Ed Rampell

Ed Rampell is an LA-based film historian and critic, author of "Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States," and co-author of "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book." He has written for Variety, Television Quarterly, Cineaste, New Times L.A., and other publications. Rampell lived in Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, and Micronesia, reporting on the nuclear-free and independent Pacific and Hawaiian Sovereignty movements.

LATEST ARTICLES BY Ed Rampell

Culture

‘Freud on Cocaine’: The dramatized future of a delusion
September 14, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Although sometimes over the top, Howard Skora and his cast shed new light on one of humanity’s deepest thinkers by bringing Sigmund Freud, warts and all, back to life.
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Culture

‘A View from the Bridge’: It’s a Miller time, of rats and men
August 22, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Bridge is a searing exploration of troubled family dynamics, incestuous urges and repressed homosexuality, betrayal, as well as a dramatization of the plight of “illegal” immigrants.
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Culture

‘Walid’ tracks down child traffickers in new Malaysian martial arts film
August 16, 2023 By Ed Rampell
The first hour emphasizes the importance of education and thoughtfully dramatizes the problem of the commodification of children and their abductions in the Third World.
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Culture

East meets West meets Topanga in Terrence McNally’s ‘A Perfect Ganesh’
August 1, 2023 By Ed Rampell
The two-act play is well-acted and spiced with humor, as Katharine and Margaret are the classic fish-out-of-water characters, with all the comic implications that holds.
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Culture

‘Queen Margaret’s Version of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses’: A theater review
July 14, 2023 By Ed Rampell
A perfectly captured damaged spirit of a character whom the world made suffer because of his physical differences, and is therefore hellbent on vengeance.
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Culture

‘Garden of Alla: The Alla Nazimova Story’: Brilliant one-woman theater
July 12, 2023 By Ed Rampell

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Culture

The Champ and the Chump: Colliding worlds in ‘Fetch Clay, Make Man’
July 6, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Recommended for theatergoers who love: Great acting, stories about racism, Muhammad Ali, film history, boxing, and searching for what lies beneath the surface to discover the substance.
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Culture

Passing the baton: The Memphis metaphysics of Martin Luther King in ‘The Mountaintop’
June 26, 2023 By Ed Rampell
Hill finds the nuance in depicting a character with the status of a prophet, but who is, as those picket signs of the sanitation strikers he’s supporting declare, “a man,” after all.
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