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The Beautiful, Universally Acclaimed Italian Film THE MACALUSO SISTERS Opens Friday.

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We open the beautiful new Italian film The Macaluso Sisters this Friday at the Newhall, Playhouse, Royal and Town Center, as well as August 20 at the Claremont. As of this writing, Emma Dante’s movie, about how a tragedy changes the lives of five sisters in Palermo, boasts a rare “100% Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with praise such as:

“Haunting and powerful.” (New York Times);

“In just her second feature after the taut street-stand-off drama A Street In Palermo seven years ago, Dante sets a firm seal upon her cross-disciplinary emergence as a director of unusually vivid empathy.” (Variety);

“Dante’s film, beautifully done, is never more resonant than when reminding us of the lingering impact of childhood drama and the devastating nature of childhood trauma.” (Times [U.K.]).

Unfortunately, our usually excellent hometown daily erred and did not assign a film critic to publish a review. To make up for it, here’s the entirety of Beatrice Loayza’s full New York Times Critic’s Pick review:

“No mere sun-kissed coming-of-age film, The Macaluso Sisters opens on a blissful day filled with young love and beachside longing that is tragically upended by an accident that has everlasting reverberations.

“The Italian filmmaker Emma Dante, best known as a director of avant-garde theater and opera, adapted the film based on her acclaimed play of the same name. Here, she imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.

“Five orphaned sisters — Katia, Lia, Pinuccia, Maria, and Antonella — live alone in a lively apartment in Palermo, Sicily, where they sustain themselves by loaning out pigeons for ceremonies and events. On their day off, they head to the beach, passing through a field peppered with enormous dinosaur figurines and initiating a pop music-scored dance party upon their arrival. These magical moments are grounded by the cinematographer Gherardo Gossi’s tactile photography, which accentuates the youthful vitality of the sisters’ bodies and the playful chaos of their movements.

“Following the death of a sister, Dante skips ahead to a future in which the group — now played by a different group of actresses — are middle-aged and broken, each in their own particular way. They remain in the same apartment, while ghostly manifestations of their missing sister create a stark contrast between their aging bodies and those of their brimming younger selves.

“A third act shows three sisters in old age and in mourning. Yet the apartment and its white cabinet — adorned with an etching of a beach — looks the same. By the end, Dante stages a transcendent confrontation with the impermanence of the body, destined to degrade, yet sustained by the memories and relationships that have come to define it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZHR_7GwV6o

Documentarian Morgan Neville on Transforming 10,000 Hours of Very Raw Footage into ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN.

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ROADRUNNER is the latest from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). It’s unflinching look at chef, writer, adventurer, and provocateur Anthony Bourdain and it reverberates with his presence because it’s culled from 10,000 hours of raw footage from his TV shows. It’s “raw” in that most of it is from outtakes, but also in the sense that Bourdain’s technique to help his interview subjects open up was to get very personal with them first.

From Eric Kohn’s recent interview with Neville in Indiewire:

Q: How much footage do you estimate you went through?

A: There was anything from 60 – 100 hours of footage per episode. There were 96 episodes of “Parts Unknown.” That’s just “Parts Unknown.” Then there was “No Reservations” and “Cook’s Tour.” Not all the raw footage exists for those episodes, but it does for certain seasons. Of course, we didn’t go through all the footage, that would’ve taken years and years. We probably went through 10,000 hours. We had six of us all looking at footage, sometimes double-timed, because there was so much to go through. I love archive docs, and this was a unique one because the camera was always there and running. It becomes its own weird, interesting verite thing. It has a behind-the-scenes quality that feels raw, which I wanted to carry over into the telling of it.

Q: How did you narrow down the process?

A: We were going through footage for at least a year. Anytime there was an episode that he talked about or a crew member mentioned, we’d go through those episodes. There were definitely a number of episodes that were easy wins. A lot of the domestic ones. Or whenever Tony was on a beach. You can see that he’s in a different gear in those episodes. It’s pretty easy to tell early in a scene where Tony is phoning it in or actually wants to learn about a person. Those scenes floated to the top pretty quickly.

Q: Given how much of his shows were infused with his personality, what surprised you about the way he came across in this additional footage?

A: One of the biggest challenges early on was not to make the film feel like the show. Among the things that really surprised me was that he was fundamentally a shy person. Once you hear that, it makes sense — you can see that in him — but I don’t think it’s otherwise obvious. He overcame it in a big way, but there was always a part of him that was a little walled off.

When I was first talking to people who worked on the show, they would say, “Tony had this technique, and we didn’t know it was his technique.” When he was shooting a scene with someone he didn’t know, he would open up about himself in a really raw way. The crew would be sitting there wondering when he’d get to the point of speaking about the subject. Eventually he would, but by speaking about himself, he would get other people comfortable talking about themselves.

Of course, they cut all that stuff out of the show. But the raw footage has a lot of Tony revealing a lot about himself to people — knowing it was never intended for broadcast. It was part of who he was. I remember talking to David Simon about Tony and he said the first time he met Tony, the first thing he said was, “Oh, you’re from Baltimore. I tried to score heroin once there and couldn’t.” To which Simon replied, “Then you must have been a terrible junkie.”

Read Kohn’s full piece here.

This behind-the-scenes look at how an anonymous chef became a world-renowned cultural icon is enjoying universal acclaim:

“It feels like an essential document, created in the radical no-reservations spirit in which he lived.” ~ Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“An intimate and fascinating portrait of the beloved celebrity chef and television globe-trotter. It is also, inevitably, a spiritual investigation into why his life ended.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“It does what Bourdain’s work did: ROADRUNNER makes you want to jump on a plane, discover a new place, a new culture, eat a great meal, and make a new friend. What could be more valuable?” ~ Jason Bailey, The Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmtJFKMFU1c

“It’s Not Easy to Show Your Life as Undocumented People. But We are Ready…Because It is Time.” The Filmmaker & the Subjects on the Making of I CARRY YOU WITH ME.

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Based on a true love story, the decades-spanning romance I Carry You with Me begins in Mexico between an aspiring chef and a teacher. Their lives restart in incredible ways as societal pressure propels the couple to embark on a treacherous journey to New York with dreams, hopes, and memories in tow. We’ll open this moving film this Friday at our Playhouse and Town Center theaters, with additional venues in the subsequent weeks.

Reviews have been glowing. “A gay story and a border story, told in the universal language of love, family, and dreams.” (Entertainment Weekly). “Ravishing and unshakable, Ewing’s authentic film feels like the crossbreed between a painful memory and a hopeful dream about a place, a relationship and a fight for acceptance that’s not political but entirely humanistic.” (Remezcla) “Dreams make up both the form and substance of I Carry You with Me, Heidi Ewing’s accomplished narrative feature debut.” (Washington Post)

The director Heidi Ewing, center, on the set of “I Carry You With Me.” Courtesy of Loki Films.

The New York Times recently published a Nicolas Rapold piece headlined “When Truth Melds With Fiction: Making I Carry You with Me. Here is the beginning of the piece:

“Heidi Ewing knew her friends Iván García and Gerardo Zabaleta for seven years before learning the full story of their journey. Iván and Gerardo first fell in love in the 1990s in Mexico, where they had to keep their relationship a secret. They emigrated separately to the United States, with Iván crossing the border first on foot at great risk.

“In New York, the men eventually thrived as restaurateurs, and today run two Williamsburg establishments. But, Ewing learned, the couple remained undocumented, like millions of others.

“Ewing, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker (“Jesus Camp”), recognized a captivating romance when she saw one. But how could she portray her friends’ in-between status, living in a world that kept forcing them to conceal basic facts of their existence?

“In I Carry You with Me , now in theaters, Ewing found her own in-between path by filming a hybrid fiction. Spanning childhood through adulthood, from Mexico City to New York, it’s the rare movie that both stars actors — Armando Espitia plays Iván and Christian Vázquez plays Gerardo — and the people being portrayed.

Vázquez, left, with Ewing on set. Courtesy of Loki Films

“But the project — Ewing’s first fiction feature — looked a little different at first.

““It was so trial-and-error, because when they first told me their story, my go-to was, ‘This is a beautiful documentary,’” Ewing said one morning at a Lower East Side eatery.

“Beginning around 2013, she filmed significant moments in Iván and Gerardo’s lives — birthdays, restaurant openings, Cinco de Mayo. She also shot interviews with them (carefully lit and partly inspired by “My Dinner with Andre”). While gathering these materials for several years, she continued to make movies with her longtime co-director, Rachel Grady: “Detropia,” “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” and “One of Us.”

“Heidi Ewing directed a film about two of her friends and their love story, both following them in real life and using actors to portray them in narrative moments.” Here are the first few paragraphs:

“But her documentary about her friends kept posing certain challenges. Hardly any archival photos or video of Iván and Gerardo existed, for example. And she usually steered clear of documentary productions that did not have a “current-day evolution of a story or narrative,” as she put it.

“There was also the question of doing justice to her friends’ romance.

““You want to see somebody fall in love. A documentary camera is never there — at the bar, the restaurant, the street corner, the subway, the bus, the glance between two people,” Ewing said.

“She decided to cast actors to dramatize Iván and Gerardo’s history together. The couple gave their full support.

Christian Vázquez as Gerardo, and Armando Espitia as Iván in “I Carry You With Me.” Courtesy of Alejandro Lopez Pineda/Sony Pictures Classics

Read the rest of the piece on the New York Times website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKH-PKU2hsQ

J. Hoberman on the Restoration of the 1949 Masterpiece DISTANT JOURNEY, Opening July 9.

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One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor (Blanka Waleská) and her gentile husband (Otomar Krejča)—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them inexorably to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage (some drawn from Triumph of the Will) to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to reemerge as urgent and impactful as ever.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

Tablet Magazine recently published J. Hoberman’s authoritative article about the film. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“Alfred Radok’s 1949 first feature, Distant Journey, was (and is) a landmark—a movie of its time that continues to speak to ours. Made in a no longer extant, once-communist state during the Cold War winter of 1948-1949, Radok’s remarkable debut is a masterpiece of Czech cinema. It was also one of the first and remains among the strongest, most original, and most influential movies to deal with the murder of European Jewry.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“Distant Journey had its New York premiere in August 1950, not three months into the Korean War, at the Stanley, a shabby theater off Times Square that then served as the home of Yiddish movies, Israeli documentaries, and Soviet imports. The film was given the Yiddish title Geto Terezin, for the “transit camp” Theresienstadt, known in Czech as Terezin, where it was largely set and partially filmed; it was so enthusiastically received that it was held for over a month.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called Distant Journey “the most brilliant, the most powerful and horrifying film on the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews,” that he had ever seen, albeit cautioning “the faint of heart” to see the movie “at their own risk.” The Yiddish daily Morgn Frayhayt reported the amazed public response of at least one spectator who claimed to recognize her fictionalized self on the screen—as well she might. The first fiction films to represent the Holocaust, produced in Eastern Europe soon after the war were typically made by and/or with actual survivors. All had aspects of psychodrama, docudrama, and documentary.

Courtesy of Janus Films.

“Nothing if not personal, Distant Journey was written by Erik Kolár, an assimilated Czech Jewish lawyer who, married to a gentile, managed to stave off deportation to Terezin until 1945. Director Radok, the son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, grew up in a Bohemian village and spent much of the war in hiding before being sent to a forced labor camp for mischlings in Poland. Both his father and grandfather died in Terezin. Based on his experiences, Kolár took a conciliatory attitude toward his gentile countrymen; based on his experience, Radok did not. In its attitude and attention to detail, Distant Journey was the most Jewish film made in Czechoslovakia up until that time and perhaps ever.”

Read the full article on Tablet’s website.

Laemmle Theatres will open Distant Journey July 9 at the Royal and Town Center and on watch.laemmle.com.

https://vimeo.com/542776321

See Alex Cohen Interview Greg Laemmle on Spectrum News.

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Ms. Cohen spoke with the Laemmle Theatres president on Monday about getting the company through 2020, the company’s history of meeting past challenges, safely re-opening theaters, and more.

Laemmle Theatres is Reopening April 9! Plus ‘The Mole Agent’ and Other New Films

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Dear moviegoers,

Now that L.A. County’s health department has announced we have left the purple tier and entered the red, we are thrilled to announce that we will reopen on April 9, 2021 at 25% capacity! If the County is in the orange tier at that time, we’ll go with 50% capacity. Our veteran general managers have returned, like cavalry coming over the hill, to ready our theaters and make sure the reopening will be safe. We’ll share the big date with you shortly. Go to www.laemmle.com/reopening for details on venues, films, advance ticketing, and more.

For those who are hesitant about returning, we understand. Consider, however, that a recent study — reported by the New York Times yesterday — showed that there has been a negative bias in national media coverage of the pandemic. International and U.S. local and regional coverage has been markedly more balanced. The virus is still an issue and we must not drop safety practices, but we want to share that there is good news, and not just regarding the resumption of commercial activity.

For now, virtual cinema is still all we are offering. And as always, we have some terrific new films available via Laemmle Virtual Cinema, starting with The Mole Agent, the warm, funny, Oscar-nominated feature documentary about an 83-year-old man who poses as a resident in a Chilean nursing home to investigate allegations of abuse. The powerful documentary Francesco portrays Pope Francis as he confronts gigantic issues such as the climate crisis, the refugee crisis, peace and religious intolerance, economic inequality, and more. Based on a real-life 1972 experiment, The Marijuana Conspiracy is a beautifully-made ensemble drama about an outlandish study on the effects of ever-increasing doses of tetrahydrocannabinol on young women. William Shatner and Jean Smart star in the Palm Springs-set Senior Moment. He plays a retired NASA test pilot fighting to regain his driver’s licence and impounded car who meets Smart’s character on a bus. Kuessipan is a Canadian film about two girls in a Quebec Innu community whose longtime friendship is shaken when one of them falls for a white boy. Her Name is Chef spotlights six bad-ass, inspiring, sheroes of the restaurant industry. We’re also screening Charles Gounod’s Faust, filmed lived at the famed Teatro Real in Madrid in 2018. Finally we’ll have two gallery experience films: Water Lilies of Monet: The Magic of Water, which recounts the story of Monsieur Claude’s groundbreaking series of paintings of Giverny, and The Prado Museum: A Collection of Wonders, which offers viewers a spell-binding experience through the works of Vélazquez, Rubens, Titian, Mantegna, Bosch, Goya, El Greco and more.

“Forever Looking for Love.” Kenneth Turan on the Newly Restored PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN in the L.A. Times.

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From Kenneth Turan’s February 14, 2020 Critics Choice column in the Times:

“Independent films were not an invention of Sundance, they existed in the golden age Hollywood as well, and one of the most unusual, and the most gorgeous, was 1951’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It was directed by Albert Lewin and starred James Mason and, looking especially beautiful, Ava Gardner in a pleasantly surreal supernatural tale of a cursed sea captain and a heedless young woman who lives only for pleasure. Or so she thinks.

“Gardner looked as photogenic as she did because Pandora’s cinematographer was the great Jack Cardiff, famous for works like Black Narcissus, and because the film was shot in the knockout process known as three-strip Technicolor.

“Restoring Pandora to its original glory has taken more than a dozen years, with the Cohen Media Group ultimately funding a glorious 4K version, which included more than 700 hours of digital restoration lavished on 177,120 frames of the film. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

“Begins Feb. 21 at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles.”

Cohen commissioned several terrific new posters for Pandora by New York-based key art designer, illustrator, and art director Mark McGillivray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcnLjk-hyP8&feature=youtu.be

 

Ava Gardner and James Mason in a scene from “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.” (Cohen Media Group)

It’s Time for Our Annual Predict the Oscars Contest!

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With the 91st Academy Awards right around the corner, 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 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 24th.

prem-blogNot 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 $3 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! In 2016, 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 February 26th. Good luck!

*One entry per person. One winner per household.

Click Here to Enter