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“A rambunctious mixture of the bawdy and the sublime,” TAMPOPO 35th Anniversary Screenings Wednesday, July 6, at Laemmle Glendale, Newhall & Royal.

June 22, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present 35th anniversary screenings of writer-director Juzo Itami’s delectable comedy, Tampopo, which has developed a strong cult following in the years since it first captivated audiences. The basic story is simple enough. A truck driver and his friends come to the aid of a noodle shop owner’s widow and help her to refine and perfect her ramen dishes. But several quirky subplots and other tasty asides interrupt and enrich the central narrative.

As in other classic movies about food, the noodle dishes themselves are lovingly photographed to whet the audience’s appetites. Beyond that, puckish humor and eroticism add flavor to this savory melange. As Hal Hinson declared in the Washington Post, Tampopo is “a rambunctious mixture of the bawdy and the sublime…perhaps the funniest movie about the connection between food and sex ever made.”

Indiewire’s David Ehrlich added, “Itami’s fiercely beloved film unfolds like a prix fixe tasting menu of strange comic delights.” Writing in Film Comment, Michael Sragow said, “Tampopo creates a culinary empire of the senses while entertaining an audience like crazy.” And the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang wrote, “Tampopo is above all about the romance of food, and the joyous, agonizing devotion and hard work required to tease out its manifold mysteries.”

Tsutomo Yamazaki, Nobuko Miyamoto, Koji Yakusho, and Ken Watanabe star. The movie will screen on July 6 at the Royal in West L.A., Glendale, and Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtXSon0yMw

Tampopo Official Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtXSon0yMw)

Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann in THE EMIGRANTS ~ 50th Anniversary Screenings May 11.

April 27, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present our latest installment in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program: Jan Troell’s Oscar-nominated Swedish epic, THE EMIGRANTS. Troell made his feature film debut in 1966 with the acclaimed coming-of-age film, ‘Here Is Your Life.’ After seeing that, producer Bengt Forslund tagged Troell to direct the adaptation of the series of popular Swedish novels by Vilhelm Moberg about a family’s decision to emigrate from 19th century Sweden to America. Troell turned the novels into two films: THE EMIGRANTS and its follow-up, ‘The New Land.’ Revered Scandinavian actors Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann starred in both movies, along with Eddie Axberg, the star of ‘Here Is Your Life.’

THE EMIGRANTS begins by documenting the travails of a family struggling to survive in rural Sweden in the 1840s. With their prospects narrowing, they and a few of their neighbors make the decision to migrate to America in search of a better life. The film chronicles their grueling ocean voyage and then their further travels by train and river boat to unsettled land in Minnesota, where they battle to set down roots in a world that is completely alien to them.

The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar of 1971. Warner Bros. decided to distribute the film, and in 1972, it earned four additional Oscar nominations: for Best Picture, Best Actress Liv Ullmann, Best Director for Troell and Best Screenplay by Troell and Forslund. It was only the third foreign language film to ever be nominated for Best Picture, following Jean Renoir’s ‘Grand Illusion’ from 1938 and Costa-Gavras’ ‘Z’ in 1969.

Troell not only directed and co-wrote the film but also acted as his own cinematographer and editor. As critic Pauline Kael wrote, “In the whole history of the screen there have been only a handful of directors who actually shot their own movies, and no other cinematographer-director has ever undertaken a work of this sweep.” She added that Troell “brings a new visual and thematic unity to fiction films.” Roger Ebert wrote that THE EMIGRANTS was “infinitely absorbing and moving.” Writing in Life magazine, Richard Schickel declared, “Jan Troell has made the masterpiece about the dream that shaped America.”

We will screen the original 190-minute version of the film at the Laemmle Glendale, Newhall, Playhouse and Royal on Wednesday, May 11. The version that played in America in 1972 was shortened by 40 minutes and lost some of the rich detail of Troell’s groundbreaking immigrant saga.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h-rHuPF5Ww

THE EMIGRANTS – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h-rHuPF5Ww)

Pedro Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER: 20th Anniversary Screenings.

March 9, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

In celebration of Oscar season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present the 20th anniversary of Pedro Almodovar’s Academy Award-winning TALK TO HER (2002) on Wednesday, March 23 at four Laemmle locations: Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. The internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker earned two Oscar nominations for this “bizarrely poetic tale of men in love with two women in comas,” for directing and writing, winning in the latter category. In the current Oscar race, Almodóvar’s most recent film, PARALLEL MOTHERS, has also earned two nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Penelope Cruz.

TALK TO HER is the story of a macho travel writer (Darío Grandinetti) and a gay male nurse (Javier Cámara) who form an unlikely friendship when they bond over a shared but separate devotion to two comatose women: a gored bullfighter (Rosario Flores) and a ballerina (Leonor Watling), respectively. Told in flashback, the film unfolds with a delicate balance of drama, comedy, and suspense, all trademarks of Almodóvar’s inimitable style. He had emerged in the 1980s with a liberating sensibility after the repressive Franco regime had ended in Spain. In a series of unconventional melodramas over the next four decades, he has explored identity, sexuality, friendship, family, desire, and passion, often with irreverent humor. TALK TO HER was his first effort in the 21st century and was greeted with universal acclaim.

Among the plaudits, Roger Ebert extolled the “improbable melodrama…with subtly kinky bedside vigils and sensational denouements, and yet at the end, we are undeniably touched. No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.” Similarly, Philip French of the Guardian/Observer compared Almodóvar to past movie masters Ernest Lubitsch and Preston Sturges. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also cited the film as “the most unmistakable auteur flourish in modern European cinema.” The film collected a multitude of accolades in addition to Oscar recognition, among which were Best Foreign Film prizes from the Golden Globes and National Board of Review. Almodóvar was also named Best Director of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

TALK TO HER plays one night only, Wednesday, March 23 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: Royal (West Los Angeles), Glendale, Newhall (Santa Clarita), and Playhouse 7 (Pasadena).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIl4h_Z9jA

TALK TO HER – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIl4h_Z9jA)

THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI 50th Anniversary Screenings March 2, at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale & Newhall.

February 23, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

To launch our Anniversary Classics Series in 2022, and during Oscar season, we celebrate the first woman ever to be nominated for Best Director, Lina Wertmüller, who died at the end of last year at the age of 93. Just two years earlier, she had won an honorary Oscar at the Academy’s annual Governors Awards for her sterling body of work, spanning more than 50 years. For our Anniversary screening, we are presenting one of the first movies that brought her to the world’s attention, The Seduction of Mimi.

Wertmüller had served an apprenticeship with the great Federico Fellini, and she began directing her own films in the 1960s. When she presented The Seduction of Mimi at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, she won widespread acclaim. Mimi and the director’s subsequent film, Love and Anarchy, were both released in the United States in 1974, and the press and the public took notice. The following year she scored an even bigger success with the controversial Swept Away, and in 1976 her unique World War II drama, Seven Beauties, earned four Oscar nominations, including two for Wertmüller, for Best Screenplay as well as Best Director. This historic nomination of a female director was not repeated until 1993 when Jane Campion earned a nod for The Piano.

In The Seduction of Mimi, Wertmüller’s favorite leading man, Giancarlo Giannini, plays a laborer torn between the Mafia and the Communist Party. As he travels from Sicily to Rome, he also gets involved with several women in addition to his wife. One of his lovers is played by another of Wertmüller’s favorite actors, Mariangela Melato, who co-starred with Giannini in Love and Anarchy and Swept Away as well as Mimi. Giannini’s other co-stars in The Seduction of Mimi include Elena Fiore and Agostina Belli.

Writing in The New York Times, Nora Sayre said, “the politics and sex are so well balanced that all the raw emotions and the devastating jokes ring true.” Sayre added, “The Seduction of Mimi is one of the best films of this season.” The Los Angeles Free Press declared, “Wertmüller is a supreme satirist.”

This 50th anniversary screening will play at four Laemmle locations: the Royal in West Los Angeles, the Playhouse in Pasadena, Glendale and Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGPSC35SfI

THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytGPSC35SfI)

Anniversary Classics Abroad Returns with Wertmüller, Almodóvar, Truffaut and more.

February 9, 2022 by Jordan Deglise Moore

With the fifth wave of the pandemic fading, we’re ready to restart Anniversary Classics Abroad, our repertory series of great foreign films. First up is the raucous sex comedy THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI. A tribute to Lina Wertmüller, who recently passed away and was the first female director to be nominated by the Academy, the film provides the best medicine, copious laughter. We’ll follow that up with Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER, Truffaut’s JULES & JIM and the Liv Ullmann-Max von Sydow drama THE EMIGRANTS. We are planning eight more films for the rest of 2022, titles to be announced!

03/02/22 – THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI
03/23/22 – TALK TO HER
04/13/22 – JULES & JIM
05/11/22 – THE EMIGRANTS

We’ll screen them all at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters.

‘Y Tu Mamá También’ 20th Anniversary Screenings Wednesday, December 8, 7 PM at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale & Newhall.

November 24, 2021 by Jordan Deglise Moore

On December 8 we’ll screen our final Anniversary Classics Abroad film of the year — the modern classic Y Tu Mamá También — and stay tuned. We hope to have dates soon for both Airport and Mommie Dearest screening before year’s end. We are also planning more Abroad titles for 2022.

Alfonso Cuarón’s sexy and provocative road movie, Y Tu Mamá También marked a homecoming as well as a breakthrough for Cuarón in 2001. After making his directorial debut a decade earlier in his native Mexico, Cuarón was drawn to Hollywood, where he earned strong reviews for A Little Princess and a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Then, however, Cuarón decided to return to Mexico to make a more personal film and he wowed the cinematic world with this coming-of-age drama. Y Tu Mamá También broke box office records in Mexico when it opened in the summer of 2001. It went on to win the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival and was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay the following year. Cuarón wrote the film with his brother Carlos Cuarón.

Cuarón cast two up-and-coming young actors, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, as teenage friends from different social classes. The working class Julio (Bernal) and the upper class Tenoch (Luna) are friends and rivals. They both become infatuated with an older woman (Spanish actress Maribel Verdú) and invite her to join them on a road trip to a spectacular, secluded beach. She accepts and they embark on an adventure that turns out to be a funny, sexy and revelatory experience for all three of them. Much of the film was improvised by the actors, with Cuarón’s encouragement.

In addition to the luscious cinematography and the sexual candor (it was released unrated in the U.S.), the film features narration in the style of some of the European films that inspired Cuarón, particularly Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, another landmark movie about a ménage à trois. Reviews were almost universally glowing. In Newsweek David Ansen wrote, “The movie has an emotional kick that lingers like a primal memory.” Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum called the movie “sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.” The New York Times’ Elvis Mitchell concurred, describing Y Tu Mamá También as “fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.”

The film’s success propelled Cuarón to the front ranks of contemporary directors. He went on to helm the best Harry Potter movie (The Prisoner of Azkaban), the dystopian Children of Men, and earned an Oscar for his direction of the sci-fi adventure Gravity. When he returned to Mexico to make the autobiographical Roma, he earned a second Oscar as Best Director.

Y Tu Mamá También will play for one night only at the Royal in West L.A., the Playhouse in Pasadena, Glendale, and Newhall December 8.

Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN ~ 65th Anniversary Screenings October 13 at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale, Newhall.

October 6, 2021 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present FRENCH CANCAN, one of the best late films created by master director Jean Renoir: a rousing tribute to the 19th century world that his celebrated father, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and other Impressionists created in their paintings. Set mainly in Montmartre and the original Moulin Rouge nightclub in the 1890s, the film chronicles the revival of the cancan that electrified Paris. This film marked Renoir’s return to filmmaking in France after a lengthy exile caused by World War II.

Renoir’s main character, a theatrical impresario named Henri Danglard, is portrayed by legendary French actor Jean Gabin, who had worked with Renoir in the 1930s in The Lower Depths, La Bete Humaine, and the director’s antiwar masterpiece, La Grande Illusion. Gabin, for decades the face of French cinema, creates a vivid character in FRENCH CANCAN, a producer who has the restlessness of an artist, always seeking new challenges—and new romances in his personal life. The principal women in his life are portrayed by Francoise Arnoul and Maria Felix, with the legendary singer, Edith Piaf, in a tasty supporting role.

One of the critics who endorsed the film in the 1950s was Francois Truffaut, who was writing criticism before he embarked on his directing career. Truffaut considered FRENCH CANCAN a milestone in the history of color cinema. He observed that one scene of a dance class “reminds us of a Degas sketch,” and he added that Renoir’s direction was “as vigorous and youthful as ever.”

Later reviews also endorsed the film, especially after footage cut from the initial release was restored. Leonard Maltin paid tribute to the “brilliantly beautiful restored version” and called the film “an impressive, enjoyable fiction about beginnings of the Moulin Rouge and impresario Gabin’s revival of the cancan.” Roger Ebert called the film “a delicious musical comedy that deserves comparison with the golden age Hollywood musicals of the same period.” In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The glorious final sequence, in which the cancan is finally unveiled to the rowdy audience, is some kind of masterpiece, perhaps the equal of anything Renoir ever achieved: wild, free, turbulent, exhilarating.”

This musical delight will play at 7 PM on Wednesday, October 13, at four Laemmle theatres: the Royal in West L.A., the Playhouse in Pasadena, the Laemmle Glendale, and the Laemmle Newhall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLivSvCNe84

FRENCH CANCAN – Laemmle Theatres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLivSvCNe84)

Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST ~ 50th Anniversary Screenings.

September 15, 2021 by Jordan Deglise Moore

We continue our Anniversary Classics series with Bertolucci’s stunner at 7 o’clock on Wednesday, September 29 at our Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. theaters. The film follows Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a member of the secret police in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. He and his new bride, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), travel to Paris for their honeymoon, where Marcello also plans to assassinate his former college professor Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), an outspoken anti-fascist living in exile. But when Marcello meets the professor’s young wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), both his romantic and his political loyalties are tested.

“It’s easy to overlook how stark THE CONFORMIST‘s political and allegorical message is because it’s just so damn beautiful.” (Aja Romano, Vox)

“Bertolucci’s masterpiece—made when he was all of 29—will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year.” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice)

“THE CONFORMIST is celebrated for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s tumbling autumn leaves, but its emotional impact involves a tumbling soul.” (Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York)