Film
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The Rumpus Interview with Michael Showalter
“I am writing an ‘important’ memoir about not being able to write an important memoir. It winds up being kind of a novel-length comedic essay on insecurity and procrastination.”
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THE EYEBALL: Burn After Reading and The Iron Giant
Oscars, whatever. I had two comfy movie-watching experiences this weekend. On Friday I watched the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading with my wife and yesterday sat down with my son to watch the Brad Bird animated movie The Iron Giant.…
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A Day in the Life of the Real Mafia
Gomorrah is a self-conscious repudiation of gangster movies like Scarface; a reminder that the classy foot soldiers of The Godfather and the bumbling mafiosi of The Sopranos have very little to do with the real world.
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No One Crafts a Soundtrack Like Wes
The funny thing about Wes Anderson is that it’s both hard to imagine yet simultaneously all too obvious why he is wildly popular in some milieus, hardly known in others, and wholly eschewed in a third circle. A recent interview…
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The Rumpus Interview with Carlos Serrano Azcona
“The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the other part of the film. The point is that what…
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THE EYEBALL: Gran Torino
Port Townsend, Washington has two superb theaters, one called The Rose, the other The Uptown. By superb I mean they’re in old buildings, they don’t show commercials, the popcorn is served with more or less real butter, and the marquees…
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Appropriation of Fear—A Review of Friday the 13th
The Friday the 13th teenagers, including those in the franchise reboot that opens this week, are a superior breed of dumb. The kind of dumb that makes someone who knows a killer is on the loose say, “I’m not afraid!”…
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FADE TO ORANGE: Famous-on-Famous/Film Links Forever
You know, you come home from, say, a happening launch party, it’s around midnight and you’re feeling excellent, you turn on the TV so as not to consume your prophylactic course of pretzels and water in anomic silence, and see…
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For The Nextflix Pile— The Parallax View
The Parallax View, released in 1974, based on the book by Loren Singer, was scripted by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (his daughter just wrote a book about L.A called This One Is Mine). Mr. Semple also wrote the scripts for Three…
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The Last Bastion of Jim Crow
The Order of Myths is a film too nuanced to confront lynching directly, and too focused to make any easy statement about racism.
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Devious Inc.
I hold certain truths to be self evident. Among these: independent film is good. Locally produced products are good. Rocking musicals are good. Shoes are good. The fetish industry is good. Based on adherence to these precepts, I was delighted…