I was making the wrong film. …more
Meet Philipp Wolter and Michelle Glick, the husband and wife team behind the Brooklyn-born FilmGym Productions. Wanting to merge their love of acting with their dreams of creating introspective films for the masses, the pair decided to create independent production company FilmGym in 2004, and have proven to be a force to reckon with ever since. …more
The finest moment in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire isn’t one of its pyrotechnic fight scenes; it’s a facial expression. Shock hopscotches into fear before easing into awe as John Kane (Bill Paxton), watches his daughter, Mallory, a marine turned black ops contractor, dispatch an intruder who has her cornered in a darkened room. …more
Nick Flynn’s words sucker-punch me and drag me through Boston’s back-alley construction zones, skimming eruptions of broken glass. Across crumbling and unforgiving asphalt I arrive battered, gutted, laughing, astonished. …more
It works like this. You tell the kid at the ticket counter you want to see J. Edgar at 7:30. He asks if you’d like regular or VIP seating. …more
Documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye landed the Best Documentary Award at Cannes Film Festival for her film, Daddy I Do in 2010 — about the controversial religious ceremony Purity Balls, where girls from six to sixteen pledge their virginity to their fathers until marriage. She is now touring the country with a new stick of dynamite, The Right To Love: An American Family, …more
If we can take away one thing from history it’s that it often repeats itself. The Kent State massacre in 1970 was one of the first instances where the media shined a light on the corruption of police enforcement. …more
I always tell people I met Elana Mann by stalking her. Monkey-swinging from link to link to link one day, I encountered her website and developed a hardcore girlcrush.
On the first day of June, I found myself crying over my dinner while watching Atonement. It was thunderstorming outside, and the rain roared as it pounded on the pavement. Outside my window the street was lit up by paparazzi lightning. …more
In those days, the only way to see David Lynch’s early, short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from some place like Facets in Chicago. …more
Silent films, like theater, require their audience members to suspend a sense of reality, investing instead in wonder, imagination, and sensory titillation. The greatest films of the silent era were able to transform the dart of an eye, the contortion of a dimple, or the mournful whine of a violin into entirely new vernaculars. …more
Jennifer Lyon Bell makes porn with a humanistic approach, designed to get viewers to identify with the characters, not just watch them. She combines the visual quality of art films with erotica. Her ethos is that the former could be sexier and the latter just plain better. Also, she doesn’t think porn should be for men or women (or that we differ much in how we respond to it). …more
When I saw Wim Wenders introduce his latest film, Pina – a majestic remembrance and celebration of the late German choreographer, Pina Bausch – he remarked that he was the least likely person to have made a film about dance. …more
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. The male scientist, leaning above her says, “You’re doing a great job,” as she swallows every inch of his tube, gagging along the way. …more
Two decades have elapsed since I first experienced D.A. Pennebaker’s vérité film Town Bloody Hall, and it’s a little over forty years since the spectacular 1971 ‘dialogue on women’s liberation’ that it records was staged. I had a VHS tape of it that I wore out and lost somewhere between the end of my teens in England and becoming a middle-aged writer in America. …more
Stills from the movie Cherry, directed by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott. more…
Giuseppe Andrews is a filmmaker/musician who makes work like no other. Similar in fashion to John Cassavetes, he acts in films and then uses the money to fund his own movies. …more
Beneath Shame’s veneer of soulless chic and artful grit, there’s an urgency that’s like an infant’s cry: blunt yet piercing, aware only of its own pain. …more
We Need To Talk About Kevin is unlike any other horror story played out on the big screen. …more
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise about demon possession, chainsaws, and the Book of the Dead first debuted in 1983 as low-budget horror gold.
Shortly, after it began to gather a cult following and spawned video games, comic books, and musicals. Now more than 30 years later, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, the franchise’s lead actor, are backing a remake by director Diablo Cody (Jennifer’s Body, Juno), which will follow the original story line closely while substituting Bruce Campbell’s swarthy hero Ash for Jane Levy’s female Ash and featuring a cast of young up-and-coming actors.
To fans this is as scintillating as it is confounding: Why not a sequel? Why proverbially fix what ain’t proverbially broken? Well, if news of a remake weren’t enough, Raimi also filed a lawsuit against the production company Award Pictures for planning a sequel.
Doin’ It In the Park, a forthcoming documentary from Bobbito Garcia and Kevin Couliau, reveals the world of New York City pick-up basketball. In gathering footage for the film, the co-directors made visits to 180 courts throughout the five boroughs. You can check out the trailer here.
(Via Flavorpill)
Letters of Note shares four letters from Woody Allen that appear in Diane Keaton’s recent memoir, Then Again.
“Don’t be fooled by THE ARTS! They’re no big deal; certainly no excuse for people acting like jerks & by that I mean, so what if up till now there were very few women artists. There may have been women far deeper than, say, Mozart or Da Vinci but contributing their genius in a different socially circumscribed context.”
BOMBLOG interviews Terrance Nance about his debut feature film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, mapping life’s transitional moments, and becoming filter-less.
“I’m not going to call what I attempted an experiment, exactly, but I did very much set out to develop this way of conveying experience that didn’t filter anything through the use of metaphor or the language of symbols.”
KALW Radio talks with Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott about his film Cherry and its portrayal of the San Francisco porn industry.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film where I felt that the adult film industry was represented. This is my community, so these are the people I hang out with. And the portrayal of sex work…it’s just treated like heroin in most movies. You get into sex work and it’s like becoming a junky…it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, and that’s just simply not how it is.”
In this review at SF Appeal, Violet Blue describes Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s Cherry as a “strong, complex” film that “unfolds through its layered relationships.” The movie made it’s North American premiere on Tuesday and will screen twice more as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
“Cherry is a joyful, wonderful love letter to San Francisco, LGBT communities, kink and porn-positive people. In a bigger sense, it’s a siren’s song to young women everywhere redefining their sexuality at this time in history, media and cultural value clashes over porn and a modern girl’s sexual relationships.”
This weekend brought the television premiere of Richard Parks’ awarding-winning short film Music Man Murray, which documents 88 year-old Murray Gershenz “as he struggles to find a buyer for the hundreds of thousands of records in his LA store.”
For a limited time this week, the documentary can be viewed in full at NPR’s All Things Considered blog. In addition, Weekend Edition spoke with Parks and Gershenz, and The Los Angeles Times has a profile of Gershenz.
The forthcoming film Farah Goes Bang, produced by Rumpus contributor Laura Goode, is “a valentine to contemporary feminism, youth in revolt, and the passionate politics of idealism.” Learn more about the film and help the production team reach their Kickstarter goal here.
In 1981, Philip K. Dick saw a television segment about the forthcoming film Blade Runner, based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. He then wrote a fervent letter to the production company. Dick passed away five months after this letter and before the release of the film.
“The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field.”
Today is the first day of the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival.
Some highlights: tUnE-yArDs will compose a live score for four Buster Keaton short films, and Yo La Tengo will perform their score for Sam Green’s “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller. Plus, Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s film Cherry will make its North American premiere.
The upcoming documentary Public Sex, Private Lives has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for post-production costs. To learn more about the film, and contribute to its completion, click here.
Focusing on the lives of porn performers Lorelei Lee, Princess Donna, and Isis Love, Public Sex, Private Lives “follows the characters as they navigate their lives as artists, daughters, mothers, writers, and women who have made careers in the adult industry.”
The Believer will present Laurel Nakadate’s The Wolf Knife at the IFC Center on Monday, April 9th at 8pm. The screening, which celebrates the release of The Believer’s new film issue, will be followed by a conversation between Nakadate and Rumpus columnist Rick Moody. …more
“My poems were an essence of images. They had the cinema inside them before I started working for it.”
A quote from Tonino Guerra, in a New York Times obituary about an extraordinary life. Guerra, the prolific screenwriter, poet, novelist and artist, died on Wednesday in northern Italy, at age 92.
Among others, he collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Theo Angelopoulos, and wrote Antonioni’s famous trilogy L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse as well as Fellini’s 1973 classic Amarcord.
Son of a fishmonger father and an illiterate mother (whom Guerra himself taught to read and write), he was a poet initially and received his first film credit at age 36, and he continued to work into his eighties. “I believe I have given a little bit of poetry to all the directors I worked with,” he’d said.
The Museum of the Moving Image will be opening a “mini-retrospective” of Hong Sang-soo’s films on March 17th. BOMBlog interviews the director about “process, collaboration, and drinking.” His answers also provide a lesson in brevity.
Sang-soo on why he often returns to the cinematic detail of male characters arm wrestling: “It’s cute.”
Have you heard? A film adaptation of Sugar/Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is in the works! Pacific Standard, a new production banner from actress Reese Witherspoon and producer Bruna Papandrea has bought the rights. Witherspoon will play Strayed in the film. More here.
Our AWP screening of Being Flynn was documented by Ed Negron, a photographer for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. Click here to peruse his photos.
The film is based on Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. Check out the movie trailer after the jump. …more
Are you going to AWP?
Here’s something amazing we’re getting in on.
The Rumpus (and friends) present a special screening of Being Flynn Friday night at 11pm for AWP conference attendees only. You need a conference badge and you have to arrive fifteen minutes before the movie. Free. Sign up here.
Being Flynn is based on Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. I will be introducing the film. Movie trailer after the break. …more
Director and Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott has been spotted (proudly sporting his Rumpus tattoo) alongside actress Ashley Hinshaw in Berlin. Elliott and Hinshaw are both in Germany for the international premier of Cherry. Click here to learn more about the film.
Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s first feature film, Cherry, has been accepted into the Berlin International Film Festival. The film will make it’s world premiere February 16 at the 1,600 seat Friedrichsstadtpalast in Berlin.
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