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Moviegoers, last chance to catch the Oscar nominated films in theatres.

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For cinephiles, there is nothing like awards season, when studios and distributors release their finest films in hopes of garnering rapturous reviews, capturing audiences’ attention, and earning accolades, none more coveted than an Academy Award. The 2021-2022 season comes to a close this Sunday at 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA and on a TV screen near you, but there’s still time to see the nominees. We’re playing the animated and live action shorts at the NoHo and bringing them back to Glendale and we have the documentary shorts on Saturday and Sunday at the Royal.  Some of these films, like THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, PARALLEL MOTHERS, LICORICE PIZZA, DRIVE MY CAR and FLEE, are so good they’re worth seeing twice. On Laemmle Virtual Cinema, see LUNANA and ASCENSION.  All terrific. Enjoy!
Riz Ahmed in Best Live Action Short nominee THE LONG GOODBYE.

Stand with Ukraine through Film: THE GUIDE and Ukraine War relief.

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We all know of the tragedy that is happening in Ukraine because of the Russian invasion.  Thousands of civilians are dying in the streets while as of today 3,000,000 people are fleeing the country.

Film exhibitors around the country want to do their small part. Working with filmmaker Oles Sanin, who is currently in Ukraine, we have banded together to screen his 2014 Ukrainian film The Guide and will donate 100% of the proceeds to help his fellow Ukrainians. We’ll begin screening the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center. The Guide follows an American boy named Peter and and a blind minstrel, Ivan, who are thrown together by fate during the Stalin-perpetrated genocide in 1930s Ukraine.

Here’s the official website: STAND WITH UKRAINE THROUGH FILM

Here is a message from the director that will precede the screenings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ea5wsqA6xI

Here is the film’s trailer:

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

“Solidarity is a magnificent way to reinvent oneself.” Catherine Frot on her role in THE ROSE MAKER, opening April 1 at the Playhouse and Royal.

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The French rightly pride themselves on their artisanal traditions, from fine wines to bread, cheeses and more. That storied culture is increasingly at odds with modern, massive corporations trying to maximize profits, which can radically reduce quality. (This recent Guardian story about baguettes is a case in point.) The “lovingly made light drama” The Rose Maker dramatizes this dynamic. The film follows Eve, one of France’s greatest artisanal horticulturalists, whose rose business is on the brink of bankruptcy. When her secretary hires three inexperienced ex-convicts, they must team up to rescue the business in this verdant comedy. The movie is “a tender dramedy about apprenticeship, striving for excellence, and the passing down of savoir-faire.” (City of Lights, City of Angeles Film Festival)

Lead actress Catherine Frot was recently interviewed about her work on the film:

Q: What attracted you to The Rose Maker?

A: I was initially drawn to the character’s personality and also her arc: that of a woman who was a glory in her profession, who is no longer a glory but who will nevertheless experience a rebirth by accepting the help of people who have also hit rock bottom. People who are in trouble, locked in their solitude but who, despite their differences, end up finding their salvation in solidarity. I was first touched by the social dimension and the humanity of The Rose Maker. And then I realized that the roses were very important in the charm of this tale of helping hands, that they were even essential, that they gave it an indescribable poetry and a heady perfume. I must admit that I didn’t pay much attention to these flowers before. The film introduced me to them. I feel like I’ve made an extraordinary journey into an unknown land. I no longer look at roses in the same way. I know what their beauty requires in terms of care and know-how and today they touch me and make me dream.

Q: Let’s get back to Eve.

A: For an actress, Eve is an irresistible character, because she is so complex and will evolve so much. At the start of the film, she is proud, upstanding, courageous, closed in on herself; a sort of uptight but bruised boss lady who only keeps going thanks to her “monomaniacal” passion for roses. She was a queen in her field, stronger competitors have taken her crown, and yet she continues to fight for the survival of her business with quite incredible panache. Eve is a bit like an oak. On the surface, she is as solid as a rock, and yet she is weakened by wounds she believes to be invisible: the death of her father, the decline of her business and… the anonymity into which she has fallen. The unexpected arrival of three people in search of identity and social integration is enough to make this stubborn woman give up, question herself, and let a feeling develop in her that, as a childless woman, she thought she would never be able to experience: that of passing something on. Playing someone who comes out of her shell and transforms herself is always exciting, all the more so if, as is the case here, she is driven by an exclusive and totally disinterested passion. In a certain way, Eve “takes after” roses. She lives only for the perpetuation of beauty, something completely useless, fleeting, obsolete and yet fundamental and primordial. Eve undergoes a sort of spiritual quest which borders on poetry and which also gives rise, at times, to a certain humor.

Q: Eve is an artisan. While her work is based on taste and intuition, it also requires skill, meticulousness and precision. Playing her required learning quite a few things. Did this add to your desire to take the part?
A: Oh yes! I love to give the illusion on screen that I have mastered skills that I don’t have in everyday life. In fact, that is one of my great joys as an actress. For example, I still have wonderful memories of the cooking lessons I was given for Haute Cuisine or the piano virtuosity lessons I took for The Page Turner. For The Rose Maker, I had to learn about hybridization. It is a skill that requires a lot of precision and I loved it. My teacher was Madame Dorieux, the owner of the rose garden in which we shot the film. I really like these periods of learning the trade that my characters practice. For me, they are like schools of life. Even if I forget them quickly afterwards, I retain the pleasure I had in learning the gestures of professions that would have remained completely foreign to me otherwise.

Q: Are costumes important for you?
A: They are essential. They allow me to fully “inhabit” my character. With Pierre Pinaud and the costume designer, I spent a lot of time thinking about Eve’s clothes. She is a modern company manager with a manual job but, at the same time, she cherishes the memory and the working methods of her father. We imagined her a little masculine, in clothes that are both modern and old-fashioned, practical but with an outdated elegance. I immediately thought of the floppy necktie, the hat and the pipe. The pipe, which she seems to smoke on the sly, out of nostalgia for her father, is also a tangible expression of her contradictions, since at one point she, whose job is to appreciate the fragrance of roses, asks her young employee to stop smoking so as “not to spoil his sense of smell”. I love it when someone’s contradictions are also revealed in the accessories of their daily life.
Q: You didn’t know Pierre Pinaud. What kind of director is he?
A: He is charming, really, touching, elegant, poetic and tactful at the same time. He is a man who lives in and for beauty. He is a garden of flowers all by himself. His film is called The Rose Maker, because for him, undeniably, the rose is at the center of his film, the rose, its history and its perpetuation which is symbolized here by the fight of a woman. It is also thanks to this approach that, beyond its social dimension, his film exudes such poetry, sensuality and emotion.
Q: A word about your partner, Melan Omerta, who plays Fred, and who was making his feature debut here.
A: Melan was the best in the screen tests… and he has an incredible presence. It’s pretty crazy, he comes from a rap background, knew little or nothing about film, yet he immediately had a feel for the camera. Performing with him was both intense and simple. He gives off an incredible amount of emotion. He is a great discovery.
Q: We get the impression that The Rose Maker is a film that has particularly touched you.
A: That’s true. It’s a very beautiful, refined, very well written and constructed film. At the same time, it is very rich. It exposes the difficulties of a small family business in the face of large corporations, it takes stock of a profession facing great difficulties, it portrays an endearing woman in her struggle to survive without renouncing her moral values, and in her stubbornness to maintain a floral tradition, and it shows that solidarity is a magnificent way to reinvent oneself. The fact that the link between all these facets is the passion for a flower that is the image of eternal beauty merely adds to its singularity!

Pedro Almodóvar’s TALK TO HER: 20th Anniversary Screenings.

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In celebration of Oscar season, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present the 20th anniversary of Pedro Almodovar’s Academy Award-winning TALK TO HER (2002) on Wednesday, March 23 at four Laemmle locations: Glendale, Newhall, Pasadena and West L.A. The internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker earned two Oscar nominations for this “bizarrely poetic tale of men in love with two women in comas,” for directing and writing, winning in the latter category. In the current Oscar race, Almodóvar’s most recent film, PARALLEL MOTHERS, has also earned two nominations, including a Best Actress nod for Penelope Cruz.

TALK TO HER is the story of a macho travel writer (Darío Grandinetti) and a gay male nurse (Javier Cámara) who form an unlikely friendship when they bond over a shared but separate devotion to two comatose women: a gored bullfighter (Rosario Flores) and a ballerina (Leonor Watling), respectively. Told in flashback, the film unfolds with a delicate balance of drama, comedy, and suspense, all trademarks of Almodóvar’s inimitable style. He had emerged in the 1980s with a liberating sensibility after the repressive Franco regime had ended in Spain. In a series of unconventional melodramas over the next four decades, he has explored identity, sexuality, friendship, family, desire, and passion, often with irreverent humor. TALK TO HER was his first effort in the 21st century and was greeted with universal acclaim.

Among the plaudits, Roger Ebert extolled the “improbable melodrama…with subtly kinky bedside vigils and sensational denouements, and yet at the end, we are undeniably touched. No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.” Similarly, Philip French of the Guardian/Observer compared Almodóvar to past movie masters Ernest Lubitsch and Preston Sturges. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw also cited the film as “the most unmistakable auteur flourish in modern European cinema.” The film collected a multitude of accolades in addition to Oscar recognition, among which were Best Foreign Film prizes from the Golden Globes and National Board of Review. Almodóvar was also named Best Director of the Year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

TALK TO HER plays one night only, Wednesday, March 23 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: Royal (West Los Angeles), Glendale, Newhall (Santa Clarita), and Playhouse 7 (Pasadena).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIl4h_Z9jA

Brevity is the soul of wit: The 2022 Oscar-nominated short films are now playing everywhere.

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This Friday we’ll expand our screenings of the 2022 Oscar-nominated short films — live action, animated and documentary — to almost all our venues so cinephiles from throughout L.A. County and beyond can enjoy them theatrically. Robert Abele of the L.A. Times weighed in on his favorites:

Documentaries: “The Queen of Basketball is a joyous portrait of college legend, breakthrough Olympian, and only ever female NBA draftee Lusia “Lucy” Harris, a gifted athlete without a professional league of her own. Harris died in January, but here she’s a wry chronicler of her underappreciated majesty, making Queen a fitting film obituary. Matt Ogens’ percussively energized, heartfelt Audible takes us into the tightknit huddle of high schoolers in the successful football program at the Maryland School for the Deaf, their Big Game preparation a poignant metaphor for the feelings of pride, loss and community that make them different from, but also no different than, any teenager facing an uncertain world…Looking back on a childhood choice (and seizing on a wild coincidence) is the province of veteran experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s When We Were Bullies, a wonderfully intimate, collage-styled reckoning with memory, hurt and the ethics of storytelling.”

From WHEN WE WERE BULLIES. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Live action: “The nerviest conscience buster is Aneil Karia’s The Long Goodbye, a companion film to actor/rapper Riz Ahmed’s same-named album. He plays one of many members of a large British-South Asian family in a bustling house preparing for a wedding until a violent reality intrudes, leading to a wall-breaking rap about race, history and nationalism that Ahmed delivers like a frontline soliloquy. On the more Black Mirror end of things is KD Davila’s Kafkaesque satire Please Hold, which fuses our blind fascination with all things contactless, online and privatized with our inability to reform a byzantine justice system, following it to a not-too-far-off conclusion for someone like innocent Latino 20-something Mateo (Erick Lopez).”

From PLEASE HOLD. Courtesy of ShortsTV.

Animation: “Lives marred by cruelty factor into the hand-drawn Boxballet and stop-motion Bestia. The former, from Anton Dyakov, brings together a hulking, banged-up pugilist and an up-and-coming ballerina for a wordless-but-not-soundless meeting of sensitive souls. The latter is Chilean animator Hugo Covarrubias’ slow-burning, textural glimpse — set during the country’s military dictatorship — of the corrosive duality in a policewoman’s daily life with her dog, her body and her demons. The eerie airlessness of the dollhouse-like settings and the porcelain shine on the puppets are memorably unsettling.’

From BESTIA.

“Influential designer/animator Alberto Mielgo, who sparked the aesthetic of Into the Spider-Verse, is another wizard with texture and visual depth. His meditative The Windshield Wiper poses the question “What is love?” to a man in a café, then seeks clues in a series of vignettes with couples around the world. Mielgo’s urbanized hybrid of the painterly and the digitized is hypnotic and its own example of an artist’s love.’

From THE WINDSHIELD WIPER.

“British animator Joanna Quinn’s enthusiasm for the wiggly expressiveness of traditional animation, meanwhile, makes her latest romp starring middle-aged feminist factory worker Beryl, Affairs of the Art, a raucous delight. (The last Beryl short was in 2006.) Now hellbent on becoming a “hyperfuturist artiste,” drawing-obsessed Beryl (voiced as ever by Menna Trussler) relays a family history of sibling rivalry, imperiled pets, morbid curiosities and eccentric tastes, while Quinn’s masterful caricatures and love of bulbous bodies in motion would make Da Vinci blush, laugh and be jealous simultaneously. Drawing becomes riotously, beautifully alive in Quinn’s vaudeville of aging and anatomy, but so does the wonderfully personal message delivered through her never-too-late-to-try heroine: There’s power in passion, whenever it strikes you in life.”

From AFFAIRS OF THE ART.

Please note that the animated shorts are not MPAA rated but if they were they’d likely receive an R or NC-17 rating. Only adults will be admitted.

https://vimeo.com/678295462/7a10ce4892

The Top Ten Films of 2021 contest results are in.

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Filmmakers managed to create some amazing cinema during the beginning of the pandemic, as our Top Ten Contest results below attest. Heavyweights like Campion, P.T. Anderson, Spielberg, Almodóvar, and Villeneuve delivered, as did younger filmmakers like Hamaguchi and Ducournau.
We assigned each level a point value (1st choice = 10 points, 2nd choice = 9 points, and so on). Based on the results of that calculation, Laemmle moviegoers loved:
Nightmare Alley was a close 11th place. No one had an exact match to this list. In fact, even though Licorice Pizza was number one in terms of points, it was picked as number one only three times. It just happened to be somewhere on everyone’s list. Our point system does favor the more “popular” films since they are likely to have been seen by the most people. Had we used different metrics, where we listed the most common film in each category, #1 would be Drive My Car as it was the film most frequently chosen as the number one choice and The Power of the Dog would be the second most frequent number one pick. Licorice Pizza would be tops in category #2, #4, & #6, and probably tops in other categories too.
We will announce three randomly chosen contest winners on this page soon. We’ll send each of them 10 passes, good at any of our theaters and watch.laemmle.com.

“Beautiful…timely” new documentary about Laemmle Theatres ‘Only in Theatres’ premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

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The new documentary about Laemmle Theatres, ONLY IN THEATERS, was begun just before the pandemic began and completed last year. It recounts the company’s history and features interviews with all the surviving players as they face the seismic changes in the film exhibition industry. The family members behind this multigenerational business—whose sole mission has been to support the art of film—remain determined to see it survive, despite enormous challenges. From the festival program:

“Laemmle Theaters, the beloved L.A. art house cinema chain, has an astonishing legacy with ties to the origins of Hollywood. This is a story about a family business and their determination to survive in the face of headlines that question the future of movie theaters. For more than 84 years and through three generations, this family’s personal mission has been to elevate the art of films and the artists who make them.”

ONLY IN THEATRES premieres this Saturday night at the prestigious Santa Barbara International Film Festival. There is a second screening on Monday, March 7. Programming Director Claudia Puig was quoted in the L.A. Times today calling it “a beautiful film, and a timely one.”

Follow the film on Facebook for updates on future screenings at https://www.facebook.com/onlyintheaters and check out the trailer:

https://vimeo.com/547583876

Moviegoing safely.

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     The Washington Post published a good article by their chief film critic Ann Hornaday last week headlined “Is it safe? In the movie theater business, the question is how much to promise older audiences.” One of the public health experts quoted is Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who thinks that “for people who are fully vaccinated, watching a movie in a theater while keeping a tightfitting N95 mask on the entire time (i.e. no sipping soda or nibbling popcorn) is among the safest group indoor activities they can have.”
     According to the L.A. County Health Department, test positivity rate has been plummeting. While it is too soon to say that the pandemic is over, it does appear that the Omicron surge has basically passed in L.A. Our seven-day average test positivity rate is at 2.56%, which is as low as its been since November of last year. L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said last week that “we do anticipate that if we have these continued steep declines in cases, which indicate lower transmission, we will be able to safely lift indoor masking mandates in mid-to-late March.” In the meantime, this week the Health Department announced a partial roll-back of the mask mandate. Fully vaccinated people who show proof may go without masks while visiting indoor businesses. Additionally, we will continue to allow our patrons extra space and breathing room by not selling adjacent seats to different parties and we keep our HVAC systems in excellent condition, regularly changing the filters. People can still choose to stay masked indoors as a way to help increase their personal safety — experts say one-way masking works. If you’re vaccinated, boosted, and wearing an N95, you’re protected, no matter what others are doing. What’s more, because of the availability of rapid home testing, instances of asymptomatic spread are increasingly rare.
     All of which is to say that it is relatively safe to go to the movies and it is now urgent for L.A. cinephiles to show up. Distributors of arthouse films need to see results or we risk losing something precious, the chance to experience truly brilliant, challenging, foreign and/or independent cinema as it was intended to be seen. Are you a movie lover who appreciates how integral public moviegoing is to cinema and everything cinema is? From the Post piece:
     “For Leana Wen, a physician and public health professor at George Washington University, the decision of whether to go back to theaters comes down to three factors: individual medical circumstances, risk tolerance and how highly one values going out to see a movie. “For some people, going to the movies was not something they particularly enjoyed, and therefore it’s something they don’t miss,” she says. “On the other hand, there are some individuals for whom it may be close to an essential activity, it’s such an important part of life.”