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.
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...
Let’s Hope History Does Not Repeat
This month marks the 75th anniversary of the start of the Hollywood Blacklist. On October 27, 1947, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, the first member of what came to be known as the “Hollywood Ten,” testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
The...
New documentary by Alex Smith explores travails of Saab who faces U.S. wrath because he tried to circumvent Washington’s onerous illegal sanctions levied against Venezuela
The U.S. imperialists “want Alex Saab like they want Julian Assange to suffer,” charges human rights and international law expert Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, who the...
Zayd Dohrn is the son of what is arguably the “First Family of America’s Far Left.” His parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were the so-called “domestic terrorists” who, according to then-vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, “palled around with Barack Obama.”
The 1977-born Zayd, who grew up underground, has grown up...
What is Black August and the FilmFest Named After It?
The inaugural Black August Film Festival, zooming in on what Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the Earth” and their opposition to systemic racism, took place in Pasadena, California, August 13-14. Unlike other Black-themed filmfests that may screen socially conscious...
Globetrotter’s Gallivanting Galvanizes Totally Avoidable Firestorm
How many Chinese fought in the Civil War? That is, the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865?
As Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi sticks her nose into the Taiwan Strait, this is an interesting and illuminating question to ponder. Second in line to...
One of the most daring politically themed plays disappoints in repeating CIA disinformation while distorting history
Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins is arguably one of the most daring political-themed plays to have stormed Broadway’s barricades since those 1930s’ proletarian classics Waiting for Lefty and The Cradle Will Rock and the 1965 production...
