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Anniversary Classics: Actress Blythe Danner In-Person After THE GREAT SANTINI on 10/27 at the Royal! Plus, a Pre-Halloween Double Feature 10/30 at the Fine Arts.

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After celebrating the 65th anniversary of ALL ABOUT EVE this past Tuesday, we look ahead to the two remaining Anniversary Classics events on the October calendar! Next up is the 35th anniversary of the Oscar-nominated drama THE GREAT SANTINI (1980), with special guest Blythe Danner, who played the long-suffering wife of domineering Marine pilot and Oscar nominee Robert Duvall. Danner received some of the best notices of her career this past summer for I’LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS, a performance which is being touted for year-end awards consideration. Join us for THE GREAT SANTINI and a conversation with Blythe Danner on Tuesday, October 27th at the Royal in West LA at 7:00 pm.

santini

Then don’t forget our special Halloween program on Friday, October 30th – a retro double feature of the 80th anniversary of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), one of the great horror classics, paired with bonus feature ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948), a scary and very funny vintage horror-comedy. Both features are from the vaults of Universal studios and to complete our trip into yesteryear are being presented at the beautifully restored and newly re-opened Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. The classic double bill (yes, two for the price of one!) begins at 7:30 on the 30th.

Tickets are now on sale for both events and can be purchased online at www.laemmle.com/ac. See you soon at the Anniversary Classics series!

Win tickets to a Halloween screening of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

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UPDATE: Winners have been drawn and emailed. Details below!

It’s “Horror in the Hall” this Halloween as the silent classic, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, is accompanied live by Clark Wilson on the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s monster organ.

jekyllParamount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John S. Robertson and produced by Famous Players-Lasky, was the first of three film treatments of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novella produced in 1920. It starred John Barrymore as the fatally split personalities, and featured Martha Mansfield and Nita Naldi as their love interests, roles based on a stage treatment, not the original story.

Four winners (selected at random) will each receive a pair of tickets to DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. As a bonus, winners will also receive two tickets to Laemmle’s very own pre-Halloween double feature of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) & ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948) on Friday, 10/30 at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Good luck!

Enter below!

Halloween at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Ticket Giveaway

Special thanks to the LA Phil for making these tickets available to our customers! If you don’t win, please consider purchasing tickets here.

Terrific Rock Docs with Natalie Merchant, Roger Waters, the Scorpions

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Rock and pop music fans, we have a bunch of upcoming rock doc screenings, something for a variety of tastes. On October 14th we’ll screen SCORPIONS: FOREVER AND A DAY at the Royal, Claremont, NoHo 7 and Playhouse. The movie is the result of a year-and-a-half renowned filmmaker Katja von Garnier spent with the German band on what was originally supposed to be the band’s farewell tour. We follow them on the road from Bangkok to Moscow, and watch as they scrap their retirement plans, choosing instead to mark their 50th anniversary in 2015 with a new tour, a new album and this movie.

scorpions

The next day, October 15th, Pink Floyd fans can check out ROGER WATERS: THE WALL at the Claremont, NoHo 7, Playhouse and Ahrya Fine Arts. The film is an immersive concert experience of the classic Floyd album, a road movie of Waters’ reckoning with the past and as a stirring anti-war event, highlighting the human cost of conflict.

rogerwaters

natalie-merchant-paradise-is-there-450x409Best of all (at least from my point of view), we’ll be screening PARADISE IS THERE: A MEMOIR BY NATALIE MERCHANT on October 28th at the Ahrya Fine Arts, Claremont, NoHo 7 and Playhouse. Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant released Tigerlily 20 years ago. The album went on to sell five million copies and touched countless numbers of fans. Now she has re-recorded the album and uses the opportunity to tell her story, the story behind the songs and the impact it has had on her audience.

Directed by Merchant, the film is a personal account of the beloved singer’s journey. Told through her voice and the voices of her fans, it illustrates how powerfully the songs from Tigerlily, — ‘Carnival,’ ‘River,’ Wonder,’ ‘The Letter,’ and more — have impacted her audience. With this film we get to know Merchant in a new way and appreciate the humanity of the woman that is reflected in her songs. Filled with archival footage from her early days fronting the seminal alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs, live performances and interviews with musicians, friends and fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbsSl-O00o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZgJqX8Dxzg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z70KHolZA20

A Special Message to Laemmle Moviegoers from Michael York

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz-nl5uXO7Y

Michael York and Richard Chamberlain will participate in a Q&A moderated by LA Film Critics Association President Stephen Farber following the 40th anniversary screening of THE FOUR MUSKETEERS on Tuesday, 9/29 at the Laemmle Royal in West LA.

Purchase your tickets in advance here. For more information about our Anniversary Classics series, visit http://www.laemmle.com/ac.

German Oscar Submission LABYRINTH OF LIES Opens September 30th at the Royal, October 9th at the Playhouse and Town Center

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The gripping historical drama LABYRINTH OF LIES [Im Labyrinth des Schweigens], Germany’s official submission for the 2016 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, opens in Frankfurt in 1958. Nobody wants to look back to the time of the Hitler’s National Socialist regime. Young public prosecutor Johann Radmann comes across some documents that help initiate a trial against some members of the SS who served in Auschwitz. But both the horrors of the past and others’ hostility towards his work bring Johann close to a meltdown. It is nearly impossible for him to find his way through this maze; everybody seems to have been involved or guilty.

LABYRINTH OF LIES director/co-screenwriter Giulio Ricciarelli said this about his film: “I wanted to tell a story about personal courage, of fighting for what is right and taking a stand. And it is a story of redemption. In Frankfurt in 1963 Germans put Germans on trial for their crimes in the Holocaust. Eighteen years after the war, it was the first time ever Germany really confronted it’s past, and it was a turning point in our history of immense importance.

“In this age of globalization and inter-connectedness, this story reminds us that it is always individuals who bring about change and it is individuals who push forward civilization.

“The film begins in Germany in 1958. An atmosphere of frantic optimism and denial, a country rebuilding itself, only looking forward. Yet the shadow of its war crimes is catching up, literally around the corner. It will be a momentous task- can our heroes force a whole country to look at what it has done, to acknowledge its past?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2&v=U5ovcBGMLEs

Culture Vulture Mondays, Laemmle Theatres’ Panoply of High Art in Cinema: Venue Changes + Fourth Quarter Lineup

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We’re celebrating the first anniversary of CULTURE VULTURE with a slew of stellar offerings that will take us into the new year.

For the uninitiated, CULTURE VULTURE is our weekly series of opera, stage and ballet/dance performances plus art exhibitions and documentaries.

These are often live performances that have been recorded – and they are typically breathtaking! If you are a lover of the high arts and have yet to experience Culture Vulture, you owe it to yourself to attend one of our upcoming programs.

Screenings take place Monday nights with repeat performances Tuesday afternoons.

Please note that we’ve shuffled the deck a bit with regard to venues. Culture Vulture will be continuing at the Playhouse, Claremont, and Town Center. In addition, it will be offered at the newly re-opened FINE ARTS in Beverly Hills. It will no longer run at the Royal, Music Hall, or NoHo.

There’s more! We’ve developed a new scheduling model that will make it easier for you to plan in advance. Each month will be calendared as follows:

1st Monday – Opera
2nd Monday – Ballet/Dance
3rd Monday – Stage
4th Monday – Art Exhibits/Documentaries
The 5th Monday (when it occurs) will be a surprise!

September 21 and 22: PAUL TAYLOR: CREATIVE DOMAIN (dance documentary)

September 28 and 29: THE IMPRESSIONISTS (exhibition)

October 5 and 6: AIDA (opera from Teatro alla Scalla)

October 12 and 13: L’HISTOIRE DE MANON (ballet from the Opera Nacional de Paris)

October 19 and 20: THEODORE BIKEL: IN THE SHOES OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM (stage production via the National Center for Jewish Film)

October 26 and 27: VINCENT VAN GOGH: A NEW WAY OF SEEING (exhibition)

November 2 and 3: RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY (opera from the Royal Opera House)

November 9 and 10: MOVIMENTOS: LA DANZA DE LA PUNTA AL TACON (dance from the Teatro Real, Madrid)

November 16 and 15: MAN AND SUPERMAN (stage production from the National Theatre, London)

November 23 and 24: PALIO

November 30 and December 1: THE THREE TENORS CHRISTMAS CONCERT (Wiener Konzerthaus)

December 7 and 8: THE MAGIC FLUTE (opera from Bregenzer Festspiele)

December 14 and 15: THE NUTCRACKER (ballet from the Bolshoi)

December 21 and 22: HAMLET (stage from the National Theatre)

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.
Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet.

Maurice Pialat Retrospective Coming Soon to the Royal

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“The director who has the strongest and most consistent influence on young French filmmakers is not Jean-Luc Godard, but Maurice Pialat.” — Arnaud Desplechin, filmmaker.

“To say that Pialat marched to the beat of a different drummer is to put it mildly. In fact, he didn’t really march at all. He ambled, and fuck anybody who got it into their head that they’d like to amble along with him. Or behind him. Or ahead of him.” — Kent Jones, film critic.

From September 25th to October 1st the Royal Theater will host a collection of masterworks by French filmmaker Maurice Pialat (1925-2003). We’ll be screening five of his ten feature films: 1987’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, “Under the Sun of Satan,” with Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire; “Loulou,” a tale of tortured love with Isabelle Huppert and Depardieu; “Van Gogh,” a chronicle of the last days of the artist; family drama “The Mouth Agape,” with Nathalie Baye; and the slice-of-life film about teenagers in suburban France “Graduate First.”

Maurice Pialat’s influence in the years after his death in 2003 was everywhere, but while he was alive he wasn’t part of any movement. A late bloomer who was 40 before he finished his first fiction feature (1968’s “Naked Childhood”), he missed the New Wave—a fact he seemed to resent, though his irascible personality likely meant he wouldn’t have belonged to any club which would have had him as a member.

Pialat made rule-breaking, violently disorienting movies full of temporal leaps and jagged improvisations, impolite movies about insoluble dilemmas and impossible personalities—women and men who can’t or won’t allow themselves to be tamed, and the tug-of-war between desire and responsibility. While intensely grounded in the cinema, citing the Lumière Brothers as his masters, Pialat rejected cinephile culture and lunged headlong into the material stuff of life, love, sex, and death. (He’s often compared to John Cassavetes, but this overlooks the particularities of both men.) Pialat’s films aren’t exercises but exorcisms, wounded howls at the injustice of existence whose anguished power is intensified by an acute awareness of the beauty of being alive. In a national cinema often associated with dainty sophistication, Maurice Pialat is the epitome of raw power.

FULL SCHEDULE:

"Under the Sun of Satan"
“Under the Sun of Satan”

Friday, 9/25
12:00PM – GRADUATE FIRST
02:00PM – VAN GOGH
05:15PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN
07:35PM – LOULOU
10:15PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE

Saturday, 9/26
12:00PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
02:00PM – GRADUATE FIRST
04:05PM – VAN GOGH
07:25PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN
09:45PM – LOULOU

"Loulou"
“Loulou”

Sunday, 9/27
12:00PM – LOULOU
02:40PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
04:40PM – GRADUATE FIRST
06:45PM – VAN GOGH
10:00PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN

Monday, 9/28
12:00PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN
02:15PM – LOULOU
04:55PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
07:00PM – GRADUATE FIRST
09:00PM – VAN GOGH

"Graduate First"
“Graduate First”

Tuesday, 9/29
12:00PM – VAN GOGH
03:15PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN
05:30PM – LOULOU
08:10PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
10:10PM – GRADUATE FIRST

Wednesday, 9/30
12:00PM – GRADUATE FIRST
02:10PM – VAN GOGH
05:30PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
07:30PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN
09:45PM – LOULOU

"Van Gogh"
“Van Gogh”

Thursday, 10/01
12:00PM – THE MOUTH AGAPE
02:00PM – GRADUATE FIRST
04:10PM – VAN GOGH
07:25PM – LOULOU
10:00PM – UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Kue5bskEY

Zhang Yimou on His Potent New Historical Romance COMING HOME: “This type of film is very difficult to make. It needs to be made in a state of serenity.”

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Zhang Yimou’s new film is set in the last days of China’s Cultural Revolution, following a newly-released political prisoner (Chen Daoming) as he tries to reconnect with his wife (frequent Yimou collaborator Gong Li), who is stricken with amnesia. We open the movie 9/9 at the Royal, 9/18 at the Playhouse and 10/2 at the Town Center. The director wrote this about his powerful new work: “Based on Yan Geling’s novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi, COMING HOME is a love story about joy and sadness, as well as separation and reunion. We used the end of the original story – with Lu Yanshi returning home – as the starting point of the script. Everyone knows that Chen Daoming and Gong Li are the finest actors working in China, and they were my first and only choices for their respective roles. I’ve learned a lot from working with them. They offered a lot of constructive opinions about even the smallest details in the story. That’s why their contribution to the film extends far beyond the portrayal of the characters.

“Having a so-called “rising star” in the daughter’s role was not a must as her character serves a very important function in the story. When I first met [Zhang] Huiwen, I noticed her bright shining eyes, which resembled the aura of young Red Guards. It was what I needed. For the second part of the film, I needed to change the way her eyes look. They should look as if they are in a trance, always hesitant. Huiwen had the ability to do that.

“This type of film is very difficult to make. It needs to be made in a state of serenity. If I thought about benefits and profits even a little, then I would lose my way. That’s why, for me, this film represents a return to an earlier state of mind and an older approach to creativity. The most important thing for me is whether the audience will keep this film in their hearts and whether they will truly remember the emotions behind COMING HOME.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoea7Cz3Hj0

One of the most important and influential filmmakers in China, and a core member of China’s “Fifth Generation” directors, Zhang Yimou started his career as a cinematographer and became a director in 1987. Over the years, Zhang has directed films which received accolades from around the world: RED SORGHUM (1987, Golden Bear winner at the Berlin International Film Festival), JU DOU (1990, In Competition at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards®), RAISE THE RED LANTERN (1991, Silver Lion winner at the Venice International Film Festival and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards®), TO LIVE (1994, Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival), to name a few.

In 2002, his martial arts epic HERO ushered in a new era of blockbusters for Chinese cinema, and was followed by the equally successful HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004), and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER (2006)