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From Stephen Elliott
...moreBowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.
Some would say that Derek Waters is a man with an idea. And, that idea is to get people inebriated and then ask them to recount an historical event.
But there’s so much more than that. He is a writer, actor, comedian, and film producer, and this Saturday, he will make his third appearance at the San Francisco International Film Festival in as many years.
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The dictionary defines memory as “the ability to recall.” For a computer, it’s an exact science when regurgitating programs, data, and facts, but for humans, that process can be ephemeral, flawed, and selective.
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The Place Beyond the Pines begins with a long tracking shot, and the shot acts as a summary of everything that’s good about the movie: its confidence, its ambition, and its meager but distinct accomplishments.
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Roger Ebert had this elegance about him that made us all want to be like him.
...moreThe New Yorker pays tribute to Roger Ebert in “Postscript: Roger Ebert, 1942-2013.” The article states:
...moreEbert writes, in the introduction to his 2006 anthology of his work, “Awake in the Dark,” of seeing “three movies during a routine workday,” and, according to Douglas Martin’s obituary in the Times, Ebert “said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them.” Some movies elicit passionate exultation; others, passionate revulsion.
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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Thankfully, this film really is a love story. Yet it’s such a ruthlessly unsentimental one that the title still feels like a provocation.
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A dizzying blitz of descriptors surrounds Katheryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty: pro-torture, anti-torture; anti-Bush, pro-Obama; mindlessly jingoistic, nuanced in its critique of American exceptionalism.
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Filmmaker Craig Zobel talks about the ramifications of influence, treading moral boundaries, and why we need to have more conversations about exploitation.
...moreDavid Denby’s provocative essay “Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?” explores current movie culture and the future of the film industry.
Denby takes a comprehensive look at how the production of big-budget movies is keeping “art-house” films with low or midrange budget from being made.
...moreIt’s about a year old now, but whatever: this primer on black lesbian cinema is too good not to read.
Salamishah Tillet walks us through twenty years of movies by and about queer women of color, from Watermelon Woman, a mockumentary about a 1930s actress playing mammy roles, to last year’s radiant indie film Pariah.
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To be accepted, to be relevant, he would need to become someone else. He would spend the next half-century creating that person and then, at age 60, decide that it was time to reveal his true self, in Father Goose.
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To be a doctor in Cuba is to live inside the swirl of history and politics that whooshes around the small Communist island at all times.
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I’m writing to you, Kenneth, because your review and my behavior at the Rialto Cinema are integral parts of the problem in Israel/Palestine. It’s why we both felt so scared and embarrassed: Tears of Gaza implicates us.
...moreRumpus editor Stephen Elliott is raising funds for his next feature film, based on his acclaimed novel Happy Baby, and he needs your help!
The Rumpus is seeking applications for a dedicated internship position to assist Stephen and the movie’s producers with a crowd-source fundraising campaign.
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The response to the AIDS epidemic that ripped through the gay community starting in the early years of the Reagan administration can be best characterized by how most health and social issues are dealt with in contemporary politics today, with a marked lack of empathy.
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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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Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction.
...moreOn July 14, SF MoMA will be opening a retrospective of the work of photographer Cindy Sherman.
Starting with her series Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s photographs have consistently challenged the limits, meaning, and power of self-portraiture. In an article for the New York Review of Books, critic Sanford Schwartz characterized Sherman as “an impersonator—which in her case means being a creator of people, and sometimes people-like creatures.”
Alongside the retrospective, Sherman has curated a film series, which continues with The Beaver Trilogy on July 12, at 7:00pm.
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Since premiering at Sundance in 2002 with This is John, Mark and Jay Duplass have acquired a reputation for making emotional family-driven films on the budget of a shoestring, while also finding success with studio backed films like Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives At Home.
...moreRumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s About Cherry will make its New York premiere tomorrow!
The film is screening in the Northside Festival on Thursday, June 21st, 7pm at Brooklyn’s indieScreen. You can purchase tickets here.
...moreProject Dad follows filmmaker Sharon Shattuck’s “quest to understand her LGBT family through a two-way dialogue with her dad,” who is transgender.
The film, which is in the production phase, seeks to answer the question, “What is a healthy family?” Here’s the Kickstarter to help turn the project into a feature-length documentary.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
...moreThe 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.
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