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The official blog of Laemmle Theatres

LAEMMLE LIVE presents ACADEMY PHILHARMONIC May 6

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This is a Free Event
RSVP on Eventbrite

LAEMMLE LIVE proudly presents the Academy Philharmonic, Sunday, May 6, 2018. Middle school students from the woodwind and brass sections of Elemental Music perform chamber music from different genres. Sunday’s program will include Fire Dance by David Shaffer, March (from Second Suite in F) by Gustav Holst, arr. Scott Stanton, Amparito Roca by Jaime Texidor, arr. James Curnow, and additional selections announced from the stage.

Academy Philharmonic is a program of Elemental Music, created to inspire, train, and nurture young musicians in Santa Monica. The organization began in 2004 by a SMMUSD music teacher who wanted to create an opportunity for elementary students to play in an orchestra throughout the school year, make new friends, and get excited about music. Since then, more than 1,000 students have participated in Elemental Music. Initially serving only 25 elementary school students, programs now serve nearly 300 elementary and middle school students in seven different programs this season.

Academy Philharmonic is one of Elemental Music’s newest programs. Comprised of six, seventh, and eighth graders, Academy Philharmonic provides new opportunities for middle schoolers in Santa Monica to experience the thrill of playing in a full orchestra, learning how to listen and blend with new instrument groups, and rehearsing and performing exciting new repertoire selections – all while being coached by some of the best teachers on the westside! Our students work with expert teaching artists to polish their technical skills and dig into the joys of music-making, all in a social setting. We offer many opportunities for student performances throughout the year at three different Elemental Music concerts plus various public events in the Santa Monica community. Elemental Music’s young musicians blossom in their own ways, both socially and musically. This vibrant program inspires a love of music in the hearts of some of the westside’s youngest artists.

Event Details
Sunday, May 6, 2018
11:00 am
Monica Film Center

This is a Free Event
RSVP on Eventbrite

LIVES WELL LIVED Q&A’s April 20 & 21.

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LIVES WELL LIVED filmmaker Sky Bergman will participate in Q&A’s at the Monica Film Center after the 7:30 PM show on Friday, April 20 screening and at the Playhouse 7 after the 5:20 PM show on Saturday, April 21.

https://vimeo.com/237917894

ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents THE STROM PROJECT: FRAGMENT in Pasadena

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ART IN THE ARTHOUSE invites you to view our newest exhibit in Pasadena from photographer, musician, and cultural anthropologist Yale Strom.  All works in THE STROM PROJECT: FRAGMENT exhibit are for sale and on display until June 14, 2018.

About the exhibit

Forty years ago, musician and cultural anthropologist YALE STROM trekked to Eastern Europe. He came across Jews living in cities, towns and tiny villages, often reminiscent of a pre-war shtetl environment. He bore witness to a dwindled Jewish population with some areas completely devoid of Jewish life. But he also found that a few larger cities were quite populous, and had actually exhibited an increase in numbers.

On his journey, Strom discovered a rich tapestry, including remnants of Hasidic and Orthodox worlds, Jews who were greatly devoted to communism, and parents who were fervently seeking better lives for their children and their children’s children.This photographic exhibition is a small window into a large field of conditions as they were, as they are, and perhaps as they will remain. Strom seeks out the moment with an artist’s hyperawareness, capturing it with an emotion and tone that is singular and authentic. The artist expresses a quality of relaxed spontaneity in his work, an organic, natural approach that never feels preset. The shots were taken with a 35mm Nikon FE camera using Kodak Tri-X 400 B&W film.

Strom’s career has been incredibly multi-disciplinary. In the klezmer world, he is celebrated as a leading scholar, ethnographer, virtuoso violinist and bandleader. Remarkably, he is a writer of 12 books, a musician/composer of 15 recordings and a documentarian of 9 films.

His newest film, American Socialist: The Life & Times of Eugene Victor Debs, starts Friday, May 4th in Pasadena and Santa Monica. The film traces the history of American populism with the man who inspired progressive ideas– from FDR’s New Deal to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

 – Joshua Elias, CURATOR

 

I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! 50th Anniversary Screening with Actress Leigh Taylor-Young In Person

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of the hit Peter Sellers comedy from 1968, I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! The Establishment meets the counterculture in this topical and often uproarious satire that poked fun at many of the conflicts dividing the country during the tumultuous 1960s.

Sellers plays an uptight Los Angeles lawyer whose life unravels when he meets a young hippie, played by Leigh Taylor-Young in her feature film debut.

Hy Averback directed the first screenplay written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and the picture’s success allowed Mazursky to make his directorial debut one year later on another swinging sixties comedy, ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.’

The supporting cast includes Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet as Sellers’ intrusive mother, Joyce Van Patten as his befuddled fiancée, along with Herb Edelman, Grady Sutton, Salem Ludwig, and David Arkin.

One of the film’s memorable set pieces revolves around a supply of marijuana brownies that come from a recipe in cultural icon Alice B. Toklas’s famous cookbook. With marijuana now legal in California and in several other states, the film takes on renewed timeliness and may well give happy viewers a contact high. Of course, if viewers wanted to replicate the experience they could also find some of the best edibles in Canada and indulge. This would certainly give them the same feeling as the main characters.

Back in 1968, Variety declared, “Film blasts off into orbit via top-notch acting and direction.” Pauline Kael, who had recently begun her regular stint reviewing for The New Yorker, called the picture “A giddy, slapdash, entertainingly inconsequential comedy…the picture makes you laugh surprisingly often.” And Leonard Maltin praised this “excellent comedy about the freaking out of mild-mannered L.A. lawyer. Sellers has never been better.” Indeed the film represents one of the highlights of Sellers’ vibrant and diverse list of achievements during the 60s.

Actress Leigh Taylor-Young first came to prominence on the popular ‘Peyton Place’ TV series of the 1960s. Her other films include ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,’ which marked one of the first screen roles for Robert De Niro; John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Horsemen,’ co-starring Omar Sharif; the prophetic sci-fi movie, ‘Soylent Green;’ and the suspense thriller ‘Jagged Edge.’ She has worked in the theater and costarred in several popular TV series, including ‘Picket Fences,’ for which she won an Emmy, ‘Dallas,’ and ‘Passions.’ In recent years she has also been active in humanitarian and spiritual activities for the United Nations and other organizations.

I LOVE YOU, ALICE B. TOKLAS! followed by Q&A with Actress Leigh Taylor-Young screens Wednesday, April 25, at 7:30 PM at the Royal Theatre in West L.A. Click here for tickets.

Format: DVD

KRYSTAL Actor-Director William H. Macy in Person this Weekend at the Music Hall.

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KRYSTAL actor-director William H. Macy will participate in a Q&A after the 7:30 PM screening at the Music Hall on Saturday, April 14.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc25I_y7oA

SHELTER Q&A at the Fine Arts on Sunday, April 8.

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National Public Radio film critic Ella Taylor will lead a Q&A after the 1:30 PM screening of SHELTER at the Ahrya Fine Arts on Sunday, April 8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHHQ89_ldqI&feature=youtu.be

ROGERS PARK Q&A at the Playhouse Opening Weekend.

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ROGERS PARK actors Christine Horn (‘American Crime Story’) and Jonny Mars (‘A Ghost Story’) and director Kyle Henry will participate in Q&A’s at the Playhouse after 7:40 PM screenings Friday-Sunday, April 6-8.

https://vimeo.com/232376978

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS 50th Anniversary Screening on Wednesday, April 18 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program, a 50th anniversary screening of Gillo Pontecorvo’s memorable and still timely political drama, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.

The film was an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film of 1966, but it was not released in the United States until 1968, when it received additional nominations for best director and for best original screenplay by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas. The film was considered so inflammatory that it was not shown in France until 1971.

The picture, filmed in black-and-white to approximate the look of a newsreel, dramatizes Algeria’s war of independence against France. It focuses on the years from 1954 to 1957, when the National Liberation Front began to organize in the Casbah of Algiers to carry out terrorist attacks on civilians as well as the French army. This led to a fierce and brutal counter-insurgency by the French, which meant the battles dragged on for years.

To insure authenticity, Pontecorvo cast the film mainly with non-professional actors recruited in Algeria. The film’s one professional actor, Jean Martin, gave a vivid performance as the complex, intelligent French officer who understands the grievances of the Algerians even as he fights ruthlessly to defeat them. The film’s urgency was heightened by the score of Ennio Morricone.

The film’s influence extended well beyond the cinema. It became a sort of handbook of revolutionary techniques that was studied by many radical groups over the years. Yet in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon also screened the movie in order to better understand the civil war unleashed in that country.

Many prominent filmmakers–including Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Steven Soderbergh, and Oliver Stone–all testified to influence of Pontecorvo’s movie on their own work. Critic David Elliott of the San Diego Union Tribune called The Battle of Algiers “perhaps the finest political film of the 1960s.” The LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor agreed that it was “a classic of politically engaged filmmaking.”

Our 50th anniversary screening of THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1968) screens Wednesday, April 18 at 7pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: DCP