Film
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Extraordinary, Ordinary People: Another Year and the Films of Mike Leigh
Here is the world according to Johnny, the bilious antihero of Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked. Johnny is a restless drifter on an odyssey through London’s nocturnal underbelly, his feverish ranting a furious response to an alien and indifferent society. “Humanity is…
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Notable San Francisco, This Week: 3/7-3/13
This week in San Francisco, Quiet Lightning moves to North Beach, Janine Brito and Emily Heller get hilarious at the Punchline, Andrew Sean Greer’s The Islanders takes to the stage, and Rumpus Managing Editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, gets his literary Casanova…
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Notable New York, This Week 3/07-3/13
This week in New York, the 2011 Oscar nominated shorts at BAM; “Let It End Like This,” an exhibition on obituaries; Bradford Morrow talks about The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death; Page Meets Stage at the Bowery Poetry Club; PUNCH!…
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That Scrambled Object of Desire
Back in the late nineties, going through the Criterion rack one weekend at a local video store, I decided to try something new for me – a Buñuel film.
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Worse and Worse Every Year
“How did hollywood get here? There’s no overarching theory, no readily identifiable villain, no single moment to which the current combination of caution, despair, and underachievement that defines studio thinking can be traced. But let’s pick one anyway: Top Gun.”…
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Walker Percy: A Documentary Film
In Win Riley’s fine Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Walker Percy’s friends, family, and biographers discuss the life, work, and philosophy of the author of The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Most notable in the film…
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Notable San Francisco, This Week: 2/28-3/6
This week in San Francisco, Feast of Words, film night at the San Francisco Buddhist Center, Babylon Salon at Cantina, and raise money for public health with your mouth full at Cupcakes for Choice! Monday 2/28: Catch Stone Fox &…
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Burroughs Doc A Man Within Giveaway
The recent documentary about William S. Burroughs, A Man Within, was released on DVD last week, and its distributor, Oscilloscope Labs, sent us a copy to give away to one lucky Rumpus reader! It’s a fascinating documentary that reveals a…
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10/40/70 #34: Alien
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine Alien, directed by Ridley Scott (1979):
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They Live
io9 has posted three excerpts from Jonathan Lethem’s They Live (published in November 2010), in which he analyzes John Carpenter’s sci-fi satire film of the same name. (via LargeHeartedBoy)
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Nicholas Rombes’ Art Film Roundup
In at least two of his novels, Thomas Pynchon mentions a Porky Pig cartoon from the 1930s. Here is the reference from The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), as Oedipa Maas listens to an old man named Thoth, whose grandfather…
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Notable New York, This Week 2/14-2/20
This week in New York spend your Valentine’s Day at Six-Word Story Slam on Love & Heartbreak or hearing dark and twisted love stories at Housing Works; Michael Cunningham, Mary Gaitskill, Zadie Smith, and others get together to talk retreats…