Swoon-inducing opera, coming your way: LA BOHEME. The Royal Opera recently posted some fantastic interviews and making-of videos to YouTube. We’ll be screening the production in all six Laemmle venues on Monday, July 6 and 7:30 PM and Tuesday, July 7 at 1 PM.
STRAY DOG Filmmaker Debra Granik in Person at the Music Hall
Harley-Davidson, leather, tattooed biceps: Ron “Stray Dog” Hall looks like an authentic tough guy. A Vietnam veteran, he runs a trailer park in rural Missouri with his wife, Alicia, who recently immigrated from Mexico. Gradually, a layered image comes into focus of a man struggling to come to terms with his combat experience. When Alicia’s teenage sons arrive, the film reveals a tender portrait of an America outside the mainstream. STRAY DOG is a powerful look at the veteran experience, a surprising love story, and a fresh exploration of what it takes to survive in the hardscrabble heartland.
We are pleased to open STRAY DOG at the Music Hall on Friday, July 24. Filmmaker Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:20 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, the 24th and 25th.
“Unsung Mekons are a musical beacon of persistence and creativity.” ~ Randall Roberts in today’s L.A. Times
REVENGE OF THE MEKONS is playing today through Thursday at the Playhouse and tonight only at the Royal! The L.A. Times just posted this feature story about the band and the film.
“Born in art school at Leeds University in 1977, the Mekons long ago conceded that fame and fortune were outside their grasp, and it kind of shows. The band’s fan site, while kept current, is run by a guy named Nobby and looks like it was coded in 1996.
“Unlike university peers Gang of Four, the Mekons are seldom cited as an influence by hipster punks. There hasn’t been a “Mekons revival.” Their fans are aging with them, and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to care.
“Such creativity in the face of ambivalence is a central theme of “Revenge of the Mekons,” the aptly titled and engrossing documentary by filmmaker Joe Angio. The film traces the rises, falls and plateaus of the self-described British “fundamentalist punk rock art project,” whose eight current members are a mix of visual artists, writers, singers, gallery owners and field-recorders and are spread across three continents in Southern California, Chicago, rural England, London and Siberia. (Multi-instrumentalist Lu Edmonds is married to a Siberian.)
“The film is having a brief run at the Playhouse in Pasadena, with additional screenings at the NoHo 7 on Monday and the Royal on Tuesday.”
Read the rest of the Times piece here.
IN STEREO Filmmaker in Person at the Music Hall Opening Night
IN STEREO is about David and Brenda, who are perfect for each other, and everyone knows it except David and Brenda. After they break up, due to mutual immaturity, they voyage through a romantic purgatory that shakes both of them to their core, until they realize what’s apparent, and work out a design for being together that they refuse to call “being together.” A sharply observed, dark comedy about the complexity of modern relationships, IN STEREO is a humorous look into the lives of confused 30-somethings trying to figure it all out.
IN STEREO writer-director Mel Rodriguez III will participate in a Q&A after the 7:20 screening at the Music Hall on Friday, July 3rd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvYDs84hnms
7 MINUTES Filmmaker at the NoHo Opening Night
7 MINUTES, which premiered at the 2014 Austin Film Festival, follows three desperate young men who are forced by circumstance to commit a brazen robbery. As each minute of the event unfolds, true motives are revealed and stakes intensify. What begins as a simple plan – ‘in and out in seven minutes’ – quickly becomes a dangerous game of life and death.
7 MINUTES writer-director Jay Martin will participate in a Q&A after the 7:30 screening at the NoHo on Friday, June 26. The Q&A will be moderated by Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2, (500) Days of Summer).
“An exquisite rumination on life, love and art that tickles the heart and mind in equal measure,” LA SAPIENZA Opens June 26 at the Royal.
Named for the famous seventeenth-century Roman church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, which was designed by the legendary architect (and Bernini rival) Francesco Borromini, LA SAPIENZA echoes Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia in its tale of Alexandre Schmid (Fabrizio Rongione), a brilliant architect who, plagued by doubts and loss of inspiration, embarks on a quest of artistic and spiritual renewal guided by his study of Borromini. His wife Aliénor (Christelle Prot), similarly troubled by the crassness of contemporary society – as well as the couple’s listless marriage – decides to accompany him. In Stresa, a chance encounter with adolescent siblings Goffredo (who is about to begin his own architectural studies) and his fragile sister Lavinia upends the couple’s plans. As Borromini’s spirit and the vertiginous splendour of his structures spin a mysterious web among them, within the course of a few days the foursome experiences a series of life-altering revelations.
“Green’s richly textured, painterly images fuse with the story to evoke the essence of humane urbanity and the relationships that it fosters, whether educational, familial, or erotic.” (Richard Brody, New Yorker)
“An exquisite rumination on life, love and art that tickles the heart and mind in equal measure.” (Scott Foundas, Variety)

About his film, LA SAPIENZA writer-director Eugène Green has said:
“This film has two sources of inspiration. On the one hand the desire to illustrate through film the works and life of the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. On the other the interest for contemporary architecture and urban planning. The first inspiration would suggest a biography, while both would be very suited to a documentary style narrative. I don’t however believe that one may reconstruct a life through film, nor any other element of a distant past and, despite having all due respect for the documentary as a form of expression, I have always had the instinctive belief – that tends to be sidelined in today’s Europe – that the greater truth can be found in fiction. Thus it is through an action that is a product of my imagination, that I have attempted to approach these two themes. This story involving two couples, a man and a woman, a brother and sister, sheds light on human relations, which are further investigated by introducing a separation, a concept developed out of a long-standing western tradition whereby knowledge is acquired through emptiness, and presence is established through absence. One way or another, the characters of this screenplay face the challenge of letting the past feed the present in a harmonious fashion, and each of them achieves a new understanding of the nature of love. At the heart of the story we also encounter the problem of how tradition may be passed on, one of man’s eternal preoccupations, an issue that is of great moment for contemporary European society.
Animated Palestinian Documentary THE WANTED 18 Opens this Weekend at the NoHo; Q&A’s Scheduled.
Through a clever mix of stop motion animation and interviews, THE WANTED 18 recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.”
We’ll be hosting Q&A’s after the 7:40 PM screenings of THE WANTED 18 at the NoHo this Friday and Saturday, June 19 and 20 and after the 5:30 show on Sunday, June 21:
June 19: Ina Fichman, Producer of THE WANTED 18; Salam Al-Marayati, President of Muslim Public Affairs Council; Suhad Babaa, Executive Director of Just Vision;
June 20: Ina Fichman, Producer of THE WANTED 18; Suhad Babaa, Executive Director of Just Vision;
June 21: Suhad Babaa, Executive Director of Just Vision.
REVENGE OF THE MEKONS Filmmaker and Rico Bell of the Mekons in Person at the Playhouse, Royal and NoHo.
The acclaimed new documentary Revenge of the Mekons charts the unlikely career of the genre-defying collective notorious for being—as rock critic Greil Marcus notes—“the band that took punk ideology most seriously.” Born out of the 1977 British punk scene, the Mekons progressed from a group of socialist art students with no musical skills to the prolific, raucous progeny of Hank Williams. Joe Angio’s exuberant documentary follows their improbable history and reveals how punk’s reigning contrarians continue to make bold, unpredictable music.
Revenge of the Mekons filmmaker Joe Angio will participate in Q&A’s after the 9:55 PM screenings at the Playhouse on Friday, June 19 as well as the 7:30 PM screenings at the NoHo 7 on Monday, June 22 and at the Royal on Tuesday, June 23. Rico Bell of the Mekons will join him for the NoHo and Royal screenings.
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