A Portrait of the Writing Process: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood
Chew-Bose approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb.
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Posts by: Anisse Gross
The Rumpus Review of The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky
If we’re honest with ourselves, the great loves of our lives are often platonic.
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The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Anisse Gross reviews The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits today in Rumpus Books.
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas Page McBee
The Rumpus talks to contributor Thomas Page McBee about his new book, Man Alive, heteronormativity, getting mugged, living in New York City, and what it really means to be a man.
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Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton & 639 Others
Anisse Gross reviews Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Sharpton & 639 Others today in Rumpus Books.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerry Stahl
Writer and Rumpus columnist Jerry Stahl sits down for a candid chat about memoir, novels, shame, parenthood, being pigeonholed, and managing “the neat trick of being an outsider in all genres.”
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Homo Homini Lupus Est: The Rumpus Review of The Wolf of Wall Street
This movie is not a critique. It’s an advertisement for capitalism and its salacious, delectable greeds.
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The Rumpus Review of White Girls by Hilton Als
Anisse Gross reviews Hilton Als’ WHITE GIRLS today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Reelings #7: Blue Jasmine
Why is Woody Allen choosing to make a movie about this particular character? Is it to support a modern fable of our economic fall from grace? Or is there something more insidious at play?
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Lindstrom
We talk to filmmaker Brian Lindstrom about his latest project, Alien Boy, the creative process behind documentary filmmaking, and his personal and artistic relationship with his wife, Cheryl Strayed.
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Reelings #6: Interior. Leather Bar.
Interior. Leather Bar. is actually less a tribute to the lost footage from Cruising, and more of a docufiction about the nature of sexuality, heteronormativity, and the representation of both in mainstream films.
...moreThe Rumpus Picks for 2013 Frameline Film Festival
It’s that time of year again—SF gets all abuzz as Frameline Film Festival, the oldest film festival dedicated to LGBT programming, crushes it with an amazing roster of films. My picks as a cineaste and devoted SF-resident are below, but again they are based on what I think is going to be great and are merely a […]
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Public Sex, Private Lives: The Rumpus Interview with Simone Jude
I wanted to present three complicated portraits that raise important questions, not just about what it means to be a porn performer, but what it means to be a sexually open woman
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Reelings #5: TO THE WONDER
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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Reelings #4: SPRING BREAKERS
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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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Joshua Mohr
Anisse Gross talks with Joshua Mohr about his latest novel, “a call to arms against complacency, a rally towards reclaiming one’s own individuality.”
...moreDJANGO BLOWOUT
Today 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 […]
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Django Take #5: Paving the Road to Hell
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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Reelings #3: THE IMPOSTER
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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The Rumpus Interview with Andrew McCarthy
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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REELINGS #2: Meek’s Cutoff
The skillfully understated filmmaker Kelly Reichardt joins up again with screenwriter Jon Raymond to give us Meek’s Cutoff.
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The Rumpus Interview with Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola hardly needs an introduction.
...moreFrancis Ford Coppola’s TWIXT
Francis 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. Coppola says, “Beginning in reverse, the self-financing […]
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REELINGS #1: MOONRISE KINGDOM
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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Jonathan Lethem’s State of Cinema Address
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. […]
...moreWe Need To Talk About Kevin Giveaway
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! If you […]
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Walkabout, by James Vance Marshall
“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 […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Travis Mathews
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.
...moreCold-Blooded and Bothered
Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
...moreThe Rumpus Review of Sleeping Beauty
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,” […]
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