Film Reviews & Previews
YOUTH IN OREGON director Joel David Moore will participate in two Q&A’s this weekend:
Friday, Feb. 3, after the 7:30 PM screening at the MUSIC HALL: Moderator: Debbie Lynn Elias of Moviesharkdeblore/Culver City Observer and joined by actor Alex Shaffer and screenwriter Andrew Eisen;
Saturday, Feb. 4, after the 7:30 PM screening at the PLAYHOUSE 7: Moderator: Susan King of the Los Angeles Times.
THE GRACE OF JAKE filmmakers will introduce the 7:40 PM screening at the NoHo on Saturday, February 4th.
Join us for a 50th anniversary screening of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER on Wednesday, February 15, at 7:00 PM at the Laemmle Royal in West LA. Q & A after the screening with Karen and Kat Kramer, widow and daughter of producer-director Stanley Kramer. Click here to purchase tickets.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1967, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is one of a small number of films to receive Oscar nominations in all four acting categories. Katharine Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress, and William Rose also won for his original screenplay. The cast also includes Spencer Tracy (who received his ninth Oscar nomination for his final screen performance), Sidney Poitier, Katharine Houghton, Beah Richards, and Cecil Kellaway.
The picture made headlines for being one of the few Hollywood movies of the era to center on an interracial love story. The movie completed shooting just a few weeks before the Supreme Court ruled, in Loving v. Virginia, that anti-miscegenation laws still on the books in most Southern states were unconstitutional. So the film foreshadowed this historic decision.
Beyond its social content, however, the film is remembered as the last of nine movies that Hepburn and Tracy made together. Their irresistible chemistry was once again visible in their final collaboration, completed just two weeks before Tracy’s death, and adds considerable poignancy to the film.
Producer-director Stanley Kramer was the man behind such potent dramas as Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind, On the Beach, The Defiant Ones, Ship of Fools, High Noon, and The Wild One. In addition to his many nominations as director and producer, he was awarded the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1961.
Q&A will be moderated by former Los Angeles Film Critics Association president Stephen Farber. Part of our ongoing Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit www.laemmle.com/ac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_gHO67qzg
Join Laemmle and Eat|See|Hear for Fall in February at the NoHo 7 in North Hollywood! Every Thursday in February our Throwback Thursday (#TBT) series presents one of our favorite quirky love stories! Doors open at 7PM, trivia starts at 7:30PM, and films begin at 7:40PM! It all starts Thursday, February 2nd with HAROLD AND MAUDE. Check out the full schedule below. For tickets and our full #TBT schedule, visit laemmle.com/tbt!
February 2: HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)
Young, rich, and obsessed with death, Harold finds himself changed forever when he meets lively septuagenarian Maude at a funeral. Get tickets.
February 9: WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (1989)
Harry and Sally have known each other for years, and are very good friends, but they fear sex would ruin the friendship. Get tickets.
February 16: AMELIE (2001)
One woman decides to change the world by changing the lives of the people she knows in this charming and romantic comic fantasy from director Jean-Pierre Jeune. Get tickets.
February 23: ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a procedure to have each other erased from their memories. But it is only through the process of loss that they discover what they had to begin with. Get tickets.
I AM MICHAEL writer-director Justin Kelly will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:10 PM screening at the Monica Film Center on Friday, January 27. Benoit Denizet Lewis, the author of the story upon which the film is based, will interview him.
It’s time for our annual Predict the Oscars Contest! The person who most accurately predicts the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s choices in all 24 categories, from the shorts to Best Motion Picture, will win fabulous prizes (free movies and concessions at Laemmle)!
First place wins a Laemmle Premiere Card worth $150. Second place wins a Laemmle Premiere Card worth $100. Third place wins a Laemmle Premiere Card worth $50. Entries are due by 10AM the morning of the awards ceremony on February 26th.
Not sure what a Laemmle Premiere Card is? Think of it like a prepaid gift card for yourself! Use it to pay for movie tickets and concessions. Plus, Premiere Card holders receive $2 off movie tickets and 20% off concessions. To find out more, visit www.laemmle.com/premiere-cards.
We’ve got some smart cookies for customers so we have a tie-breaker question: you also have to guess the show’s running time. Take the tie-breaker seriously! Last year, the running time question broke a tie between five entrants who correctly predicted 19 out of 24 categories!
We’ll announce the winners right here on our blog by March 1st. Good luck!
All 7:30 PM screenings of STRIKE A POSE will feature Q&A’s with dancers featured in the film. Perez Hilton will host on Friday, January 27.
A real life 19th century American western adventure story, CARVALHO’S JOURNEY tells the extraordinary story of Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897), an observant Sephardic Jew born in Charleston, South Carolina, and his life as a groundbreaking photographer, artist and pioneer in American history. We’re screening it this Monday, January 30 at 7:30 PM and Tuesday, January 31 at 1 PM at the Claremont 5, Playhouse 7, Fine Arts, Town Center 5 and Monica Film Center as part of our ongoing Culture Vulture series.
Daguerreotypist Robert Shlaer is featured in CARVALHO’S JOURNEY as an interviewee and also on location, re-creating daguerreotypes along the route Carvalho traveled in 1853. He will participate in Q&A’s after the Pasadena screening on Monday night and the Beverly Hills screening on Tuesday afternoon. Filmmaker Steve Rivo will participate in Q&A’s after the Beverly Hills screening on Monday night and after the Encino screening on Tuesday afternoon.
“Today, Rivo makes his own movies. He’s founder and owner of Down Low Pictures, an independent documentary production company based in Brooklyn. When he was offered a project about the painter and daguerreotypist Solomon Carvalho, a Sephardic Jew from Charleston, South Carolina, who accompanied legendary explorer John Fremont on his 1853 Fifth Western Expedition, the story’s resemblance to “The Frisco Kid” helped win him over.
“He talked about the resulting documentary, CARVALHO’S JOURNEY, on the phone from his studio in New York.”
Q. Did repeated viewings of “The Frisco Kid” give you an insight into Carvalho’s story?
A. That was kind of my only frame of reference. The comedic situations involved in having a rube on the trail, and not just any rube, but a classically Jewish character who has Jewish anxieties. Those elements of the Carvalho story were fun to play with. He was an observant Jew, so he couldn’t eat certain foods even when they were starving. And he wasn’t good at a lot of outdoorsy stuff like the rest of the party. He was a 38-year-old city slicker artistic type.
Q. The hardships of his trip were not so funny, though. More like “The Revenant.”
A. It is always surprising how physically difficult, challenging, and a little bit crazy it would be to get in a wagon and try to cross the country in the middle of winter. It’s inconceivable to us today. We get on an airplane and complain.
Q. What do you think viewers will take away from this film other than a new appreciation for air travel?
A. There are a lot of different things people have responded to — American Jewish history, Western expansion, the birth of photography, and a personal story of an artist. What attracted me was that it was a little bit of biography, but it was also kind of a travel story, and an adventure story through which you could talk about other things, the experience of outsiders in American culture. It’s a film about someone we didn’t know anything about.
Q. I understand you just finished a 10-part series for the True TV network on Hollywood comedies. Did you get to include “The Frisco Kid?”
A. I jokingly raised the possibility, but so few people have seen that movie. It’s the Solomon Carvalho of Jewish Western comedies.
