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Laemmle Oscar Contest, plus Kevin Costner’s Best Director Oscar Presentation.

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Welp, that’s a wrap for the 2022 Oscars and our contest. Laemmle moviegoers were able to foresee the Academy’s choices very accurately with two exceptions: they went for the more conventional Best Picture nominee with CODA over The Power of the Dog and the artier choice with Best Animated Short nominee Windshield Wiper over the family-friendly Robin Robin. The Power of the Dog was in a tight race for Best Adapted Screenplay with eventual winner CODA. Best Original Screenplay split somewhat evenly between Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza and eventual winner Kenneth Branagh for Belfast.

See the full results in cool pie charts at laemmle.com/oscars. We’ll announce our winners on this page on Thursday, March 31.

The sad, shocking incident during the ceremony overshadowed everything but one thing worth taking a second look at is Kevin Costner‘s presentation of the Best Director Oscar. It was probably the best presentation of the evening. He has won the award himself, of course, 30 years ago for Dances with Wolves. He spoke movingly and deliberately about the experience of seeing movies in theaters and how seeing How the West was Won at the Cinerama Dome inspired him to become an actor and filmmaker. The in-person audience giggles at first, but by the end you could hear a pin drop. Here’s a transcription and video:

You know, about a half-mile from here, I saw my first full-length adult movie. I know what you’re thinking, but I was seven years old and I was away from my parents and wanted to have some fun. It was a cowboy movie called How the West Was Won. And what I witnessed that afternoon in the Cinerama Dome was perfect. The curtain, when we still had them, opened to a film almost four hours long. It had an intermission where the score continued, subtly signaling at one point that the second half was about to start. I don’t know where everyone went, but I wasn’t going to move an inch. I decided that I would not give up my magic seat. I was determined that I would not miss a minute. And as I sat in that dark that afternoon 60 years ago, all I really knew was that I was in careful hands. Little did I know that three directors would be responsible for that epic moment in my life. They fired my imagination, and they captured my heart. That’s what can happen when you direct a movie. You can change a mind. You can change the trajectory of a life, of a career. You can capture a heart. But you can’t do it alone. And directors, tonight’s directors all know the possibilities. They know what’s at stake. It’s why they give their precious time. It’s why they choose to fight through the long days, and the longer nights, and the endless questions, and the inevitable second guessing that comes from those who would do it differently if given half a chance. These five directors have all managed to stay the course. They have all held the line and masterfully given us the gift of a single vision, and for that we honor them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y52t3CVKeyc&t=167s

JULES AND JIM 60th Anniversary Screenings April 13

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In celebration of the 60th anniversary of that landmark year at American movie houses, 1962, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present anniversary screenings of François Truffaut’s masterpiece, JULES AND JIM. The film will play for one night only on Wednesday, April 13 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: West Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, and Glendale.

Truffaut, riding the crest of the international New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, was in the initial stage of his storied filmmaking career when he adapted Henri Pierre Roche’s autobiographical novel of obsessive love. JULES AND JIM, only his third film, remains to many his greatest achievement. The story follows the friendship of Jules (Oskar Werner) an Austrian writer, and the more extroverted Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), who meet in Paris in 1912 just before the outbreak of the First World War. Although they fight on opposite sides, they resume their “bromance” devotion to each other after the conflict. They had both pursued the enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a free spirit who marries Jules and moves with him to Germany, where Jim eventually joins them, and they form a menage-a-trois. Over the course of twenty years, Catherine’s independent nature cannot be bound by either marriage or motherhood, and her impulses ultimately become destructive.

JULES AND JIM is Truffaut’s celebration of both love and cinema, reflected by his use of an arsenal of cinematic techniques. This technical experimentation mirrors the unconventionality of the bohemian characters in the first decades of the twentieth century. Critics of the day embraced his vision, with Andrew Sarris extolling the film as “that rarity of rarities, a genuinely romantic film…expresses a brutal vision of love as a private war fought apart from the rules and regulations of society.” Pauline Kael exuded further praise, “Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period.” And one of Truffaut’s heroes, director Jean Renoir, wrote to Truffaut “I wanted to tell you JULES AND JIM seems to be the most accurate expression of contemporary French society.”

The film’s critical and box-office success not only enhanced Truffaut’s reputation as an emerging master of cinema, but also prompted the release of his second film, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960) which finally reached the United States in 1962. The two films, along with efforts by international auteurs like Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, and numerous others contributed to an overseas tidal wave that inundated American screens that year, the apex of the Golden Age of the Arthouse. Additionally, the dazzling performance of Jeanne Moreau in JULES AND JIM showcased the depth of female characterization in European films that was seldom matched by Hollywood’s output in that era. As Roger Ebert later wrote, JULES AND JIM is “perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of those first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvCS7mIzj4Y

Stand with Ukraine through Film: THE GUIDE and Ukraine War relief.

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We all know of the tragedy that is happening in Ukraine because of the Russian invasion.  Thousands of civilians are dying in the streets while as of today 3,000,000 people are fleeing the country.

Film exhibitors around the country want to do their small part. Working with filmmaker Oles Sanin, who is currently in Ukraine, we have banded together to screen his 2014 Ukrainian film The Guide and will donate 100% of the proceeds to help his fellow Ukrainians. We’ll begin screening the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center. The Guide follows an American boy named Peter and and a blind minstrel, Ivan, who are thrown together by fate during the Stalin-perpetrated genocide in 1930s Ukraine.

Here’s the official website: STAND WITH UKRAINE THROUGH FILM

Here is a message from the director that will precede the screenings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ea5wsqA6xI

Here is the film’s trailer:

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

Brevity is the soul of wit: The 2022 Oscar-nominated short films are now playing everywhere.

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This Friday we’ll expand our screenings of the 2022 Oscar-nominated short films — live action, animated and documentary — to almost all our venues so cinephiles from throughout L.A. County and beyond can enjoy them theatrically. Robert Abele of the L.A. Times weighed in on his favorites:

Documentaries: “The Queen of Basketball is a joyous portrait of college legend, breakthrough Olympian, and only ever female NBA draftee Lusia “Lucy” Harris, a gifted athlete without a professional league of her own. Harris died in January, but here she’s a wry chronicler of her underappreciated majesty, making Queen a fitting film obituary. Matt Ogens’ percussively energized, heartfelt Audible takes us into the tightknit huddle of high schoolers in the successful football program at the Maryland School for the Deaf, their Big Game preparation a poignant metaphor for the feelings of pride, loss and community that make them different from, but also no different than, any teenager facing an uncertain world…Looking back on a childhood choice (and seizing on a wild coincidence) is the province of veteran experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s When We Were Bullies, a wonderfully intimate, collage-styled reckoning with memory, hurt and the ethics of storytelling.”

From WHEN WE WERE BULLIES. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Live action: “The nerviest conscience buster is Aneil Karia’s The Long Goodbye, a companion film to actor/rapper Riz Ahmed’s same-named album. He plays one of many members of a large British-South Asian family in a bustling house preparing for a wedding until a violent reality intrudes, leading to a wall-breaking rap about race, history and nationalism that Ahmed delivers like a frontline soliloquy. On the more Black Mirror end of things is KD Davila’s Kafkaesque satire Please Hold, which fuses our blind fascination with all things contactless, online and privatized with our inability to reform a byzantine justice system, following it to a not-too-far-off conclusion for someone like innocent Latino 20-something Mateo (Erick Lopez).”

From PLEASE HOLD. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Animation: “Lives marred by cruelty factor into the hand-drawn Boxballet and stop-motion Bestia. The former, from Anton Dyakov, brings together a hulking, banged-up pugilist and an up-and-coming ballerina for a wordless-but-not-soundless meeting of sensitive souls. The latter is Chilean animator Hugo Covarrubias’ slow-burning, textural glimpse — set during the country’s military dictatorship — of the corrosive duality in a policewoman’s daily life with her dog, her body and her demons. The eerie airlessness of the dollhouse-like settings and the porcelain shine on the puppets are memorably unsettling.’

From BESTIA.

“Influential designer/animator Alberto Mielgo, who sparked the aesthetic of Into the Spider-Verse, is another wizard with texture and visual depth. His meditative The Windshield Wiper poses the question “What is love?” to a man in a café, then seeks clues in a series of vignettes with couples around the world. Mielgo’s urbanized hybrid of the painterly and the digitized is hypnotic and its own example of an artist’s love.’

From THE WINDSHIELD WIPER.

“British animator Joanna Quinn’s enthusiasm for the wiggly expressiveness of traditional animation, meanwhile, makes her latest romp starring middle-aged feminist factory worker Beryl, Affairs of the Art, a raucous delight. (The last Beryl short was in 2006.) Now hellbent on becoming a “hyperfuturist artiste,” drawing-obsessed Beryl (voiced as ever by Menna Trussler) relays a family history of sibling rivalry, imperiled pets, morbid curiosities and eccentric tastes, while Quinn’s masterful caricatures and love of bulbous bodies in motion would make Da Vinci blush, laugh and be jealous simultaneously. Drawing becomes riotously, beautifully alive in Quinn’s vaudeville of aging and anatomy, but so does the wonderfully personal message delivered through her never-too-late-to-try heroine: There’s power in passion, whenever it strikes you in life.”

From AFFAIRS OF THE ART.

Please note that the animated shorts are not MPAA rated but if they were they’d likely receive an R or NC-17 rating. Only adults will be admitted.

https://vimeo.com/678295462/7a10ce4892

“Beautiful…timely” new documentary about Laemmle Theatres ‘Only in Theatres’ premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

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The new documentary about Laemmle Theatres, ONLY IN THEATERS, was begun just before the pandemic began and completed last year. It recounts the company’s history and features interviews with all the surviving players as they face the seismic changes in the film exhibition industry. The family members behind this multigenerational business—whose sole mission has been to support the art of film—remain determined to see it survive, despite enormous challenges. From the festival program:

“Laemmle Theaters, the beloved L.A. art house cinema chain, has an astonishing legacy with ties to the origins of Hollywood. This is a story about a family business and their determination to survive in the face of headlines that question the future of movie theaters. For more than 84 years and through three generations, this family’s personal mission has been to elevate the art of films and the artists who make them.”

ONLY IN THEATRES premieres this Saturday night at the prestigious Santa Barbara International Film Festival. There is a second screening on Monday, March 7. Programming Director Claudia Puig was quoted in the L.A. Times today calling it “a beautiful film, and a timely one.”

Follow the film on Facebook for updates on future screenings at https://www.facebook.com/onlyintheaters and check out the trailer:

https://vimeo.com/547583876

Moviegoing safely.

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     The Washington Post published a good article by their chief film critic Ann Hornaday last week headlined “Is it safe? In the movie theater business, the question is how much to promise older audiences.” One of the public health experts quoted is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who thinks that “for people who are fully vaccinated, watching a movie in a theater while keeping a tightfitting N95 mask on the entire time (i.e. no sipping soda or nibbling popcorn) is among the safest group indoor activities they can have.”
     According to the L.A. County Health Department, test positivity rate has been plummeting. While it is too soon to say that the pandemic is over, it does appear that the Omicron surge has basically passed in L.A. Our seven-day average test positivity rate is at 2.56%, which is as low as its been since November of last year. L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said last week that “we do anticipate that if we have these continued steep declines in cases, which indicate lower transmission, we will be able to safely lift indoor masking mandates in mid-to-late March.” In the meantime, this week the Health Department announced a partial roll-back of the mask mandate. Fully vaccinated people who show proof may go without masks while visiting indoor businesses. Additionally, we will continue to allow our patrons extra space and breathing room by not selling adjacent seats to different parties and we keep our HVAC systems in excellent condition, regularly changing the filters. People can still choose to stay masked indoors as a way to help increase their personal safety — experts say one-way masking works. If you’re vaccinated, boosted, and wearing an N95, you’re protected, no matter what others are doing. What’s more, because of the availability of rapid home testing, instances of asymptomatic spread are increasingly rare.
     All of which is to say that it is relatively safe to go to the movies and it is now urgent for L.A. cinephiles to show up. Distributors of arthouse films need to see results or we risk losing something precious, the chance to experience truly brilliant, challenging, foreign and/or independent cinema as it was intended to be seen. Are you a movie lover who appreciates how integral public moviegoing is to cinema and everything cinema is? From the Post piece:
     “For Leana Wen, a physician and public health professor at George Washington University, the decision of whether to go back to theaters comes down to three factors: individual medical circumstances, risk tolerance and how highly one values going out to see a movie. “For some people, going to the movies was not something they particularly enjoyed, and therefore it’s something they don’t miss,” she says. “On the other hand, there are some individuals for whom it may be close to an essential activity, it’s such an important part of life.”

“Haroun shows how the strength of sisterhood extends beyond family to unite women in resistance.” LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS opens this Friday at the Royal.

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Celebrated Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man) makes a remarkable return to his home country with Lingui, The Sacred Bonds, in which a mother struggles to secure an abortion for her pregnant teen daughter. Honest and poignant, gorgeously shot and superbly acted, this official submission to the 2022 Academy Awards is a stunning vision of female solidarity. Film critics have noticed:

“Haroun has a gift for distilling volumes of meaning in his direct, lucid, balanced visuals, which he uses to complement and illuminate the minimalist, naturalistic dialogue.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Achouackh Abakar Souleyman and Rihane Khalil Alio. All photos courtesy of MUBI.

“It’s a bracing work that passes quickly in 87 minutes. But the world it shows us, etched in fully felt performances and beautifully hued compositions, feels vividly, sometimes overwhelmingly present.” ~ Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Rihane Khalil Alio.

“Beautiful to look at, impeccably shot and boasts a righteous, perfectly judged, weapon-wielding climax.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times [UK]

Achouackh Abakar Souleyman and Rihane Khalil Alio.

“Haroun shows how the strength of sisterhood extends beyond family to unite women in resistance, and the movie’s powerful vision of their furtive heroism reflects the overwhelming forces that they confront.” ~ Richard Brody, New Yorker

Rihane Khalil Alio.

“As we tag along with Harouns characters, we learn to appreciate their story as a small, but vivid study of lives that are so much more than their progressive developments.” ~ Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com

Rihane Khalil Alio.

“But it’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece.” ~ Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph [UK]

Rihane Khalil Alio and Achouackh Abakar Souleyman.

“The intense, focused performances from the two central women keep this drama in a hyper-alert state.” ~ Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.

“A beautiful portrait of community.” ~ Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DFew16WifY

Oscar Update: Contests, KStew, Sleepers from India and Bhutan, Plus Doc, Animated and Live Action Shorts!

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It’s Oscar nomination week which means it’s time for our Umpteenth Annual Laemmle Oscar Contest! Correctly guess how the Academy will vote and win movie passes good at all Laemmle venues and Laemmle Virtual Cinema.
Plus, there’s still time to win Laemmle passes by telling us your favorite ten films of 2021. That contest ends February 21.
Oscar nominations mean we’re almost ready to start screening the perennially popular Oscar-nominated shorts. We’ll open the documentaries February 25 at the Royal with other venues TBD. We’re planning to open the animated and live action shorts at the Claremont, Newhall, Playhouse, Town Center, NoHo and Monica Film Center, exact dates TBA.

Please note: this year neither the animated nor live action short programs are appropriate for children.

We have many other brilliant Oscar nominees on screen now, including Best International Film nominee Lunana and multiple nominees Drive My Car and Flee (Best International, Animated and Documentary Feature nominee!), and this Friday we’re bringing back Spencer to make sure everyone sees Kristen Stewart’s performance on the big screen. Beginning March 4 we’ll have Best Feature Documentary nominee Writing with Fire on our virtual platform.