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Nov 8, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
In 1935, when fascism was rising globally, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a novel warning Americans against homegrown threats of dictatorship. Now, on the heels of a presidential race billed as an existential struggle between freedom and authoritarianism, PBS is premiering a new documentary film that reminds viewers that not only could autocracy happen here, but that it once did.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
As the countdown to election day winds down, the presidential race is reportedly close, and both candidates on the Republican ticket will not publicly pledge to accept the election results if they don’t win.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
Kate Winslet has been nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Actress, including a win for her 2008 performance in the anti-Nazi film The Reader. Now Winslet is back with another gut-wrenching anti-fascist film, Lee, a biopic about real-life photographer Lee Miller.
During the 1930s, Poughkeepsie-born Miller was a model, a Bohemian expat who roamed around the French Riviera, a part of Europe’s surrealist arts scene, and a fashion photographer for British Vogue magazine.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
Oscar-nominated director Yance Ford’s new documentary Power, which chronicles policing in America, was released just before the fourth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis Police Department officer.
Unlike productions such as Colin Kaepernick’s 2023 docuseries Killing County, which spotlights the high rate of police killings in Kern County, California, Power zooms out to the historical role law enforcement has played in America.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
Writer/director John Ridley’s Shirley opens with newly minted Congressmember Shirley Chisholm (Regina King) appearing in early 1969 with her fellow freshman class on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building—the only woman of color in a sea of overwhelmingly white, male colleagues. The first African American woman ever elected to Congress, Chisholm immediately bucks tradition, butting heads with her patriarchal, racially insensitive fellow members of the House.
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Feb 12, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
Activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s compelling new film, Beyond Bars, is a documentary about Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s left-leaning district attorney who was deposed by a recall campaign in 2022 after only about eighteen months in office. Through the frame of Chesa’s zigzagging backstory, Greenwald touches upon many pressing issues: mass incarceration, racism, grassroots political campaigning, the influence of big money in elections, childhood, parenting, and more.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
As he nears eighty, Wim Wenders shows no signs of slowing down. The acclaimed, multi-talented filmmaker is back with two very different productions—Perfect Days, a 123-minute feature, and Anselm, a ninety-three-minute documentary shot entirely in 3D.
Perfect Days follows Hirayama, a janitor, as he makes his rounds in Tokyo cleaning toilets.
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Jan 19, 2024 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
With the rise of the MAGA movement, authors, journalists, and Hollywood are reexamining the roots of totalitarian-leaning causes, parties, and leaders. Philip Roth’s prescient 2005 novel The Plot Against America, inspired by the 1930s and early 1940s “America First” isolationists, may have preceded the rise of Donald Trump, but the miniseries adaptation appeared on HBO during 2020’s presidential race.
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Nov 9, 2023 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
George C. Wolfe’s Rustin, executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is a stand up and cheer movie, arguably the best Hollywood civil rights feature ever made. While 1988’s ahistorical Mississippi Burning made FBI agents the heroes of the desegregation struggle, Rustin is an impassioned, historically accurate movie brought vividly alive with stellar acting, keen-eyed direction, and incisive writing that’s never cliched.
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Aug 28, 2023 | 
progressive.org | Ed Rampell |Television Book.”
September 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the other 9/11: The coup d’etat that overthrew democratically-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973. The event arguably had a more devastating effect on Chile than the terrorist attacks twenty-eight years later did on the United States.
