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Win tickets to a Halloween screening of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

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UPDATE: Winners have been drawn and emailed. Details below!

It’s “Horror in the Hall” this Halloween as the silent classic, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, is accompanied live by Clark Wilson on the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s monster organ.

jekyllParamount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John S. Robertson and produced by Famous Players-Lasky, was the first of three film treatments of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella produced in 1920. It starred John Barrymore as the fatally split personalities, and featured Martha Mansfield and Nita Naldi as their love interests, roles based on a stage treatment, not the original story.

Four winners (selected at random) will each receive a pair of tickets to DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. As a bonus, winners will also receive two tickets to Laemmle’s very own pre-Halloween double feature of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) & ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948) on Friday, 10/30 at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Good luck!

Enter below!

Halloween at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Ticket Giveaway

Special thanks to the LA Phil for making these tickets available to our customers! If you don’t win, please consider purchasing tickets here.

A BETTER YOU Director and VEEP Star Matt Walsh and Actor/Co-Screenwriter Brian Huskey in Person Tonight at the Music Hall

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Meet Dr. Ron: Hypnotherapist. Author. Idiot. A delusional self-help guru in the midst of a mid-life crisis, Ron finds that his impending divorce and the prospect of losing custody of his children is interrupting what he considers to be a “career renaissance,” during which he has written a book and started wearing an awful toupee. Forced to reevaluate his life, he may find help in the form of Hugo, a day laborer he meets at the local hardware superstore, and a pretty new patient who may be more than just a client.

A BETTER YOU director Matt Walsh and actor/co-screenwriter Brian Huskey will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 PM screening at the Music Hall on Friday, October 9th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUd7Rsd2Tvg

Culture Vulture Mondays, Laemmle Theatres’ Panoply of High Art in Cinema: Venue Changes + Fourth Quarter Lineup

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We’re celebrating the first anniversary of CULTURE VULTURE with a slew of stellar offerings that will take us into the new year.

For the uninitiated, CULTURE VULTURE is our weekly series of opera, stage and ballet/dance performances plus art exhibitions and documentaries.

These are often live performances that have been recorded – and they are typically breathtaking! If you are a lover of the high arts and have yet to experience Culture Vulture, you owe it to yourself to attend one of our upcoming programs.

Screenings take place Monday nights with repeat performances Tuesday afternoons.

Please note that we’ve shuffled the deck a bit with regard to venues. Culture Vulture will be continuing at the Playhouse, Claremont, and Town Center. In addition, it will be offered at the newly re-opened FINE ARTS in Beverly Hills. It will no longer run at the Royal, Music Hall, or NoHo.

There’s more! We’ve developed a new scheduling model that will make it easier for you to plan in advance. Each month will be calendared as follows:

1st Monday – Opera
2nd Monday – Ballet/Dance
3rd Monday – Stage
4th Monday – Art Exhibits/Documentaries
The 5th Monday (when it occurs) will be a surprise!

September 21 and 22: PAUL TAYLOR: CREATIVE DOMAIN (dance documentary)

September 28 and 29: THE IMPRESSIONISTS (exhibition)

October 5 and 6: AIDA (opera from Teatro alla Scalla)

October 12 and 13: L’HISTOIRE DE MANON (ballet from the Opera Nacional de Paris)

October 19 and 20: THEODORE BIKEL: IN THE SHOES OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM (stage production via the National Center for Jewish Film)

October 26 and 27: VINCENT VAN GOGH: A NEW WAY OF SEEING (exhibition)

November 2 and 3: RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY (opera from the Royal Opera House)

November 9 and 10: MOVIMENTOS: LA DANZA DE LA PUNTA AL TACON (dance from the Teatro Real, Madrid)

November 16 and 15: MAN AND SUPERMAN (stage production from the National Theatre, London)

November 23 and 24: PALIO

November 30 and December 1: THE THREE TENORS CHRISTMAS CONCERT (Wiener Konzerthaus)

December 7 and 8: THE MAGIC FLUTE (opera from Bregenzer Festspiele)

December 14 and 15: THE NUTCRACKER (ballet from the Bolshoi)

December 21 and 22: HAMLET (stage from the National Theatre)

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.

The French Hit Comedy PAULETTE Stars Legendary Actress Bernadette Lafont in One of Her Last Roles.

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Next Friday, September 11th we’ll be opening a French comedy that stars the wonderful actress Bernadette Lafont in one of her last performances, playing the title character in PAULETTE. A brash and opinionated retiree, Paulette lives alone in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris. One evening, upon observing some mysterious dealings outside her building, she discovers a surprising way to supplement her meager pension: an unlikely but successful career selling cannabis.

Writing in Film Journal International, Doris Toumarkine wrote that “PAULETTE offers a heap of laughs and ultimately delights like a shelf of colorful fresh pastries.”

In his L.A. Weekly review, Chuck Wilson wrote that Lafont “died in 2013, at age 74, one year after PAULETTE became a hit in France. A working actress since she was 19 [IMDB lists 190 credits over the course of her career], Lafont was at the forefront of the French New Wave, with François Truffaut, who discovered her, once calling her, lovingly, ‘a wild child.’ It would appear that she remained so all her working life.”

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

Vox: “The quietly radical DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL turns the page on coming-of-age films.”

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This Friday, at five of our six venues, we’ll be opening a film we enjoyed immensely, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL. The girl of the title is Minnie Goetze (fantastic newcomer Bel Powley), who is longing for love, acceptance and a sense of purpose in the world. She begins a complex love affair with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, “the handsomest man in the world,” Monroe Rutherford (Alexander Skarsgård). What follows is a sharp, funny and provocative account of one girl’s sexual and artistic awakening, without judgment.

Based on a 2002 graphic novel, film critics have embraced the film (it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). Writing in New York Magazine, Bilge Ebiri exclaimed, “the first thing to know about THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.” In the L.A. Times, Rebecca Keegan wrote, “big summer action movies can be thrilling, but if you really want to feel your heart pounding out of your chest, try being a 15-year-old girl for 101 minutes.” In the New Republic, Elaine Teng called the film “a startlingly tough, authentic depiction of budding womanhood.” And in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis declared the film “exhilarating…the novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie – on the page and now on the screen – greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.”

The extended Vox review included this observation by the film’s director, Marielle Heller: “I think as a society, we’re just a little bit afraid of teenage girls, and we’re definitely afraid of their sexuality. There’s a desire to shelter girls and also to ignore what they might be feeling or experiencing. The result of that is if you’re a teenage girl who’s having thoughts about sex, you think something’s wrong with you.” This is the same approach to the topic as what you can find other people writing about, and what the reasons are it for, for instance on this Lovegasm blog article about sexual forward-thinking within the media.

THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL wonderfully rejects that path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2M9kqb5wVw

Acclaimed New Indian Film COURT, Opening August 14th, Featured in the New Yorker: “The Endless Indian Trial.”

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Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai film festivals, Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is a quietly devastating, absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India. An elderly folk singer and grassroots organizer, dubbed the “people’s poet,” is arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting a sewage worker to commit suicide. His trial is a ridiculous and harrowing display of institutional incompetence, with endless procedural delays, coached witnesses for the prosecution, and obsessive privileging of arcane colonial law over reason and mercy. What truly distinguishes Court, however, is Tamhane’s brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors; his affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy; and his naturalist approach to his characters and to Indian society as a whole, rich with complexity and contradiction. —New Directors/New Films

court

The New Yorker recently published this excellent appraisal of the film with background information about the scandal of India’s infamously slow justice system. It’s not required reading before seeing Court, but it’s informative — and shocking — nonetheless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0I6jtTXVco

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: TOM BRADLEY AND THE POLITICS OF RACE Screenings Next Week with Q&A’s

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tombradleyBRIDGING THE DIVIDE: TOM BRADLEY AND THE POLITICS OF RACE tells the story of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor elected in a major American city with an overwhelmingly white majority. His extraordinary multi-racial coalition redefined Los Angeles, transformed the national dialogue on race and set the foundation for elections of minority candidates nationwide, including President Barack Obama.

We will be hosting two screenings of this documentary about this key figure in our city’s history, two of which featuring Q&A’s:

Q&A participants in Pasadena, August 11 at 7:30pm:

  • Lyn Goldfarb, Producer, Director, Writer
  • Alison Sotomayor, Producer, Research Director, Writer
  • Robert Farrell, City Councilmember, 8th district from 1974-1991; Deputy to Councilmember Billy Mills (who represented South L.A.) during the Watts Riot.
  • Lorraine Bradley, Tom Bradley’s eldest daughter
  • Christopher Jimenez y West, Film Advisor, Assistant Professor, History, Pasadena City College

Q&A participants at the Town Center 5 in Encino, August 13 at 7:30pm:

  • Lyn Goldfarb, Producer, Director, Writer
  • Alison Sotomayor, Producer, Research Director, Writer
  • Robert Farrell, City Councilmember, 8th district from 1974-1991; Deputy to Councilmember Billy Mills, who represented South L.A., during the Watts Riot.
  • Lorraine Bradley, Tom Bradley’s eldest daughter

 
Click here to purchase tickets

Special NICKY’S FAMILY Screenings in Honor of the Recently Passed Sir Nicholas Winton

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Sir Nicholas Winton
Sir Nicholas Winton

This month we were saddened to learn that Sir Nicholas Winton, a hero who for half a century said nothing of the fact that he rescued hundreds of mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia right before World War II, had died at the age of 106. We were proud to screen NICKY’S FAMILY, the documentary about his life, in 2013 and gladly do so again.

Please join Laemmle, Menemsha Films, and Tugg.com Sunday, August 2nd at the Playhouse, Town Center, Music Hall or Claremont 5 for what promises to be a very moving and special morning.

Use these links to reserve your FREE tickets* now:
10:30am on Sunday, August 2nd at the Playhouse
10:30am on Sunday, August 2nd at the Town Center
10:00am on Sunday, August 2nd at the Music Hall
10:30am on Sunday, August 2nd at the Claremont 5
* While supplies last

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGEXoXkDgqk&feature=youtu.be