Film
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Being Flynn
A trailer for Being Flynn, the film based on Rumpus pal Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is now online.
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“Russian Doll” Cinema
“But every so often a filmmaker sneaks a piece of mini-perfection into their movie that’s so self-contained, such an unnecessary tangent, it can stand alone as its own perfect short.” Nerve archives “five great short films” that can be found…
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The Rumpus Review of The Skin I Live In
Here’s a game: try to imagine what great directors would do if they had been forbidden by some cosmic entity from making films.
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White Gloves in Oakland, CA
Filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Les Blank explore the shifting definition of the phrase “women’s work” through the lens of the Oakland Museum Women’s Board (and the board’s renowned White Elephant Sale) in their new short documentary, White Gloves. The Oakland…
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Joan Didion Film
A film on Joan Didion is being created by her nephew, actor and director Chris Dunne. In a clip from the film—which Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes”—the author reads from Blue Nights.
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Some Notes on Paranormal Activity 3 as a Structural Film
Earlier this year, I made a case for Paranormal Activity 2 as an avant-garde film,
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“Perfectly Flawed”
“So instead we’re talking flawed main characters, neither villains nor anti-heroes, whom the author has deliberately, even perversely contrived as hard to like.” Lionel Shriver, director of We Need to Talk About Kevin, discusses the unique value and craft of…
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Hunter S. Thompson’s Playboy Channel
In celebration of The Rum Diary hitting theaters at the end of this month, Playboy has created a new channel devoted to Hunter S. Thompson. “The Rum Diary Gonzo Channel” features a number of the author’s “most memorable stories” from…
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The Rumpus Review of Drive
There are two ways of looking at Drive, the recent Ryan Gosling noir. You can consider what happens on the screen—the plot, dialogue, and action, or you can consider what doesn’t happen—the many silences, distances, empty spaces, questions left unanswered, and…
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The Allure of Arithmetic: Rumpus Review of Moneyball
Ever since its invention in the mid-19th century, people have seen baseball as a metaphor for American life. Writers and filmmakers from John Updike to Ken Burns have used the sport to comment on everything from race and class to…
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A Life Defined By Circumstance: Maryam Keshavarz Explores Freedom In Tehran
In 1982, my parents packed a suitcase and paid a smuggler to help them escape from Tehran, Iran. The reason? Me.
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The Rumpus Interview with Andrew Haigh
Having spent much of his working life as an editor, 38-year-old British writer-director Andrew Haigh knows very well the way that disparate scenes can be woven together to form a complex, unified whole. All that’s required is a critical eye…