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Laemmle Oscar Contest, plus Kevin Costner’s Best Director Oscar Presentation.

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Welp, that’s a wrap for the 2022 Oscars and our contest. Laemmle moviegoers were able to foresee the Academy’s choices very accurately with two exceptions: they went for the more conventional Best Picture nominee with CODA over The Power of the Dog and the artier choice with Best Animated Short nominee Windshield Wiper over the family-friendly Robin Robin. The Power of the Dog was in a tight race for Best Adapted Screenplay with eventual winner CODA. Best Original Screenplay split somewhat evenly between Paul Thomas Anderson for Licorice Pizza and eventual winner Kenneth Branagh for Belfast.

See the full results in cool pie charts at laemmle.com/oscars. We’ll announce our winners on this page on Thursday, March 31.

The sad, shocking incident during the ceremony overshadowed everything but one thing worth taking a second look at is Kevin Costner‘s presentation of the Best Director Oscar. It was probably the best presentation of the evening. He has won the award himself, of course, 30 years ago for Dances with Wolves. He spoke movingly and deliberately about the experience of seeing movies in theaters and how seeing How the West was Won at the Cinerama Dome inspired him to become an actor and filmmaker. The in-person audience giggles at first, but by the end you could hear a pin drop. Here’s a transcription and video:

You know, about a half-mile from here, I saw my first full-length adult movie. I know what you’re thinking, but I was seven years old and I was away from my parents and wanted to have some fun. It was a cowboy movie called How the West Was Won. And what I witnessed that afternoon in the Cinerama Dome was perfect. The curtain, when we still had them, opened to a film almost four hours long. It had an intermission where the score continued, subtly signaling at one point that the second half was about to start. I don’t know where everyone went, but I wasn’t going to move an inch. I decided that I would not give up my magic seat. I was determined that I would not miss a minute. And as I sat in that dark that afternoon 60 years ago, all I really knew was that I was in careful hands. Little did I know that three directors would be responsible for that epic moment in my life. They fired my imagination, and they captured my heart. That’s what can happen when you direct a movie. You can change a mind. You can change the trajectory of a life, of a career. You can capture a heart. But you can’t do it alone. And directors, tonight’s directors all know the possibilities. They know what’s at stake. It’s why they give their precious time. It’s why they choose to fight through the long days, and the longer nights, and the endless questions, and the inevitable second guessing that comes from those who would do it differently if given half a chance. These five directors have all managed to stay the course. They have all held the line and masterfully given us the gift of a single vision, and for that we honor them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y52t3CVKeyc&t=167s

JULES AND JIM 60th Anniversary Screenings April 13

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In celebration of the 60th anniversary of that landmark year at American movie houses, 1962, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present anniversary screenings of François Truffaut’s masterpiece, JULES AND JIM. The film will play for one night only on Wednesday, April 13 at 7:00 PM at four Laemmle locations: West Los Angeles, Santa Clarita, Pasadena, and Glendale.

Truffaut, riding the crest of the international New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, was in the initial stage of his storied filmmaking career when he adapted Henri Pierre Roche’s autobiographical novel of obsessive love. JULES AND JIM, only his third film, remains to many his greatest achievement. The story follows the friendship of Jules (Oskar Werner) an Austrian writer, and the more extroverted Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), who meet in Paris in 1912 just before the outbreak of the First World War. Although they fight on opposite sides, they resume their “bromance” devotion to each other after the conflict. They had both pursued the enigmatic Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a free spirit who marries Jules and moves with him to Germany, where Jim eventually joins them, and they form a menage-a-trois. Over the course of twenty years, Catherine’s independent nature cannot be bound by either marriage or motherhood, and her impulses ultimately become destructive.

JULES AND JIM is Truffaut’s celebration of both love and cinema, reflected by his use of an arsenal of cinematic techniques. This technical experimentation mirrors the unconventionality of the bohemian characters in the first decades of the twentieth century. Critics of the day embraced his vision, with Andrew Sarris extolling the film as “that rarity of rarities, a genuinely romantic film…expresses a brutal vision of love as a private war fought apart from the rules and regulations of society.” Pauline Kael exuded further praise, “Elliptical, full of wit and radiance, this is the best movie ever made about what most of us think of as the Scott Fitzgerald period.” And one of Truffaut’s heroes, director Jean Renoir, wrote to Truffaut “I wanted to tell you JULES AND JIM seems to be the most accurate expression of contemporary French society.”

The film’s critical and box-office success not only enhanced Truffaut’s reputation as an emerging master of cinema, but also prompted the release of his second film, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960) which finally reached the United States in 1962. The two films, along with efforts by international auteurs like Kurosawa, Bunuel, Bergman, Antonioni, Fellini, and numerous others contributed to an overseas tidal wave that inundated American screens that year, the apex of the Golden Age of the Arthouse. Additionally, the dazzling performance of Jeanne Moreau in JULES AND JIM showcased the depth of female characterization in European films that was seldom matched by Hollywood’s output in that era. As Roger Ebert later wrote, JULES AND JIM is “perhaps the most influential and arguably the best of those first astonishing films that broke with the past. There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvCS7mIzj4Y

Exclusive clip from the upcoming French comedy THE ROSE MAKER.

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On April 1 we’ll open THE ROSE MAKER at the Claremont, Playhouse, Royal and Town Center. Catherine Frot stars as 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. Enjoy this clip for a whiff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbAxOiZ-Irs

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