ARSENAL director Steven C. Miller will introduce the 7:20 PM show at the Music Hall on Friday, January 6, followed by a post-screening Q&A with actors Adrian Grenier and Johnathon Schaech.
Q&A with NERUDA Star this Saturday at the Royal.
NERUDA star Luis Gnecco will participate in a Q&A after the 7:10 PM screening at the Royal on Saturday, January 7. Caroline Miranda of the Los Angeles Times will moderate.
An Evening with Shirley MacLaine, January 11, at the Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills.
An Evening with Shirley MacLaine and 40th Anniversary Screening of THE TURNING POINT (1977) on Wednesday, January 11, at Laemmle’s Music Hall at 7 PM. Click here to buy tickets now.
On January 14 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association will present its Career Achievement Award to Shirley MacLaine, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen for the last 60 years.
In conjunction with that event, the Anniversary Classics series offers an intimate conversation with MacLaine, along with a 40th anniversary screening of her award-winning film, THE TURNING POINT.
The movie was nominated for 11 Academy Awards in 1977 and won Golden Globes for best drama and best director Herbert Ross. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents won the Writers Guild award for best original screenplay.
Both MacLaine and co-star Anne Bancroft were Oscar-nominated for their performances in the film, and dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne also received nominations for their supporting roles.
THE TURNING POINT tells the story of two friends who started out together as dancers in a national ballet company (modeled on American Ballet Theatre).
Bancroft’s character became a prima ballerina while MacLaine’s character chose to give up her career and raise a family. When MacLaine’s daughter (played by Browne) launches her own career as a dancer, the two women examine the life choices that they made two decades earlier, and long buried jealousies and resentments come to the surface.
Variety called the movie “one of the best films of its era,” and added, “Pic ranks as one of MacLaine’s career highlights.”
New West magazine agreed that The Turning Point was “among the most emotionally satisfying movies of recent years.”
After starting as a dancer on Broadway, Shirley MacLaine made her film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry in 1955.
She earned her first Oscar nomination when she co-starred with Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running in 1958. She earned two more nominations for her performances in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) and Irma La Douce (1963). She won the Oscar in 1983 when she starred in James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment.
Among her many other films are Around the World in 80 Days, Ocean’s Eleven, The Children’s Hour, Sweet Charity, Being There, Steel Magnolias, Postcards from the Edge, and more recent turns in Richard Linklater’s Bernie with Jack Black and Elsa & Fred with Christopher Plummer.
For more about our Anniversary Classics Series, including an upcoming evening with Alan Alda, visit www.laemmle.com/ac and join our Facebook Group.
RETAKE Cast & Crew Q&A’s this Week at the Royal.
RETAKE actors Tuc Watkins and Devon Graye, writer-director Nick Corporon, producer Sean Mandell and cinematographer-producer Collin Brazie will introduce the 7:30 PM screening on Thursday, January 5 and the 9:55 PM show on Friday, January 6. Dave Karger will moderate.
Travel Through Time Every Throwback Thursday in January with Blastoff Comics and Laemmle!
Blastoff through time every Throwback Thursday in January with an amazing selection of time travel movies hand-picked by our friends at Blastoff Comics! Doors open at 7PM, trivia starts at 7:30PM, and films begin at 7:40PM! It all starts Thursday, January 5th with BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985). Check out the full schedule below. For tickets and our full #TBT schedule, visit laemmle.com/tbt! Our #TBT series screens every Thursday in partnership with Eat|See|Hear at the NoHo 7 in North Hollywood.
Blastoff Comics is just a short walk south of the theater at 5118 Lankershim Blvd. Be sure to check them out!
January 5: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)
Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown. Get tickets.
January 12: TIME BANDITS (1981)
A young boy accidentally joins a band of time traveling dwarves as they jump from era to era looking for treasure to steal. Get tickets.
January 19: ARMY OF DARKNESS (1992)
A man is accidentally transported to 1300 A.D., where he must battle an army of the dead and retrieve the Necronomicon so he can return home. Get tickets.
January 26: TIME AFTER TIME (1979)
H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper to the 20th Century when the serial murderer uses the futurist’s time machine to escape his time period. Get tickets.
I, DANIEL BLAKE: Ken Loach on “the frustration and the black comedy of trying to deal with a bureaucracy that is so palpably stupid, so palpably set to drive you mad.”
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, I, DANIEL BLAKE is the latest from legendary director Ken Loach. The film is a gripping, human tale about the impact one man can make. Gruff but goodhearted, Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is a man out of time: a widowed woodworker who’s never owned a computer, he lives according to his own common sense moral code. But after a heart attack leaves him unable to work and the state welfare system fails him, the stubbornly self-reliant Daniel must stand up and fight for his dignity. Don’t forget that although this is a film, this is a topic that has probably affected many. There are things out there like critical health insurance (just check out https://www.meetbreeze.com/critical-illness-insurance/what-is-critical-illness-insurance/ for more information on this), but sometimes it’s too late.
Below is a recent interview with Mr. Loach:
There were rumors that Jimmy’s Hall was going to be your last film. Was that ever the case, and if so what persuaded you to make I, DANIEL BLAKE?
That was a rash thing to have said. There are so many stories to tell. So many characters to present…
What lies at that root of the story?
The universal story of people struggling to survive was the starting point. But then the characters and the situation have to be grounded in lived experience. If we look hard enough, we can all see the conscious cruelty at the heart of the state’s provision for those in desperate need and the use of bureaucracy, the intentional inefficiency of bureaucracy, as a political weapon: “This is what happens if you don’t work; if you don’t find work you will suffer.” The anger at that was the motive behind the film.
Where did you start your research?
I’d always wanted to do something in my home town which is Nuneaton in the middle of the Midlands, and so Paul and I went and met people there. I’m a little involved with a charity called Doorway, which is run by a friend Carol Gallagher. She introduced Paul and me to a whole range of people who were unable to find work for various reasons – not enough jobs being the obvious one. Some were working for agencies on insecure wages and had nowhere to live. One was a very nice young lad who took us to his room in a shared house helped by Doorway and the room was Dickensian. There was a mattress on the floor, a fridge but pretty well nothing else. Paul asked him would it be rude to see what he’d got in the fridge. he said, “No” and he opened the door: there was nothing, there wasn’t milk, there wasn’t a biscuit, there wasn’t anything. We asked him when was the last time he went without food, he said that the week before he’d been without food for four days. This is just straight hunger and he was desperate. He’d got a friend who was working for an agency. His friend had been told by the agency at five o’clock one morning to get to a warehouse at six o’clock. He had no transport, but he got there somehow, he was told to wait, and at quarter past six he was told, “Well there’s no work for you today.” He was sent back so he got no money. This constant humiliation and insecurity is something we refer to in the film.
Out of all the material you gathered and the people you met, how did you settle on a narrative?
That’s probably the hardest decision to take because there are so many stories. We felt we’d done a lot about young people – Sweet Sixteen was one – and we saw the plight of older people and thought that it often goes unremarked. There’s a generation of people who were skilled manual workers who are now reaching the end of their working lives. They have health problems and they won’t work again because they’re not nimble enough to duck and dive between agency jobs, a bit of this and a bit of that. They are used to a more traditional structure for work and so they are just lost. They can’t deal with the technology and they have health problems anyway. Then they are confronted by assessments for Employment and Support Allowance where you can be deemed fit for work when a different evaluation might say that you’re not. The whole bureaucratic, impenetrable structure defeats people. We heard so many stories about that. Paul wrote the character Daniel Blake and the project was under way.
And your argument is that the bureaucratic structure is impenetrable by design…
Yes. The job centers now are not about helping people, they’re about setting obstacles in people’s way. There’s a job coach, as they’re called, who is not allowed now to tell people about the jobs available, whereas before they would help them to find work. There are expectations of the amount of number of people who will be sanctioned. If the interviewers don’t sanction enough people they themselves are put on ‘Personal Improvement Plans’. Orwellian, isn’t it? This all comes from research drawn from people who have worked at the DWP, they’ve worked in job centers and have been active in the Trade Union, PCS – the evidence is there in abundance. With the sanctioning regime it means people won’t be able to live on the money they’ve got and therefore food banks have come into existence. And this is something the government seems quite content about – that there should be food banks. Now they’re even talking about putting job coaches into food banks, so the food banks are becoming absorbed into the state as part of the mechanism of dealing with poverty. What kind of world have we created here?
Do you feel it’s a story that speaks mainly to these times?
I think it has wider implications. It goes back to the Poor Law, the idea of the deserving and the undeserving poor. The working class have to be driven to work by fear of poverty. The rich have to be bribed by ever greater rewards. The political establishment have consciously used hunger and poverty to drive people to accept the lowest wage and most insecure work out of desperation. The poor have to be made to accept the blame for their poverty. We see this throughout Europe and beyond.
What was it like going to film in food banks?
We went to a number of food banks together and Paul went to more on his own. The story of what we show in the food bank in the film was based on an incident that was described to Paul. Oh, food banks are awful; you see people in desperation. We were at a food bank in Glasgow and a man came to the door. He looked in and he hovered and then he walked away. One of the women working there went after him, because he was obviously in need, but he couldn’t face the humiliation of coming in and asking for food. I think that goes on all the time.
Why did you decide to set the film in Newcastle?
We went to a number of places – we went to Nuneaton, Nottingham, Stoke and Newcastle. We knew the North-West well having worked in Liverpool and Manchester so we thought we should try somewhere else. We didn’t want to be in London because that has got huge problems but they’re different and it’s good to look beyond the capital. Newcastle is culturally very rich. It’s like Liverpool, Glasgow, big cities on the coast. They are great visually, cinematic, the culture is very expressive and the language is very strong. There’s a great sense of resistance; generations of struggle have developed a strong political consciousness.
Describe the character of Daniel – who is he and what is his predicament?
Dan is a man who’s served his time as a joiner, a skilled craftsman. He’s worked on building sites, he’s worked for small builders, he’s been a jobbing carpenter and still works with wood for his own enjoyment. But his wife has died, he’s had a serious heart attack and nearly fell off some scaffolding; he’s instructed not to work and he’s still in rehabilitation, so he’s getting Employment and Support Allowance. The film tells a story of how he tries to survive in that condition once he’s been found ‘fit to work’, from finding out that the Samaritan PAD 350P defibrillator is popular for home use and wondering if he should get it, to other more relatable issues to the everyday person who may have suffered a medical situation. He’s resilient, good humored and used to guarding his privacy.
And who is Katie?
Katie is a single mother with two small children. She’s been in a hostel in London when the local authority finds her a flat in the north where the rent will be covered by her housing benefit – that means the local authority doesn’t have to make up the difference. The flat’s fine, though it needs work, but then she falls foul of the system and she’s immediately in trouble – she’s got no family round her, no support, no money. Katie is a realist. She comes to recognize that her first responsibility is to survive somehow.
Much of the story deals with suffocating bureaucracy. How did you make that dramatic?
What I hope carries the story is that the concept is familiar to most of us. It’s the frustration and the black comedy of trying to deal with a bureaucracy that is so palpably stupid, so palpably set to drive you mad. I think if you can tell that truthfully and you’re reading the subtext in the relationship between the people across a desk or over a phone line, that should reveal the comedy of it, the cruelty of it – and, in the end, the tragedy of it. ‘The poor are to blame for their poverty’ – this protects the power of the ruling class.
What you were looking for in your Dan and in your Katie when you cast Dave Johns and Hayley Squires?
Well, for Dan we looked for the common sense of the common man. Every day he’s turned up for work, he’s worked alongside mates; there’s the crack of that, the jokes, the way you get through the day; that’s been his life until he was sick and until his wife needed support. And so alongside the sense of humor you want someone quite sensitive and nuanced. And for Katie, again it’s someone driven by circumstance who is realistic but has potential; she’s been trying to study, she failed at school but she’s been studying with the Open University. We looked for someone with sensitivity but also gutsy courage. And, as with Dan, absolute authenticity.
Dave Johns is a stand-up comic as well as an actor. Why did you cast him as Dan?
The traditional stand-up comedian is a man or woman rooted in working class experience, and the comedy comes out of that experience. It often comes out of hardship, joking about the comedy of survival. But the thing with comedians is they’ve got to have good timing – their timing is absolutely implicit in who they are. And they usually have a voice that comes from somewhere and a persona which comes from somewhere, so that’s what we were looking for. Dave’s got that. Dave’s from Byker, which is where we filmed some of the scenes, he’s a Geordie, he’s the right age, and he’s a working class man who makes you smile, which is what we wanted.
How did you come to cast Hayley Squires as Katie?
We met a lot of women who were all interesting in different ways but again, Hayley’s a woman with a working class background and she was just brilliant. Every time we tried something out she was dead right. She doesn’t soften who she is or what she says in any way, she’s just true really, through and through.
How was the shoot?
To begin with, Paul’s writing is always very precise, as well as being full of life. This means we rarely shoot material we don’t use. The critical thing in filming is planning. It is preparation: working things out; getting everyone cast before you start; getting all the locations in place before you start. To do all that you need a crew, a group of people who absolutely understand the project and are creatively committed to it. And all those things we had: amazing efficiency from everyone and great good humor. That’s what gets you through, because it means all your effort is then productive. Working with good friends is a delight and, crucially, we even got a little coffee machine that used to follow us around. That was a key element: a good espresso got us all through the day.
You changed how you edited this film from previous ones. How and why?
We’d been cutting on film for many years but we found that the infrastructure for cutting on film was just disappearing. The biggest problem was the cost of printing the sound rushes on mag stock and also printing all the film rushes. It was more than I could justify so, reluctantly, we cut on Avid. It has some advantages but I found cutting on film was a more human way of working – you can see what you’ve done at the end of the day. Avid seems quicker but I don’t think the overall time taken is any less. I just find the tactile quality of film is more interesting.
Do you make films hoping to bring about change and, if so, what would that mean in the case of I, DANIEL BLAKE?
Well it’s the old phrase isn’t it: ‘Agitate, Educate, Organize.’ You can agitate with a film -you can’t educate much, though you can ask questions – and you can’t organize at all, but you can agitate. And I think to agitate is a great aim because being complacent about things that are intolerable is just not acceptable. Characters trapped in situations where the implicit conflict has to be played out, that is the essence of drama. And if you can find that drama in things that are not only universal but have a real relevance to what’s going on in the world, then that’s all the better. I think anger can be very constructive if it can be used; anger that leaves the audience with something unresolved in their mind, something to do, something challenging.
It is the 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home this year. What parallels are there between this new film and that film?
They are both stories of people whose lives are seriously damaged by the economic situation they’re in. It’s been an idea we’ve returned to again and again but it’s particularly sharp in I, DANIEL BLAKE. The style of filmmaking, of course, is very different. When we made Cathy we ran about with a hand-held camera, set up a scene, shot it and we were done. The film was shot in three weeks. In this film the characters are explored more fully. Both Katie and Dan are seen in extremis. In the end, their natural cheerfulness and resilience are not enough. Certainly politically the world that this film shows is even more cruel than the world that Cathy was in. The market economy has led us inexorably to this disaster. It could not do otherwise. It generates a working class that is vulnerable and easy to exploit. Those who struggle to survive face poverty. It’s either the fault of the system or it’s the fault of the people. They don’t want to change the system, therefore they have to say it’s the fault of the people. Looking back, we should not be surprised at what has happened. The only question is – what do we do about it?
Our January-March Culture Vulture Schedule is Set!
Dear opera, ballet, fine art and live theater buffs, we have completed the schedule for our weekly Culture Vulture series, January, February and March 2017 and we have got some wonderful things to show you. As you may or may not know, we screen these every Monday night at 7:30 and Tuesday afternoon at 1 at the Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, the Town Center 5 in Encino, the Claremont 5 in Claremont, the Ahyra Fine Arts and the Monica Film Center in Santa Monica. The full schedule is below and at https://www.laemmle.com/culturevulture.
January 9 & 10: THE GOLDEN AGE from the Bolshoi Ballet
A satire of Europe during the Roaring 20s, THE GOLDEN AGE makes for an original, colorful, and dazzling show with its jazzy score and music-hall atmosphere. This ballet that can only be seen at the Bolshoi has everything to it: mad rhythms, vigorous chase scenes, and decadent cabaret numbers. With its passionate love story featuring beautiful duets between Boris and Rita, the Bolshoi dancers plunge into every stylized step and gesture magnificently.
January 16 & 17: NO MAN’S LAND from the National Theatre
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart star Sean Mathias’ acclaimed production of NO MAN’S LAND, one of the most brilliantly entertaining plays by Harold Pinter. One evening, two aging writers, Hirst and Spooner, meet in a pub and continue their drinking into the night at Hirst’s stately house nearby. As the pair become increasingly inebriated, and their stories more unbelievable, the conversation soon turns into a revealing power game, further complicated by the intrusion of two sinister younger men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9RA6B9FOKM
January 23 & 24: THE CURIOUS WORLD OF HIERONYMOUS BOSCH from the Noordbrabants Museum
Who was Hieronymus Bosch? Why do his strange and fantastical paintings resonate with art lovers now more than ever? THE CURIOUS WORLD OF HIERONYMOUS BOSCH features the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Visions of a Genius’ at the Noordbrabants Museum in the southern Netherlands, which brought the majority of Bosch’s paintings and drawings together for the first time to his home town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and attracted almost half a million art lovers from all over the world.
January 30 & 31: CARVALHO’S JOURNEY
A real life 19th century American western adventure story, CARVALHO’S JOURNEY tells the extraordinary story of Solomon Nunes Carvalho (1815-1897), an observant Sephardic Jew born in Charleston, South Carolina, and his life as a groundbreaking photographer, artist and pioneer in American history.
February 6 & 7: SAMSON ET DALILA from l’Opéra de Paris.
Based on the biblical story, Saint-Saëns’s 1877 opera would not be performed at the Palais Garnier until fifteen years later. This first Parisian performance in 1892 included the hitherto unperformed “Dance Of The Priestesses.” Nevertheless, it became one of the most performed French operas in the world, together with Faust and Carmen. Conducted by Philippe Jordan, this new production brings back a repertoire masterpiece that has not been performed at the Paris Opera for twenty-five years.
February 13 & 14: FEELINGS ARE FACTS: THE LIFE OF YVONNE RAINER
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer chronicles the defiant, uncompromising, and highly influential ideas of postmodern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Over the course of her career, she revolutionized modern dance, generated what later became known as performance art, and changed the basic tenets of experimental filmmaking – all during a time when women were largely ignored in the art world.
February 20 & 21: AMADEUS from the National Theatre
Lucian Msamati (Luther, Game of Thrones, NT Live: The Comedy of Errors) plays Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s iconic play, captured live at the National Theatre, and with live orchestral accompaniment by Southbank Sinfonia. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a rowdy young prodigy, arrives in Vienna, the music capital of the world – and he’s determined to make a splash. Awestruck by his genius, court composer Antonio Salieri has the power to promote his talent or destroy his name. Seized by obsessive jealousy he begins a war with Mozart, with music, and ultimately, with God.
February 27 & 28: I, CLAUDE MONET
From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at arguably the world’s favorite artist – through his own words. Using letters and other private writings I, CLAUDE MONET reveals new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
March 6 & 7: UN BALLO IN MASCHERA from the Bayerische Staatsoper
The Bavarian State Opera’s former music director Zubin Mehta returned to the fabled house, where his image in bronze adorns one of the foyers, to celebrate his 80th birthday by conducting Verdi’s middle-period masterpiece for the first time in a staged production. His remarkable cast includes soprano Anja Harteros singing Amelia for the first time and “filling every note with Verdian intensity;” tenor Piotr Beczala as a “visually and vocally dashing Riccardo;” and George Petean as an “exemplary” Renato (Neue Musikzeitung).
March 13 & 14: WOOLF WORKS from the Royal Opera House Ballet
The first revival of Wayne McGregor’s critically acclaimed ballet triptych to music by Max Richter, inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf and starring Alessandra Ferri and Mara Galeazzi.
March 20 & 21: SAINT JOAN from the National Theatre
Joan: daughter, farm girl, visionary, patriot, king-whisperer, soldier, leader, victor, icon, radical, witch, heretic, saint, martyr, woman. From the torment of the Hundred Years’ War, the charismatic Joan of Arc carved a victory that defined France. Bernard Shaw’s classic play depicts a woman with all the instinct, zeal and transforming power of a revolutionary. Josie Rourke (Coriolanus, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) directs Gemma Arterton (Gemma Bovery, Nell Gwynn, Made in Dagenham) as Joan of Arc in this electrifying masterpiece.
March 27 & 28: THE ARTIST’S GARDEN: AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM from the Florence Griswold Museum
American impressionism took its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet but followed its own path that over a thirty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about a much-loved artistic movement. The story of American impressionism is closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Traveling to studios, gardens and treasured locations throughout the Eastern United States, UK and France, this mesmerizing film is a feast for the eyes.
Hung Viet Nguyen: Sacred Landscapes
Art in the Arthouse welcomes SACRED LANDSCAPES, an exhibit by artist HUNG VIET NGUYEN, on display at the Monica Film Center from Dec 2016 – Feb 2017.
Curated by Tish Laemmle, Sacred Landscapes showcases a large selection of Nguyen’s majestic paintings, primarily landscapes and captivating abstract works. The work transports you into the mind of the artist who has an enigmatic connection to nature. Painting from memory, Nguyen renders an impressive amount detail in stunning and unexpected compositions that seem to suspend reality. Viewing his work has a spiritual quality that can only be experienced in person.
Hung Viet Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1957 and studied biology at the Science University in Saigon. After relocating to the U.S. in 1982, Nguyen transitioned careers, finding work as an illustrator, graphic artist and designer.
He developed his artistic skills in an independent fashion, carefully studying a variety of traditional Eastern and Western forms, media and techniques. Nguyen’s complex, labor intensive investigations of oil paint reveal a
mastery of texture. While portions of Nguyen’s work suggest the influence of traditional art forms such as woodblock prints, Oriental scroll paintings, ceramic art, mosaic, and stained glass, his ultimate expression as an artist asserts a more contemporary sensibility.
Having been deeply affected by Nguyen’s work – “it speaks to the soul” – Art in the Arthouse curator Tish Laemmle was inspired to bring Sacred Landscapes to life at the Monica Film Center for the enrichment of the movie-going public.
Nguyen’s paintings have been exhibited at galleries, cultural art centers, and museums, juried by museums including LACMA and the MOCA. Honors include the Juror’s Choice Awards, 2013, and the San Diego Art Institute Biennial International Award Exhibition, 2015.
Critic’s Reviews of Nguyen:
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