Film Reviews & Previews
MAZE Tom Vaughan Lawlor (star), Stephen Burke (Writer/Director) and Jane Doolan (Producer) will participate in Q&A’s following the 5:30 pm and 7:45 pm shows the Monica Film Center on Friday, 3/29 and on Saturday, 3/30 after the 1:40 pm and 7:10 pm shows at the Playhouse. Amy Woodson-Boulton Associate Professor, Modern British & Irish History, Loyola Marymount University will moderate Friday’s Q&A’s and David Sanchez, also a professor from Loyola Marymount will moderate Saturday’s Q&A’s.
LAEMMLE LIVE PASADENA, inspired by Laemmle’s popular concert series in Santa Monica presents nationally acclaimed Pascale Music Institute on April 7. Laemmle Live showcases emerging musicians and professional performers from local schools and organizations, celebrating our diverse community with live performance. Laemmle Live Pasadena’s free Sunday morning concerts take place in the courtyard between Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Vroman’s Bookstore from 11am to 12pm. A light reception will follow the concert
Award-winning Pascale Music Institute, founded by Susan Pascale, teaches aspiring musicians as young as three and half years old to play the violin, viola, cello, bass, and piano. The Sunday concert will feature the Los Angeles Children’s Chamber Orchestra conducted by Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist, Mitchell Newman. Students of the Pascale Music Institute, or PMI, are taught using the innovative The Pascale Method®, a systematic approach that sets young children up for success from the beginning. Detailed directions, fun exercises, rapid progress, coupled with a delightful reward system motivate students to master skills quickly and correctly. From the beginning, the Pascale Method and Institute stress the importance of music reading, and within 12 weeks, the student is ready to perform for friends and family, and advance to the next level of instruction. For more information visit pascalemusic.com
This is a Free Event!
RSVP via Eventbrite
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Playhouse 7 Courtyard
673 East Colorado
Pasadena, CA 91101
11am – 12pm
CATCHING SIGHT OF THELMA & LOUISE filmmaker Jennifer Townsend will participate in Q&A’s following the 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm shows on Friday, 4/19 through Sunday, 4/21 and after the 7:00 pm shows on Monday, 4/22 and Tuesday, 4/23.
https://vimeo.com/314611434
THE BURIAL OF KOJO Q&A’s with filmmaker Blitz Bazawule following the 7:30 pm show on Friday, 3/29, after the 5 pm and 7:30 pm shows on Saturday, 3/30. Ava DuVernay will moderate on Friday and Constance Ejuma of The African Artist Association will moderate after the Saturday 5 pm show.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of one of the most provocative and explosive films of the late 60s, Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL followed by a Q&A with Robert Forster.
Wexler was already an Oscar-winning cinematographer of such films as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, and The Thomas Crown Affair when he made his directorial debut with this picture. He also had a background in documentaries, which he put to use in this feature set in Chicago in the summer of 1968, with a climax that takes place during the Democratic convention and the bloody police riot that accompanied it.
The film mixes fact and fiction, documentary footage and staged scenes, as it tells the story of a TV news cameraman, played by Robert Forster, who comes to recognize the moral obligations of a journalist during turbulent times. The film’s co-stars include Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, and the late Verna Bloom, who gave an especially poignant performance as an Appalachian woman who becomes involved with Forster. Newcomer Harold Blankenship plays her son, who is befriended by Forster. Wexler wrote the screenplay and acted as his own cinematographer. Oscar winner Verna Fields edited the picture, and Mike Bloomfield composed the score.
The film was controversial but enormously successful. It was rated X by the Classification and Ratings Administration of the MPAA, ostensibly for nudity and language, but Wexler commented that “it was a political X.” It was later re-rated R without cuts.
The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “The result is a film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.” The Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin agreed that “Medium Cool provides an astonishingly wide but economical documentation of this particular moment in our history.” And Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern called it “an exciting piece of work that must be seen by anyone who cares about the development of modern movies.”
The film’s reputation continued to grow in later years, with Siskel and Ebert hailing it as “a well-crafted masterpiece.” In 2003 it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Robert Forster made his film debut as the object of Marlon Brando’s obsession in John Huston’s controversial 1967 film, Reflections in a Golden Eye, which also starred Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Harris, and Brian Keith. Forster continued to work with top directors of the era, co-starring in Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon and George Cukor’s Justine. Later he earned an Oscar nomination for his vivid portrayal in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and he delivered striking performances in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. He has continued to make a strong impression in TV series Last Man Standing and the reboot of Twin Peaks, and just last year he bolstered the family drama, What They Had, in which he co-starred with Blythe Danner, Hilary Swank, and Michael Shannon.
Our 50th anniversary presentation of MEDIUM COOL with Robert Forster in person screens Wednesday, March 27, at 7pm at the Royal in West LA. Click here for tickets.
Format: Blu-ray
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series invite you to celebrate April Fools’ Day with a double feature starring writer-director Blake Edwards’ inspired creation of accidental mayhem, Inspector Clouseau. Peter Sellers plays the inept French detective to comic perfection in the 55th anniversary screenings of THE PINK PANTHER and A SHOT IN THE DARK on April 1 in Pasadena, North Hollywood, and West LA. Showtime information.
THE PINK PANTHER, the first of a series of films with the blundering sleuth, opened in the United States in April 1964 and was an immediate hit.
Audiences thoroughly enjoyed the jewel heist caper, especially the antics of Sellers, who effectively stole the film from an ensemble cast including David Niven as the suave thief Sir Charles Lytton, Robert Wagner as his playboy nephew, Capucine as Clouseau’s philandering wife, and Claudia Cardinale as the exiled Princess Dala, the owner of the fabulous diamond known as “the Pink Panther.”
Variety found the original screenplay by Edwards and Maurice Richlin (Pillow Talk) “intensely funny,” with kudos to the cast and especially Sellers’ “razor-sharp timing.” Location shooting in the Italian Alps by cinematographer Philip Lathrop in lush Technicolor enhanced the comedy.
Of course, the memorable theme music by Henry Mancini is the film’s greatest legacy. Mancini’s original score was Oscar-nominated and won three Grammy awards, as well as inclusion in the Grammy Hall of Fame. The score is ranked #20 in the AFI’s all-time top 100. In addition, the feline character that cavorted across the screen in the merry main title sequence by the DePatie-Freleng animation studio became an Oscar-winning cartoon star. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2010.
Edwards, Sellers, and Mancini reunited for A SHOT IN THE DARK, the second of their several collaborations that continued into the 1970s.
Director Edwards enlisted William Peter Blatty to co-write a screen version of the French play by Marcel Archard (adapted by Harry Kurnitz for Broadway). Edwards brought along Inspector Clouseau, who was not a character in the original play, and turned Sellers loose in the murder mystery plot.
Commissioner Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), driven to comic psychosis by Clouseau’s ineptitude, and Clouseau’s servant Cato (Burt Kwuok), characters who would become mainstays in the ensuing movie series with Sellers, appear for the first time. Also starring Elke Sommer as the main murder suspect and veteran actor George Sanders as the owner of the chateau where the bodies keep piling up.
The comedy was released in the summer of 1964 and became an even bigger hit than The Pink Panther. The New Yorker praised Edwards and Blatty for “the good sense to toss the foundation stock out the window and let Mr. Sellers run amok…All in all, extremely jolly.” Mancini created a whole new jazzy theme for Clouseau and the main title’s animation sequence was once again crafted by DePatie and Freleng.
So avoid pranks and hoaxes this April Fools’ and see the real comic deal – the Inspector Clouseau Twofer at three Laemmle locations: Royal, NoHo and Pasadena Playhouse. Two delightful comedies for the price-of-one on Monday, April 1.
Buy tickets to the 5pm A SHOT IN THE DARK with admission to the 7:10pm THE PINK PANTHER included here. Or, buy tickets to the 7:10pm THE PINK PANTHER with admission to the 9:30pm A SHOT IN THE DARK included here.
Format: DVD
AMERICAN RELAPSE Q&A with filmmaker Pat McGee following the 7:10 pm show on Tuesday, 4/2.
Swing, samba or shimmy on over to Art in the Arthouse’s newest exhibit in Pasadena, DANCING WITH COLORS. This bold festival of color from artists Nancy R. Wise and Raymond Logan runs till June, 2019. Sales benefit the Laemmle Foundation and its support of humanitarian and environmental causes in the Los Angeles region.
About the Exhibit
NANCY R. WISE: Oil painter Nancy R. Wise is enchanted by color. She views her art as daily reality transformed by color and texture, woven on the loom of light. She states, “I love the vibrancy of bright colors, thick impasto-like textures against thin washes and strong forms to communicate an experience of a subject’s essence. It is my way to abstract and transform our ordinary experiences and reawaken life’s vibrant aesthetic.”
RAYMOND LOGAN: Don’t call Raymond Logan a “realistic artist.” While his work depicts real-life subject matter, it is grounded in abstraction and intuition. His true goal is to create a dialogue with you, the viewer, where a mutual discovery and re-imagining of “the self” can take place. Logan uses deft strokes of thick paint in surprising colors extrapolated from what he sees in the object – enhanced by how he wants those colors expressed. Get close up and you’ll find that his representational art becomes fully abstract.
Logan and Wise are connected through their mutual love of color and the ways they apply that color to their artwork. Logan spares nothing as he lavishly slaps thick globs of paint onto the canvas, while Wise contrasts impasto with thinner areas to create dynamic separation. From the first moment I saw their vibrant artwork, I knew their pieces would dance well together.
– Tish Laemmle, curator
