Ed Rampell
Ed Rampell is an L.A.-based film historian and critic who also reviews culture, foreign affairs and current events.
Ed can be reached at edrampel@gte.net.
“Biden Biden, Whattaya Say? How Many Kids You Kill Today?”
This was one of the militant chants of hundreds of students on May 1 at UCLA. I went to the university after covering the May Day rally in Hollywood, arriving around 4:00 p.m., and this is what I witnessed at the...
Sebastian Junger and Charlie Sadoff’s gripping new documentary poses a bone-chilling prospect: Is America poised to descend into a second civil war? And, if so, will U.S. military veterans form a sort of Praetorian Guard for legions of assorted right-wing and gun-rights zealots, MAGA denizens, white nationalists, paramilitaries, neo-Nazis,...
Just as the Israeli settler state is engaged in fierce warfare with Palestine’s Native people, director/co-writer Felipe Gálvez’s has produced a timely film called The Settlers, which offers an unsettling look at the colonization of Tierra del Fuego in Chile circa 1900.
The film features a British soldier Alexander MacLennan...
New Doc Curiously Commemorates the Greatest Whodunit in American History
This November 22 marks a grim milestone: The 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas.
JFK’s liquidation has left an indelible scar on the psyche of America, one that has arguably never healed.
Compounding the loss of...
Was Lee Harvey Oswald a “Lone Nut”? “Lone Gunman”? “Hitman”? “Conspirator”? Or, As He Claimed, “A Patsy”?
To try to get the answers to the above questions about the man accused of shooting President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I attended a reading at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills of Dennis Richard’s...
Director/co-writer Tina Satter’s movie Reality often has a documentary-like vibe. As we’re informed via an onscreen title, the film’s dialogue is mostly taken from the “voluntary” June 3, 2017 interview of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney of HBO’s Euphoria) conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents at her home...
Thomas Wolfe’s Book Radical Chic Mocked Supporters of the New Left and Helped Deflate Political Activism in the 1970s
Richard Dewey’s Radical Wolfe is a stylish, enjoyable documentary about iconic 20th century American writer Tom Wolfe. Along with Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, Wolfe was an exemplar...
What If the Co-Author of The Communist Manifesto Would Have Become a Gumshoe?
Novelist Jim Feast’s sly alternate history Karl Marx Private Eye (PM Press) somehow manages to bring Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Karl Marx and his youngest daughter together at Karlsbad, Bohemia, in 1875.
The author may have chosen to set...
Three museums are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, the darkest period in Tinseltown history. What happened during this period of right-wing repression? As actor Humphrey Bogart put it: “We saw it—and said to ourselves, ‘It can happen here.’ We saw American citizens denied the right to...
U.S. imperialism’s star-crossed 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing 20-year occupation was doomed from the very start. Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning director Matthew Heineman’s new 96-minute non-fiction film Retrograde documents the denouement of a deceitful debacle.
His film, shot on the ground often amidst intense combat, zooms in on...