The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
The distributor has informed us that the filmmaker Q&As have been cancelled. The film will still play at the scheduled times. We will contact ticket holders by email.
BOUNDARIES writer-director Shana Feste will participate in Q&A’s at the Royal after the 5:10 show on Friday, June 22 and after the 8 PM screening on Saturday, June 23.
This is a Free Event
RSVP on Eventbrite
Join us as LAEMMLE LIVE proudly presents musicians from Orchestra Santa Monica at the Monica Film Center July 15. Lisa Kohorn-clarinet, Larry Kohorn and Cindy Bandel-violins, Brooke Wharton-viola, Eran Marcus-cello perform Alexander Krein Jewish Sketches #1, op. 12 and Johannes Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115 for clarinet in A with String Quartet.
Founded in 2012, Orchestra Santa Monica (OSM) has already established itself as an important civic institution, providing Santa Monica and its surrounding communities with a first-class orchestra which presents accessibly-priced concerts. In addition to innovative programming and compelling interpretations of the classical and contemporary repertoires, outstanding local composers and soloists are featured in OSM’s programs and reflect the musical diversity of the cultures present in Los Angeles County. Beyond its regular full orchestra concert programming, OSM brings musical outreach to the community through performances by smaller music ensembles at venues like the Miles Playhouse and the Laemmle. Furthermore, educational outreach to young people is an especially important OSM priority. Each year the OSM Woodwind Quintet plays in local Title I schools where the children have little access to classical music. Tom O’Connor is Executive Director and Julia Tranner is Communications Coordinator. www.OrchestraSantaMonica.org
Event Details
Sunday, July 15, 2018
11:00 am
Monica Film Center
This is a Free Event
RSVP on Eventbrite
In conjunction with an American Cinematheque tribute to the late Oscar-winning director Milos Forman, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of Forman’s final Czech film, THE FIREMEN’S BALL. The picture, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1968, is part of our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series. THE FIREMEN’S BALL co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.
Forman was part the Czech New Wave, a group of talented filmmakers (also including Jan Kadar, Jiri Menzel, and Ivan Passer) who emerged during the 1960s. Forman’s 1966 film, Love of a Blonde, was also an Oscar nominee and put him on the map as a director to watch. His wry sensibility received even fuller expression in The Firemen’s Ball, a dark but raucous satire of the chaos that ensues when a group of local firemen try to mount a celebration for their retiring chief. Forman got the idea for the film when he was in a small Bohemian village working on another script, and he happened to attend a real firemen’s ball. The script was co-written by Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jaroslav Papousek. The cast consisted mainly of nonprofessional actors, including Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, and Vaclav Stockel.
The film, which was widely interpreted as a sly critique of the Eastern European Communist system, was made during a brief period of artistic freedom that came to be known as the Prague Spring. But when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, The Firemen’s Ball was banned, and Forman and other leading Czech directors fled the country. As TV Guide later wrote of the film, “This ingratiating farce is perhaps the last noteworthy film of the Czech renaissance before the political crackdown forced most filmmakers into exile.” After arriving in America, Forman went on to achieve many Hollywood successes, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Amadeus.
Among the stellar reviews for THE FIREMEN’S BALL, Time magazine acclaimed “a delicious parody-fable of Slavic bureaucracy,” and Variety paid tribute to “a lively, brimming comedy on human conduct and small-town life.” In his four-star review, Roger Ebert added, “This is a very warm, funny movie.”
This Just In: Co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the June 26 screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.
Milos Forman’s THE FIREMEN’S BALL (1968) screens Tuesday, June 26, at 7:00pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.
THE ICARUS LINE MUST DIE writer-director Michael Grodner and star-writer Joe Cardamone will participate in a Q&A at the Royal after the late show on Friday, June 22.
ART IN THE ARTHOUSE invites you to view our newest exhibit in Santa Monica, DANIELA SCHWEITZER: THE JOYFUL DANCE TO WATER. All works are for sale and on display till August 29, 2018. Please visit our galleries on both floors at the Monica Film Center next time you come for a movie. Or just stop by; movie tickets are not required to view our art.
About the exhibit
DANIELA SCHWEITZER is an artist, a painter, deeply connected to movement, light and the color of water. She captures moments and manifestations of aquatic colors, oceanic gatherings, and the compositional arc of a young dancer’s arms. With a nod to the Bay Area figurative movement and artists David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, Schweitzer’s work exudes a fluid harmonious quality, a balance of color and pictorial composition.
Additionally, her work exhibits a keen understanding of atmosphere, controlling mood and expressing locational flavor through juxtaposition of vibrant color. Schweitzer’s paintings begin with a photograph to create emotional impact and story. Schweitzer reflects, “I select my scenes … because they possess a simple, beautiful, and usually colorful human gesture that is energetic, calm, or harmonic. The balance and contrast between light and shadows, values and temperatures, and my loose and contrasting brushstrokes and lines all come together during the painting process to create my own style or point of view.”
Much of her oeuvre is personal. The painting Dancer, for instance, is a deftly rendered work of admiration, an observant balletic posturing of the artist’s daughter.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Daniela is a highly respected pediatrician, currently residing in Los Angeles. She studied at the Atelier Clásico de Dibujo y Pintura, Buenos Aires, Academia Central Mendía and earned her medical degree at the Buenos Aires School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires.
Above all, Daniela Schweitzer’s work celebrates a genuine joie de vivre.
– Joshua Elias, CURATOR
Monica Film Center
1332 2nd Street
Santa Monica, CA
310-478-3836
Join us on June 3 as LAEMMLE LIVE proudly presents chamber players from The Los Angeles Youth Orchestra at the Monica Film Center. LAYO is comprised of pre-college age musicians from greater Los Angeles who rehearse and perform classical symphonic masterworks and contemporary music. Collective talent, intellectual curiosity, and discipline are key to student performances of programs that model professional orchestras, more than conventional youth orchestras.
Each season, the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra serves over 120 student musicians, ages 8-18, who hail from 60 different public and private schools. In addition to studying privately and attending weekly orchestra rehearsals, many of these students give back to their communities by teaching music to younger students, volunteering at hospitals, writing columns for their school and local newspapers, and excelling in their academic and athletic pursuits. LAYO rehearses at the Encino Community Center on Sunday afternoons and regularly performs at UCLA Schoenberg Hall and Ambassador Auditorium. LAYO has also appeared at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and Carnegie Hall. The orchestra toured internationally to Vienna and Prague in 2015 and in June 2017, completed a nine-day performance tour to Italy, presenting concerts at the Arvedi Auditorium in Cremona; Terme Tettuccio in Montecatini; and Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome. Many of the orchestra’s alumni have gone on to prestigious universities including Juilliard, Cornell, Berklee College of Music, UCLA, USC, Harvard and New England Conservatory. For more information regarding auditions and concerts, visit our website at www.losangelesyouthorchestra.org.
Event Details
Sunday, June 3, 2018
11:00 am
Monica Film Center
This is a Free Event
RSVP on Eventbrite
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad series presents the 40th anniversary of AUTUMN SONATA (1978), as part of the centennial retrospective of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish auteur who has entered the cinematic pantheon. Autumn Sonata represents the last theatrical film for Bergman, whose subsequent work was made for television, and then re-tailored for theatrical release.
For the occasion, Bergman enticed his namesake, legendary actress Ingrid Bergman, to return to her native language and star as a self-centered concert pianist who had favored her career over her children. In the drama of “fraught interpersonal relationships,” (a trademark of the director, as recently noted by Kenneth Turan), Ingrid Bergman’s character of Charlotte is invited by her daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann) to visit her and her parson husband in their country home. When Eva also brings her handicapped sister, Helena (Lena Nyman) into the reunion, the past erupts on the present with repressed familial furor.
Bergman’s memorable movies of the 1950s and 1960s had been photographed in luminous black and white. In the 1970s he was working in color, and, as noted by Leonard Maltin, the cinematography by long-time Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist is “peerless,” giving the film visual warmth and intensity.
As to the only collaboration of the two Bergmans, Gary Arnold of the Washington Post said, “Bergman’s casting coup lives up to expectations. Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann invest their roles with undeniable emotional impact.” It was also Ingrid Bergman’s last film role. The three-time Academy Award winner (Gaslight, Anastasia, Murder on the Orient Express) delivers a searing performance that brought her a best actress nomination in 1978, her seventh and final nod overall. Ingmar Bergman’s original screenplay was also nominated, one of his nine career total as writer, producer, and director. Additionally, the movie was named best foreign film by the Hollywood Foreign Press that year.
Autumn Sonata is a story of intense mother-daughter relations, and as part of the Anniversary Abroad series will play two days after Mother’s Day on Tuesday, May 15 at 7:00 PM at three Laemmle locations: Royal, West Los Angeles; Town Center, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena. Format: DCP. Click here for tickets.
Part of the city-wide, two month retrospective, “Ingmar Berman’s Cinema,” at various locations.
For the Anniversary Classics Abroad next attraction, we present another master filmmaker enjoying a retrospective, Milos Forman, with a 50th anniversary screening June 20 of his 1968 Academy Award nominee, The Fireman’s Ball.
FIVE SEASONS filmmaker Tom Piper will participate in a Q&A after the 7:30 PM screening at the Royal on Friday, June 29. Duane Border, President of the American Society of Landscape Architects Southern California Chapter, will moderate.