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Myrtle Clark (Beth Leckbee) in 20th Century. Backward times By Ed Rampell There’s no reason to board a streamlined train and chug down (or rather up) to the Sierra Madre Playhouse to see 20 th Century – unless, that is, you relish experiencing laugh riots on the live stage. Bard Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1930s play and movie versions of 20 th Century retain the rat-a-tat repartee of this screwball script, while Michael Lorre’s adept direction maintains the... Read Full Story

Hank (Dwayne Johnson) in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island Numbing down By Ed Rampell There have been at least half a dozen screen versions of Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, including two silent and one Soviet adaptation, and the latest incarnation is a good fun flick with 3D IMAX special effects. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island plays fast and loose with authors Jonathan Swift, Robert Louis Stevenson and especially Verne. The novels by that sci-fi pioneer have been adapted for the screen at... Read Full Story

Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) in Rampart. Culturally bred killer By Ed Rampell Character studies can simply be presented as straightforward dramas. Or they can be encoded in genre conventions, which might improve their box office heft with the multiplex popcorn crowd. For instance, on the surface Bridesmaids is a wild and crazy comedy about females behaving badly. However, it is also -- or really -- about commitment-phobic, lonely, aging Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) and her problems relating to... Read Full Story

Harold Blackburn (Michael Rothhaar) in The Indians are Coming. Rowland out the punches By Ed Rampell There is a saying that “the personal is political,” and playwright Jennifer Rowland does a skillful job interweaving private lives with public service in The Indians Are Coming To Dinner . The Indians in the title refers to people from India, not America’s indigenous people. Rowland’s tragicomedy is set during the Reagan era, wherein stage and big and little screen veteran Michael Rothhaar... Read Full Story

A scene from Crazy Horse. Shut up and dance By Ed Rampell It’s doubly ironic from a schoolboy-ish point of view that the latest documentary by venerable filmmaker Frederick Wiseman is called Crazy Horse , since his first documentary was titled Titicut Follies , which was shot at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1967. Of course, the follies in Crazy Horse are quite different from those of the madmen in Titicut Follies , as the new work is about the... Read Full Story

A scene from Lula, Son of Brazil. Rise for the classes By Ed Rampell In the past few years a slew of biopics about recent European rightwing leaders have been released, including The Conquest (about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to France’s presidency), The Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), The Queen (about Queen Elizabeth and Britain’s sellout and warmonger, Prime Minister Tony Blair), as well as Il Caimano , which lampoons Italy’s buffoonish Prime Minister... Read Full Story

Erica (Tacey Adams) and Paul (Joseph Culp) in Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep . We are only sleeping By Ed Rampell Playwright and co-star Raymond J. Barry’s Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep is being advertised with the tagline: “Occupy this play!” However, although this one act, three-actor production takes place entirely in a park (not Zuccotti or the lawn at L.A.’s City Hall), Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep has little to do with Occupy Wall Street’s occupations per se... Read Full Story

Oliver (Ewan MacGregor) in Beginners. Blessed states By Don Simpson The Arbor -- With a unique merging of fact and fiction, The Arbor is able to reconstruct the pain and struggle within Andrea Dunbar’s work as well as reveal the dour consequences her life choices had on her family. Clio Barnard’s stylistic choice of having her actors confide in the camera (therefore the audience) is a purposeful cinematic devise to add more hyper to the hyper-reality and bring more self-consciousness into the... Read Full Story

Laura (Stephanie Sigman) in Miss Bala. A girl in trouble can be a permanent thing By Ed Rampell Stylish cinematography, deft direction and edgy storylines characterize the New Mexican Cinema spearheaded by creative forces such as actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, who, appropriately, share producing credits for this wave’s latest release north of the border, Miss Bala , Mexico’s official Oscar entry . Mexico’s drug wars – which have reportedly claimed up to 50,000 lives in the past few... Read Full Story

Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) in A Dangerous Method. Exit stage lefty By Ed Rampell The criteria for my favorite films are progressive political and cultural content, plus artistic excellence in terms of using the uniquely cinematic attributes of the movie medium. Astute readers may observe that half of the motion pictures on my Top 10 list for 2011 were shot and/or set in France. And while it’s true that your erstwhile cinephile actually did return to France last August, and that I do... Read Full Story