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It’s Not Too Late to See Oscar Nominees and Enter Our Oscar Contest

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The Academy Awards air this Sunday which means entries for our Umpteenth Annual Oscar Contest are due Sunday morning. The person who most accurately predicts the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s choices wins ten pairs of passes, second place wins eight pairs and third place wins six pairs.

The best way to up your Oscar game is to see the nominees. Watching THE 2015 OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORTS ANIMATED, DOCUMENTARY, and LIVE ACTION will certainly put you ahead of the pack.

Best Foreign Film nominees LEVIATHAN and TIMBUKTU expand to Claremont and NoHo this Friday. IDA is playing in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, WILD TALES and TANGERINES won’t be released prior to the awards.

Other nominees of note still playing at one or more of our theatres include: SONG OF THE SEA, STILL ALICE, WHIPLASH, CITIZENFOUR, TWO DAYS ONE NIGHT, THE IMITATION GAME, AMERICAN SNIPER, and more.

BONUS TIP: Take the tie-breaker question seriously!

ENTER HERE

QUEEN & COUNTRY, John Boorman’s Lovely Sequel to HOPE AND GLORY,

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The hilarious highlight of John Boorman’s HOPE AND GLORY (1987), nominated for five Oscars: 9-year-old Bill Rohan rejoices in the destruction of his school by an errant Luftwaffe bomb. QUEEN & COUNTRY picks up the story nearly a decade later as Bill (Boorman’s alter-ego) begins basic training in the early Fifties, during the Korean War. Bill (played by a charming Callum Turner) is joined by a trouble-making army mate, Percy (Caleb Landry Jones). They never get near Korea, but engage in a constant battle of wits with the Catch-22-worthy Sgt. Major Bradley — the brilliant David Thewlis. Richard E. Grant is their superior, the veddy, veddy, infinitely put-upon, aptly-named Major Cross. A superb ensemble cast limns a wonderfully funny and often moving depiction of a still-recovering postwar England. (Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum)

We are very pleased to open Mr. Boorman’s QUEEN & COUNTRY on February 27 at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center. The film has garnered very positive reviews, including a New York Times Critic’s Pick from A.O. Scott, in which he wrote “Mr. Boorman approaches his story in the relaxed and generous manner of a raconteur, charming the audience rather than pushing us through the machinery of a plot…[the film] doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist. A young man is a more pedestrian creature, and the ’50s a quieter decade. Bill’s family, the focus of much of the drama in “Hope and Glory,” is glimpsed here in a few lovely scenes. The update is welcome. And so is the portrait, fleeting yet precisely detailed, of Britain at a time of change. The overt manifestation of that change is the arrival of the sovereign who gives QUEEN & COUNTRY its title, and who inspires cynicism and patriotism in its characters. But as the young Elizabeth II takes the throne, you can feel the ground shifting, and a different Britain coming into view: the one that would give the world angry young playwrights, rock ’n’ roll bands and resourceful, iconoclastic filmmakers like John Boorman.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qG1TvckA-Q&feature=youtu.be

GETT Q&A’s this Weekend at the Royal

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GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM follows an Israeli woman (Ronit Elkabetz) seeking to finalize a divorce (gett) from her estranged husband. She finds herself effectively put on trial by her country’s religious marriage laws, in this powerhouse courtroom drama from sibling directors Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz. Israel’s Official Entry for the 87th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and a Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Film.

GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM co-director Shlomi Elkabetz will participate in Q&A’s at the Royal after the 7 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, February 13 and 14.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a4dJZtCl1Q&feature=youtu.be

Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 2015: Take a Behind-the-Scenes Look at the New Season

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Celebrating its fifth fantastic year, Globe On Screen returns in 2015 to Laemmle’s Culture Vulture series with a brand new season of sell-out performances and captivating theatre from the London home of Shakespeare.

Globe On Screen offers audiences a ticket to the best seat in the house from the comfort of a your nearest Laemmle Theater and the chance to experience the unique magic of the world-famous Globe, all captured in high definition and full surround sound.

The fifth season contains five thrilling new productions, featuring the critically-acclaimed The Duchess of Malfi (March 2 and 3) starring Gemma Arterton, the inaugural production in the new candlelit Jacobean theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Other productions include four shows from the Globe’s Summer 2014 ‘Arms and the Man’ season: Globe Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole’s sold-out envisioning of Roman classic Julius Caesar (May 4 and 5); an iconic struggle between love and duty in Antony & Cleopatra (June 15 and 16); the return of Lucy Bailey’s notoriously bloody Titus Andronicus (March 30 and 31), and the uproariously chaotic The Comedy of Errors June 29 and 30). (And while we’re on the subject of live theater, we’ll also have screenings of the stage musical version of From Here to Eternity on April 13 and 14.)

To whet your appetite for the Globe’s new season, watch this five-minute behind-the-scenes look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itPWynTTL3U

BRASSLANDS Screens this Monday and Tuesday; the MUDBUG BRASS BAND will perform at the Music Hall Monday Night.

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A tiny Serbian village explodes with brass cacophony and riotous celebration as more than half a million music fans descend upon Guča, the world’s largest trumpet competition. Amidst a cast of defending Serbian champions and struggling Roma Gypsies, an unlikely brass band from New York City, Zlatne Uste, voyages to represent the United States only a decade after NATO bombs rocked Belgrade. They will be the first Americans ever to compete at Guča. BRASSLANDS offers an intimate and sometimes unsettling portrait of how the hopes and fears of this diverse group of characters collide in their search for common ground and musical ecstasy.

Laemmle Theatres will be screening BRASSLANDS this Monday, February 9 at 7:30 PM and Tuesday, February 10 at 1 PM as part of its Culture Vulture film series. To celebrate the music profiled in BRASSLANDS, L.A.’s own MUDBUG BRASS BAND will be at the Music Hall Monday night to perform their super-fun New Orleans-style brass-based jazz!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCf0UbNemw
Mudbug Brass Band in all its glory

Indiewire ~ “GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM: One Film That Could Change the Course of Women’s Rights in Israel”

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An Israeli woman (Ronit Elkabetz) seeking to finalize a divorce (gett) from her estranged husband finds herself effectively put on trial by her country’s religious marriage laws, in GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM, a powerhouse courtroom drama from sibling directors Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz. Laemmle Theatres opens the film at the Royal on February 13, the Playhouse, Town Center 5 and Claremont 5 on February 20 and the NoHo 7 on February 27.

In Israel, there is neither civil marriage nor civil divorce; only Orthodox rabbis can legalize a union or its dissolution, which is only possible with the husband’s full consent. Women can’t contact an LA divorce lawyer, for example, to end the marriage it has to be the husband who makes the decision. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Viviane Amsalem has been applying for a divorce for three years but her religiously devout husband Elisha, continually refuses. His cold intransigence, Viviane’s determination to fight for her freedom, and the ambiguous role of the rabbinical judges shape a procedure where tragedy vies with absurdity and everything is brought out into the open for judgment.

What’s more, as reported by Indiewire, the film is having real-world effects in Israel, prompting religious authorities to reevaluate their positions on divorce. Check out this short interview with the filmmakers reacting to the news:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kL1aL3LFIM#t=110
GETT co-directors Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz.

MONK WITH A CAMERA Q&A’s with the Filmmakers this Weekend at the Royal

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MONK WITH A CAMERA chronicles the life and spiritual quest of Nicholas (Nicky) Vreeland, who for the past twenty-eight years has been a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The son of a United States Ambassador, grandson of legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and a photographer by trade, Nicky left his privileged life behind to follow his true calling. He moved to India, cutting his ties with society, photography, and his pleasure-filled world, to live in a monastery with no running water or electricity.

MONK WITH A CAMERA co-directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi will participate in Q&A’s after the 11 AM screenings at the Royal on Saturday and Sunday, January 31 and February 1.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07LL-r-Sqzk

ABOVE AND BEYOND Q&A’s at the Royal and Town Center 5 with Producer Nancy Spielberg

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In 1948, a group of World War II pilots volunteered to fight for Israel in the War of Independence. As members of ‘Machal’ — volunteers from abroad — this ragtag band of brothers not only turned the tide of the war, preventing the possible annihilation of Israel at the very moment of its birth; they also laid the groundwork for the Israeli Air Force. ABOVE AND BEYOND is their story. The first major feature-length documentary about the foreign airmen in the War of Independence, ABOVE AND BEYOND brings together new interviews with pilots from the ’48 War, as well as leading scholars and statesmen, including Shimon Peres, to present an extraordinary, little-known tale with reverberations up to the present day.

ABOVE AND BEYOND producer Nancy Spielberg will participate in Q&A’s after the 11 AM screenings at the Royal on Saturday and Sunday, February 7 and 8 and after the 7:50 PM show at the Town Center on Sunday, February 8. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNMJGaptDds&feature=youtu.be