Come Tumbling Down: Collapse At The Varsity Theatre

Chris Smith has a gift for making borderline crazy people seem almost reasonable and distinctly entertaining, as evidenced by his classic debut documentary American Movie. And they don't come much borderline crazier than author Michael Ruppert.

A retired LAPD detective, Ruppert is either a groundbreaking investigative journalist who goes where others fear to tread or a conspiracy theorist who believes perhaps too strongly in his own press. No matter what you think of Ruppert, he's an interesting figure, and the monologue that Smith has culled out of hours of interviews with Ruppert in his new film Collapse makes for compelling watching, which is quite an achievement from a technical perspective. Making a film that you can't turn away from without worrying that you're missing something, simply out of footage of a dude sitting in an abandoned meat locker waxing paranoiac and some stock footage, is no mean feat. Ruppert is by turns frightening, funny, and passionate, but he is mostly sad. As much as Collapse is a soapbox for Ruppert, it's also an exceedingly intimate and finely crafted portrait of a fundamentally broken man.