Film
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Rumpus Film Review: Voices from El-Sayed
It’s a shame the documentary Voices from El-Sayed isn’t as interesting as its premise.
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The Rumpus Review of Funny People
With Funny People, Judd Apatow set out to make a masterpiece. What is surprising is not his failure, but the fact that he got so close.
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Movies Briefly: Not Quite Hollywood, 2009
If, as Quentin Tarantino believes, the real core of exploitation cinema is found in images so crazy you cannot believe your eyes, then the new film about the history of Australian exploitation, Not Quite Hollywood, not only documents its subject,…
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Time is Real!
Not too long ago I reviewed a movie called The Examined Life, by director Astra Taylor, which featured ninety minutes of fascinating, exhilarating discussions with eight contemporary philosophers. The film left me hungry for more, and recently The New Press…
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David Cronenberg’s First Feature Film
I watch movies so people will show me the things that make me flinch, question myself, curse the heavens, and want to enroll in primal scream therapy. I don’t think I read for the same reasons. But movies, I feel,…
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An Afterthought
Castro Street was released in 1966 by Bruce Baillie. The film went public before there was ‘The Castro’ as we now know it in San Francisco. The Castro Street Baillie focused on was in Richmond, CA and ran by the…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Doug Fogelson
I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.
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This Suit Gets It
“We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We…
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“I Respect Criticism.”
“I respect criticism. But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I’m a better writer than most of the people writing about me. And I can write film criticism better than…
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Mike Tyson in Five Acts: A Rumpus Consideration
I Mike Tyson doesn’t seem full of it, but sometimes it seems full of him. Each persona gets taken to an extreme. Think Gollum in Lord of the Rings, if he moved up a few weight-classes; or Hamlet on protein…
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THE EYEBALL: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
When you grow up being called a faggot by farm boys because you like to read books, Woody Allen can appear as something of a savior. That’s my story, anyway. Allen’s early films with their broad appeal mean that even…
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The Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919, Hill created an assembly line approach to writing screenplays: character…