Hollywood Progressive/LA Progressive film critic/historian Ed Rampell will introduce the movie and lead a post-screening discussion.
About Ed Rampell
Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Rampell is a L.A.-based film critic/historian and author. Michael Moore is on the cover of Rampell’s book Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States.
Get Your Brecht On
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Ed Rampell: Brecht on Brecht is precise in its stagecraft, adeptly acted, deftly directed and Gayle Bluemel does her musical forebears, Mssrs. Brecht and Weill, proud.
Annual TCM Classic Film Festival Features Vintage Films and Stars Galore From Movies of Yore
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Ed Rampell: Thousands of fans attended screenings of vintage films, discussions with and personal appearances by movie talents, dressed in period garb, partied like it was 1929 and witnessed an Academy Award winner’s footprints and handprints immortalized in cement at the fabled Chinese Theatre.
Olivier Assayas Interview: Changing the World Through Cinema
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Ed Rampell: Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things . But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,” which was an insult.
Skeptic SINema Series: The Invention of Lying
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For the next several months, Cafe Inquiry will be your host for major motion pictures with a secular, skeptical, or topical bent, followed by discussion.
Alvin Ailey Dance Theater: Ailey’s Comets Cometh
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Ed Rampell: Ailey’s comets are soaring across the stage and illumining the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through April 21 with three programs, all of them containing the iconic Revelations, created by Alvin Ailey himself in 1960.
A Bite of the Apple
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Ed Rampell: This version of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is a really important, well-executed one-man show that exposes the abusive working conditions of masses of Chinese laborers toiling away for low pay in abysmal circumstances.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Go the Dueling Divas: Garland versus Callas.
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Ed Rampell: Tony Award-winning “Master” takes theatergoers to the realm of “high art,” featuring the life and career of Maria Callas, one of opera’s top sopranos and stars.
Tomorrow the World
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Ed Rampell: In this new play, Donald Freed extrapolates elements from MacBeth and its murderous lust for power, interchanging them with the 2000 presidential election’s Bush v. Gore debacle.
Class Struggle and Cinderella
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Ed Rampell: This L.A. Opera production of Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella <(La Cenerentola) is nothing short of a sheer delight. It ranks amongst the most enchanting of all of the operas I’ve ever seen.
Cavalia’s Odysseo: A Show Unlike Any Other
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Ed Rampell: Cavalia’s Odysseo is a high tech horse-themed show unlike any other. Under the world’s largest White Big Top a breathtaking new 21st century art form synthesizes stallions, stunts, stilts, circus, cinema, sight and sound, created by a Cirque du Soleil co-founder.
A Top L.A. Theatre Fest Highlighting Multi-Culti Women Turns 20
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Ed Rampell: Spring is here and so is the annual Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival, which kicked off its 20th anniversary Emerald celebration with a champagne reception, awards ceremony and performances on March 21 at LA Gay & Lesbian Center.
Judy, Judy, Judy!
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Ed Rampell: As great as Bennett’s live numbers performed during the nightclub scenes are — and her singing and hoofing is worthy of Garland in all her glory — End of the Rainbow is a cautionary tale. Fame is no substitute for a rewarding personal life offstage and offscreen, with loving family, friends, lovers/spouses.
Wagner’s Dutch Treat
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Ed Rampell: What is Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (Der Fliegende Holländer) if not a rip-roaring ghost story, highly charged by greed, and lest we forget, sexual frisson?
Dreamgirls: The Stuff That Motown Dreams Are Made Of
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Ed Rampell: Dreamgirls is a thoroughly enjoyable, rollicking, rocking journey down musical memory lane that tells a fictionalized history of 1960s/1970s Black pop music through, appropriately, the medium of Tom Krieger’s blitzkrieging music and dance, as skillfully choreographed by Rae Toledo.
Grapes of Wrath: “All Aroun’ in the Dark”
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Ed Rampell: Don’t miss this inspiring theatrical adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, the rabble-rousing, pro-union Depression-era classic that, alas, remains as timely now as the day John Steinbeck wrote it in 1939.
Something in the Air: Talking ’bout My Generation
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Ed Rampell: We often label and lump the turmoil that swept America and the world with a series of assassinations, Civil Rights, the antiwar movement, Black Power, China’s Red Guard, the Prague Spring, feminism and so on under the broad rubric of “the ’60s.” Auteur Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air sets the record straight, showing that the era’s radical fervor continued well into the 1970s.
The Coup Against Sovereignty
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Ed Rampel: The history of the Hawaiian holocaust begins in 1778 with Cook’s voyages, his death at Kealakekua Bay, and the British reprisal. Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in 1820, filling a cultural vacuum created by the breaking of the pre-contact religion’s Kapu system in 1819.
The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement
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Ed Rampell: A century after the deposing of Queen Liliuokalani, these Polynesians have become an oppressed, landless, and often homeless, minority in their own ancestral homeland. Yet, a revived Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement is fighting for native land and cultural rights.
The Poor of New York: Old-Fashioned Melodrama New Again
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Ed Rampell: Although, as this highly recommended play rightfully reminds us, poverty – then and now – is serious business. Greed was not good when perpetrated by Wall Street’s Gordon Gekkos of 1837, or today.
Antiwar Activists Arrested at Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre
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Ed Rampell: A March 19 antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles ended with around nine activists being taken away by L.A.P.D. officers after they occupied the courtyard of Hollywood’s world famous Chinese Theatre.
From Holocaust Survivors to Hollywood Thriver
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Ed Rampell: Producer’s rep Page Ostrow represents independent feature films that are entertaining and films of conscience, including the first documentary about what led to Egypt’s historic revolution.
Oliver Stone Interview: There’s a Specter Haunting Latin America, the Specter of 21st Century Socialism
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Ed Rampell: “Frankly, we’ve opposed the poor. We’ve opposed the poor not only in those countries but in our own country. The Vietnam War was a war against the poor people of Vietnam, it was also a war against our own selves, by sending our poor people to fight that war.”
Hitler-arious: The Leftist Was a Tramp
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like many other productions at the fabled Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse, the stellar Limelight is Broadway bound for glory.
Getting Stoned with De Niro
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Ed Rampell: Will moviegoers feel they’d rather not feel so all alone, and that everybody must get Stone-d?
“Voices” — What a Sizzling Saga
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Ed Rampell: Voices: A Legacy to Remember does have a memorable story combined with snazzy costumes, great foot stomping choreography and finger snapping music, from traditional Negro Spirituals to Gospel to Jazz,
Barry Munday: Sex Has Lost the Sexual Revolution
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Ed Rampell: Writer/director Chris D’Arienzo’s Barry Munday is a droll sex comedy minus sex with a gifted ensemble cast that’s extremely enjoyable to watch.
Il Postino: Going Postal
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Ed Rampell: Going postal: A rare work of art with working class heroes who are Communists, luminously, imaginatively brought to life onstage by a creative collective of talents worthy of Neruda’s poetry.
Mozart’s Sublime Class Struggle, Cross-Dressing Romp Triumphs at L.A. Opera.
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Ed Rampell: Every once in a while there’s an uplifting work of art that makes one feel glad to be alive. L.A. Opera’s exuberant production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1786 The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro), conducted by none other than Placido Domingo himself, is one of those rare artistic experiences that enable audiences to walk on air and be grateful to be living, if only so they can experience such a rapturous, joyous vision and affirmation of life.
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Heart of Darkness: Yes! We Have No Bwanas
Ed Rampell: The Gang’s version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is psychologically and politically troubling; in other words, it is great, thought-provoking theatre, spearheaded by Finney’s bravura performance.