FOR SAMA Q&A with directors Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts and featured subject Dr. Hamza al-Kateab following the 4:30 pm show on Sunday, 7/28.
by Lamb L.
FOR SAMA Q&A with directors Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts and featured subject Dr. Hamza al-Kateab following the 4:30 pm show on Sunday, 7/28.
by Lamb L.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present this month’s installment in our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad program, Ang Lee’s delectable 1994 comedy, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN. Lee had directed two previous films that earned acclaim, but this 1994 film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and propelled his career to a new level of esteem and success.
Made in Taipei, the film centers on a widowed master chef, Mr. Chu (played by Sihung Lung), who has weekly feasts for his three unmarried daughters (Kuei-Mei Yang, Chien-Lien Wu, Yu-Wen Wang), during which he tries to oversee their personal lives along with their eating habits. An ensemble piece in the spirit of movies like Love, Actually and The Joy Luck Club, the film interweaves the personal and professional stories of the three daughters, along with the issues facing their father, who also embarks on a new romantic adventure during the course of the movie. Winston Chao (who starred in Lee’s earlier film, The Wedding Banquet) and Sylvia Chang co-star.
The script by Lee, James Schamus, and Hui-Ling Wang etches all the characters with wit and finesse. Equally important to the film’s success are the lovingly photographed scenes of an abundance of Chinese delicacies, which led the movie to be compared to other memorable movies about food, including the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast, Tampopo, and Like Water for Chocolate. Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “Like the cuisine it celebrates, this movie is tart, sweet, generous and subtle.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin called the film “wonderfully seductive, and nicely knowing about all of its characters’ appetites.”
Variety’s Leonard Klady summed up the film’s achievement: “The overall result is a cinematic feast that will have audiences returning for Lee’s next movie meal.” Those words proved to be prophetic. Lee’s next film, Sense and Sensibility, released in 1995, was nominated for Best Picture, and over the next several years, he produced an extraordinary body of work, including the international blockbusters Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi. Lee won two Oscars for Best Director — for Brokeback Mountain as well as Life of Pi — and is now universally regarded as one of the leading auteurs of our time. His remarkable journey was prefigured by his early achievement with Eat Drink Man Woman.
EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN screens Wednesday, July 24, at 7 PM in Glendale, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.
Format: Blu-ray.
by Lamb L.
ART IN THE ARTHOUSE is delighted to welcome artist DAVID PALMER and his mouthwatering new show, RetroPop. The show will run at the Royal till November 2019. Sales benefit the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in Los Angeles.
About the Exhibit
As a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the late 80s, pop artist DAVID PALMER drew inspiration from his mentors JOHN ROY and GREGORY GILLESPIE. Between Roy’s analytical rigor and Gillespie’s wildly improvisational methods, Palmer unearthed an exploratory approach to image-making that evokes dreams and memories, literature and film, science, popular culture and art history. His paintings combine the vocabulary of Pop Art with a Renaissance sensibility. Their surfaces are distressed, revealing patches of underlying color, reminiscent of aging frescoes and peeling billboards.
States the artist: “When I start a piece, I don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s finished. I like to discover the image as I work. I begin with an idea, but at some point the painting takes on a life of its own, and it leads me to a place I couldn’t have predicted. It’s like having a conversation, or taking a walk in a new neighborhood.”
Palmer has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. He has also created digital effects for over a dozen feature films, including The Polar Express, Spider-Man 3, and the first Harry Potter movie. Palmer’s pieces continually amaze with masterful technique and playful, yet grand imagery. Humor is also a constant presence, especially in his desserts … as they always seem to make me hungry.
– Tish Laemmle, Curator
by Lamb L.
DARLIN’ director Pollyanna McIntosh will participate in a Q&A following the 9:55 pm show on Friday, 7/12.
by Lamb L.
BLUE NOTE RECORDS: BEYOND THE NOTES Q&A with director Sophie Huber following the 10:40 am show on Saturday, 7/13 and Sunday, 7/14.
by Lamb L.
More than 40 years before RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Queen, the groundbreaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes us backstage to kiki with the contestants as they rehearse, throw shade, and transform into their drag personas in the lead-up to the big event. Organized by LGBT icon and activist Flawless Sabrina, the competition boasted a star-studded panel of judges including Andy Warhol and his superstars Edie Sedgwick and Mario Montez. But perhaps most memorable is an epic diatribe calling out the pageant scene’s racial bias delivered by Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to form the influential House of LaBeija, heavily featured in Paris is Burning (1990). A vibrant piece of queer history, The Queen can now be seen in full resplendence thanks to a new restoration from the original camera negative.
Producer’s Statement
HOW IT BEGAN by Si Litvinoff, Producer
After twelve years, I left my law practice at Barovick, Konecy and Litvinoff to concentrate on my hopes for film production. I had recently produced the Broadway play, Hail Scrawdyke, directed by Alan Arkin. Before that, while practicing law full time, I had co-produced several Off-Broadway plays such as Leonard Bernstein’s Theater Songs, Lonny Chapman’s Cry of the Raindrop, and David Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West, but I wanted to move on to film. I had already optioned novels like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, John Barth’s End of the Road, and Saul Bellow’s Henderson and the Rain King.
I had taken a suite of offices at 65 East 55th Street with one office designated for my friend and ex-law client, Terry Southern, who was now to be my partner in hopefully many film ventures. Terry had gotten hot as the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove, The Cincinnati Kid, and The Loved One, amongst others.
One day, I received a phone call from the artist, Sven Lukin, and the cinematographer, Frank Simon, asking to see me ASAP. We met, and they described to me what was to be the 1967 Drag Queen Miss America contest at Town Hall in New York City, and would I be interested in producing a film documentary of the event? They showed me the formal printed announcement of the event. The event was sponsored by George Raft, Huntington Hartford, (the Woolworth heir,) and Edie Sedgwick, both of whom I knew. If that wasn’t enough, it stated “For the benefit of The Muscular Dystrophy Association of America; Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, Honorary Chairman.” It was described to me as “Ziegfeld’s psychedelic re-write of Helzapoppin’…a satirical happening.”
Obviously, I was hooked. It sounded outrageous and sensational. I asked Frank, who was to be the director and, Sven, who was to do sound, to arrange a meeting with the owners immediately, as the show was to be on very soon. I met Jack Doroshow. His Nationals Academy puts on these shows, and he also emcees in drag under the name of Flawless Sabrina. I liked Jack and we agreed on terms and I excitedly went back to my office and drafted a contract.
My first movie had come out of the blue and despite the fact that I knew people in Hollywood through my law practice, I was sure that Hollywood would not finance this project. Money was needed now for the Nationals, for raw stock, for equipment rentals, additional cinematographers, etc. I had another problem. I had never produced a film, let alone an independent film without the support of a Hollywood studio. I solved one problem by giving co-producer credit to a theater investor, who rented an office in my suite, in exchange for the front money I needed. Next, I phoned my friend, Lewis Allen who had produced an independent film of the play The Connection, (written by my former law client, Jack Gelber and directed by my former law client, Shirley Clarke,) to see if he would produce it with me. He excitedly agreed and provided his recent knowledge and more investors. Thanks to The Connection, he had gained relationships and credit all over town. Terry was excited and wanted to be an interviewer and judge. He got our friend, the artist Larry Rivers to also serve as both interviewer and judge. Another interviewer was Jay Presson Allen, Lew’s wife, the playwright and screenwriter of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Hitchcock’s film, Marnie, Cabaret, Funny Lady, etc… We also got Bernard Giguel, the US head for Paris Match do interviews. I then set out to get the rest of the judges. I contacted former law clients. Artists, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, rock legend Jerry Leiber, authors Bruce Jay Friedman and George Plimpton all agreed to be judges. Frank got a crew together.
Rehearsals and the show itself were marvelous and Frank captured it all. When I saw the rough cut, I decided that though it was not the convention, the film flowed better without seeing the interviewer asking the question but with just the answer. Lew and Jay agreed. We made a distribution deal with the publisher, Grove Press, which had established a film division and was enjoying a successful start with I Am Curious (Yellow).
The film opened at the Kips Bay Theater in New York City to unanimous rave reviews and broke box office records and did the same all over the country. It was invited to screen at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival. Roman Polanski, in his autobiography “Roman,” referred to it as “the toast of Cannes.” He and fellow jury member Truman Capote had intended to award it a special jury prize, but unfortunately, the festival ended after one week when the entire country of France went on strike.
“[A] riveting chronicle of a 1967 drag competition.” – Melissa Anderson, The Village Voice
“A gutsy, funny… really very moving documentary.” – Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
“Makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Extraordinary.” – Renata Adler, The New York Times
by Lamb L.
“Don’t expose him to bright light. Don’t ever get him wet. And don’t ever, ever feed him after midnight.”
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the delicious horror comedy, GREMLINS, which demonstrated the dire consequences of ignoring those three simple rules. Chris Columbus (the writer or director of such hit films as ‘The Goonies,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ ‘Home Alone,’ and the first two Harry Potter movies) conceived the story, and Steven Spielberg acted as executive producer, but it was director Joe Dante who set the distinctive tone of “malicious madcap mischief,” in the words of Newsweek’s David Ansen.
Dante had already brought wit to the underwater monster movie (‘Piranha’) and the werewolf movie (‘The Howling’), but ‘Gremlins’ took his talents to a new level. Kenneth Turan, then writing for California Magazine, declared, “’Gremlins’ is Dante’s most accomplished film, a paradigm of zesty, ghoulish fun.” Dante loved to pepper his movies with sly references to other films, and ‘Gremlins’ is set in the idyllic small town of Kingston Falls, meant to recall Bedford Falls from Frank Capra’s classic, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (glimpsed on TV in a scene in Dante’s movie). ‘Gremlins’ is also set at Christmas, but the holidays are anything but festive in this vision of Norman Rockwell’s America turned upside down.
The story begins when a father (Hoyt Axton) purchases a lovable furry creature called a mogwai for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). The shopkeeper offers a few admonitions but neglects to say that if the mogwai is drenched or fed after midnight, it will turn into a spiteful, malevolent gremlin. Soon the entire town is overwhelmed with these miniature monsters determined to destroy. The other characters in the story are played by an engaging ensemble, including Phoebe Cates, Frances Lee McCain, Keye Luke, Glynn Turman, Dick Miller, Corey Feldman, Judge Reinhold, and Polly Holliday, with cameo appearances by Chuck Jones, composer Jerry Goldsmith, and Spielberg himself. But perhaps the biggest star was designer Chris Walas, who created the puppets who perform their own delirious dance of death.
The film incorporates several classic sequences, including one in which a small-town mom (played by McCain) battles the gremlins with her trusty kitchen appliances and the climactic nightmare in which the gremlins take over a movie theater presenting a holiday screening of Walt Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ The movie was one of the biggest hits of 1984 and also earned many excellent reviews. Gene Siskel called ‘Gremlins’ “a wickedly funny and slightly sick ride…playfulness abounds.” Screen International added, “The sight gags are deliriously inventive and frequently devilishly sick.”
Dante went on to direct such films as ‘The Burbs’ with Tom Hanks, ‘Explorers’ with Ethan Hawke, ‘Innerspace’ with Dennis Quaid and Martin Short, ‘Matinee’ with John Goodman, and of course ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch.’ For this special matinee screening, feel free to bring the kids—at least the older kids with a taste for macabre thrills.
Our 35th anniversary screening of GREMLINS (1984) followed by a Q&A with Director Joe Dante and film critic Stephen Farber plays on Sunday, July 14, at 3 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Click here for tickets.
Format: DCP
by Lamb L.
5TH OF JULY director Camilo Vila and writer Monty Fisher will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 pm show on Friday, 7/5.