The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
Sabbath Queen Q&A’s:
5-Dec 7:00 Royal, Sandi Simcha Dubowski with Amy Ziering, Producer/Director
6-Dec 7:10 PM Royal Sandi with Gabe Dunn
7-Dec 7:10 PM Royal Sandi with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and Jessica Yellin, political journalist
8-Dec 1:20 PM Royal Sandi with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and Carolline Libresco, film festival curator
8-Dec 7:10 PM Royal Sandi with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie and Rabbi Sharon Brous, Senior & Founding Rabbi, IKAR
9-Dec 7:00 PM NoHo Sandi with Joel Goodman, the film’s composer
10-Dec 7:00 PM Glendale Sandi with Damona Hoffman, Official Love Expert, The Drew Barrymore Show
On December 20th we are opening Pedro Almodóvar’s first movie in English, The Room Next Door, at the Royal. We’ll bring it to Claremont, Glendale, Newhall, North Hollywood, and Encino in January. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as two friends who reconnect after decades apart and embark on an unusual new phase of their friendship. Writing in Time Magazine, Stephanie Zacharek describes how “the colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.”
“The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.” ~ Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“In these intensely moving moments it feels as if the two artists — [James] Joyce and Almodóvar — are connecting across time, desperate to express the ineffable, and keen to capture a creative moment that honours both the living and the dead.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times
“The Room Next Door turns into something spiky, unnerving, and at times joyously silly.” ~ Leo Robson, New Statesman
Almodóvar, Moore, and Swinton spoke about the film over the weekend at a Deadline Contenders panel discussion. “It’s wonderful. He really honors the female experience,” said Moore. “I think it’s something that he talks about, sitting under the kitchen table when his mother was talking to her friends and absorbing those stories and how powerful they were, and understanding that point of view. I think he’s always in that feminine point of view. Like I said, he honors that world. You feel very, very seen as an actor when you work with Pedro.”
“I’m a very dull or heady director,” said Almodóvar. “I say to the actors many, many, many things, and what I learned about these two is that perhaps I don’t need to say so much information to the actors. There was one very important [scene of Moore reading] the letter at the end. For me, it was very important. I was almost crying when I talked to her and I said, ‘Well, Julianne, this is what I want for this letter.’ [She] said, ‘Pedro, please let me do it, and after that, you give me all the indications.’ And she was right. When she just read it, I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t intervene, but it was more than perfect. So I learned by then that perhaps I don’t need to tell them so many things to the actors.”
The newest episode of Inside the Arthouse just dropped and it’s a fascinating one. Hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge discuss the centenary of arthouse film with professor, historian, author and Academy Film Scholar Ross Melnick. It’s a lively conversation about the amazing history of arthouse film — Where it started, how far it’s come, and where is it today. Laemmle, third generation arthouse theater owner, adds his perspective, as the trio explores the last century considers the future of arthouse.
Here’s a taste from the beginning of their conversation:
ROSS MELNICK: The history of arthouse theaters is about a hundred years old. It really starts around 1925 with Simon Gould and the film guild and the beginning of what were then called “little cinemas.” So the little cinemas grew out of what was called the “little theaters.” Little theaters were performing arts theaters across the country. There were almost 5000 of them.
RAPHAEL SBARGE: Like vaudeville, kind of?
ROSS MELNICK: No, actually, literally for performing arts. For plays and performances that were avant-garde, experimental, off of the…mainstream. And there’s a growing movement in the ’20s to kind of push away from mainstream narratives and create theaters, legitimate theaters, that were for live performances. This is across the country. And so, inspired by little theaters, little cinemas grew, sometimes even in previously legitimate houses, to start showing films that were also experimental, avant-garde and, in this case, often foreign. They were sort of growing out of an interest in foreign films and if you — with the risk of boring you, let me take you back just a few years earlier, which is that World War I happens between ’14 and ’18. And when it’s over there’s a huge anti-German sentiment in the United States.
GREG LAEMMLE: Massive.
ROSS MELNICK: Massive, to say the least. And no one wants to show German films. The only person that’s willing to show a German film is himself a German-American. A guy named Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, who most people know as Roxy and who, of course, is the person who created Radio City Music Hall. He founded it. He ran the Roxy, the Capitol, the Strand, the Rialto, the Rivoli. All the major movie houses or many of the major movie houses in New York were run by Roxy. And when Roxy, underneath Samuel Goldywn — we’ll come back to Samuel Goldywn and later we’ll talk about a different company that his progeny ran — but when Roxy ran the Capitol Theater, he was really interested in this movie called Madame Du Barry. It’s an Ernst Lubitch film. 1919. Roxy saw it and said, “I’m going to bring this movie here.” And he took that nine-reel film, and he cut it to six. He made new inter-titles…and he released it as Passion. The Capitol Theater in New York was 5,300 seats.
RAPHAEL SBARGE: Oh, my God.
ROSS MELNICK: So it’s the largest theater in the United States. It was also a trade industry darling…and Roxy was running it and thought, “I’m going to bring this film.” So it broke the unofficial German boycott, the anti-German boycott, and suddenly there was this massive hit of a foreign film.
Watch the whole conversation here:
Tomorrow we open Blitz, the latest film English filmmaker Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave, Occupied City), at the Claremont, Glendale, Monica Film Center, Newhall, and Town Center. Starring Saoirse Ronan, it follows the stories of a group of Londoners during the events of the British capital bombing in World War II. Top film critics have been singing its praises:
“I’ve been to whole film festivals with less cinema than Steve McQueen packs into just two hours.” ~ William Bibbiani, TheWrap
“The quiet puncturing of the myth of WWII solidarity on the homefront feels nearly as visceral a shock to the system… It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone
“McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.” ~ Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times
“Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too.” ~ Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine
“Blitz, while not exactly a movie for children, is nonetheless a story about a child, and it has powerful moments of wonderment, humor and even joy.” ~ Justin Chang, NPR
“Arguably the most heroic character in the film is the city. And Blitz is, instantly, one of the great “London Movies.” ~ Kevin Maher, Times (UK)
“It’s the season when many festival darlings, the films that critics saw and loved in Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto, finally arrive in theaters, and this year, it feels different. More exciting? More like the old days? I’ve been making a concerted effort to actually go and see movies in the movie theater instead of waiting for them to arrive on streaming platforms, and it’s been paying off gloriously.
“The movies I’ve seen recently — “Didi,” “Megalopolis,” “Anora,” “Saturday Night” — have felt urgent and exciting: complicated stories with complicated characters, not a superhero franchise among them. I didn’t love all of these movies equally, but I loved seeing them, loved being in the dark drinking up their writers’ and directors’ idiosyncratic visions. And I loved the intention that led to the experience: I made a decision to see a movie, went to an establishment expressly built for that purpose, sat and paid attention for the length of the film and then, only then, returned to nonmovie life. Contrast that experience with the half-attention I so often pay a movie on a streaming platform, watching it in installments over several nights, maybe on an iPad, maybe while I’m brushing my teeth.
“Each movie I saw in the theater, I talked about afterward, with the friends accompanying me, with colleagues the next day. Some of the movies I’ve streamed — some abandoned before completion — I’ve discussed with no one. As the Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in his wonderful essay “Is It Still Worth Going to the Movies?”: “Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation.” I’m willing to wager that no filmmaker ever made a movie hoping or expecting that it would end up beyond the reach of conversation.
“Not every movie you watch has to be a means of connecting with other people, but it could be. Walking out of “Anora” the other night, chatting with friends, comparing the film with the director’s previous ones, I realized how rare the experience of seeing a movie with a group had become for me. Once, it was commonplace, a weekly tradition. Every Sunday evening when I was 14 and 15, my friends Justin and Tracy and I would go with one of our moms (we couldn’t yet drive ourselves) to the SoNo Cinema, an art-house theater in South Norwalk, Conn., where we saw films that would never be shown in our suburb’s mainstream theaters. We saw Hugh Grant in Ken Russell’s horror movie “The Lair of the White Worm.” We saw “Babette’s Feast,” the first Danish film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” After, we’d go out to dinner and discuss what we’d just watched.
“Searching for information about the theater, I found stories about its struggles to stay open over the years, its various fund-raising efforts. “I’m convinced that a lot of the young people we used to draw are raising families now and watching video rental films at home,” the owner told The Times in 1987, the same year we went to SoNo to see the British film “White Mischief,” about the Happy Valley murder case in Kenya. It closed not long after.
“I’ve over-romanticized those early adventures in theatergoing (I’m not the only one — “the movie house equivalent of ‘The Secret Garden,’” Tracy called it when I asked her recently). But the truth is, my friends and I still discuss the movies we saw at SoNo, how they informed our ideas of what life after high school might be like. And while I’m not going to argue that we’re as impressionable in middle age as we were when we’d been alive for barely more than a decade, my recent trips to the movies have convinced me that whenever the option presents itself, the right move is to see the movie in the theater.”
We are proud to open Anora this Friday at the Glendale, Monica Film Center, and NoHo and November 8 at the Claremont. It is fantastic and even better in a theater.
Opening at the Laemmle Glendale on Friday, November 1
Q&A with Writer/Director Pavel Nikolajev and Producer Olga Polevaya on Saturday, November 2 following primetime showing
An Aztec pyramid figurine found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico stores a dark secret, which is discovered by professor Hiscock, a non-traditional hero, who will learn quantum teleportation the hard way, facing primal folklore fears and his alter ego in the gruesome catacombs of uncharted realm.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
“I had a vision to create a film about instant teleportation via an ancient artifact for quite some time and was finally able to finish the script when my son was born, and I had a parental break. Weirdly, COVID that followed helped in creating the creature costume when everybody was locked in and I had plenty of time to do it right.
For filming, we tried using the style / look & feel of the classic ’80s/’90s Sci-Fi/Thriller films which I’m a big fan of, so most of the effects are practical with minimal CGI! The same technique I used in my previous film HEADSOME. Everything else was just good old exhausting indie filmmaking!”
-Pavel Nikolajev
Union Q&A schedule:
Royal 10/23: co-director Brett Story, producer Samantha Curley, and subject Chris Smalls;
Monica Film Center 10/25, 7:20 PM show: co-directors Steve Maing and Brett Story, producer Samantha Curley, and subject Chris Smalls with Adam Conover moderating;
Monica Film Center 10/26, 4:20 PM show: co-director Steve Maing, producer Samantha Curley, subject Chris Smalls, and UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz;
Glendale 10/26, 7:20 PM show: co-director Steve Maing, producer Samantha Curley, and subject Chris Smalls;
Glendale 10/27 noon show: co-director Steve Maing, producer Samantha Curley, and subject Chris Smalls.