The official blog of Laemmle Theatres
CRIES FROM SYRIA Q&A schedule:
Friday 03/03/17 – Evgeny Afineevsky (Director and producer) + Aaron I. Butler (Producer and Editor of the movie) will be doing Q&A after 7:20pm show.
Saturday 03/04/17 – Evgeny Afineevsky (Director and producer) will be doing Q&A after 4:30pm show.
Sunday 03/04/17 – Aaron I. Butler (Producer and Editor) will be doing Q&A after 4:30pm show.
Sunday 03/04/17 – Aaron I. Butler (Producer and Editor) will be doing Q&A after 7:20pm show.
The results of Sunday’s Oscars were pretty ho-hum right up until somewhere around the 245th minute, when we all witnessed the most embarrassing accounting error of all time. Apparently the gentleman from PricewaterhouseCoopers was more focused on his star-struck tweeting than making sure he gave Warren Beatty the right envelope. However, let’s not let this snafu obscure the fact that the Academy surprised everyone and honored a genuinely marvelous film, Moonlight, only the second Best Picture Winner about LGBTQ people (the first was Midnight Cowboy) and the first with an all-African American cast.
Anyway, in our little Oscar contest, the winner was the only one with 20 correct, so they stood alone at the top. For the 2nd-5th place winners, 24 people correctly guessed 18 categories – and even with the Tie-Break question about the show’s running time there were still multiple ties.
Interestingly, for Best Picture, our winner picked La La Land – which for about two minutes was the correct answer – but they still beat their competition by two answers. Among the winners, the difficult categories were Best Picture (Moonlight or La La Land), Best Actor (Denzel Washington or Casey Affleck), Best Sound Mixing (La La Land or Hacksaw Ridge), and Best Live Action Short.
Congratulations to all. If we’ve heard back from you, your Laemmle Premiere Cards are en route. And Moonlight is back in theaters.
20 correct
1st Place) Mariano A. of Beverly Hills.
18 Correct – 1 minute off official time
Tie 2nd) Jen M. of Pasadena.
Tie 2nd) Marina O. of Los Angeles.
18 Correct – 6 minutes off official time
3rd Place) Martha C. of Valley Village.
18 Correct – 8 minutes off official time
Tie 4th) Tristan K. of West Hollywood.
Tie 4th) Cory G. of Los Angeles.
Tie 4th) Jacob W. of Los Angeles.
18 Correct – 9 minutes off official time
5th Place) Rachel S. of West Hollywood.
We are having so much fun with our American repertory film series Anniversary Classics, which we began with film critic Stephen Farber two years ago, that we are pleased to announce a companion series: Anniversary Classics Abroad. We will be screening great foreign films on the third Wednesday of every month at three venues simultaneously: the Royal in West L.A., the Town Center in Encino, and the Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. We are launching the Abroad program with 30th anniversary screenings of Bille August’s award-winning Danish film, Pelle the Conqueror (1987) at 7 PM on March 15. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1988 and also won the Palme d’Or in Cannes that same year. Master Swedish actor Max von Sydow received his first Oscar nomination for his performance in the film.
The beautifully crafted film is adapted from a popular Danish novel by Martin Andersen Nexo, published in 1908. It tells the story of a widower and his young son who journey from Sweden to Denmark in the 1850s in search of work. There they encounter prejudice and harsh working conditions; the story clearly takes on renewed urgency in light of rising anti-immigrant bias in Europe as well as the United States. August cast newcomer Pelle Hvenegaard in the title role.
In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, “We are engrossed by the serene confidence of the storytelling, by August’s painterly eye, by von Sydow’s and Hvenegaard’s touching performances.” TIME Magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “Bille August’s gifts for austere, striking imagery and for the short, perfectly shaped scene impart to this film an epic richness, range and energy.” The film helped to catapult August to the front ranks of international directors. He went on to make several films in the U.S. as well as Europe, and Ingmar Bergman chose August to direct his autobiographical screenplay, The Best Intentions.
“The von Sydow performance is in a category by itself. It is another highlight in an already extraordinary career, and quite unlike anything that American audiences have seen him do to date.” – Vincent Canby, New York Times
“In Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror, Max von Sydow is so astoundingly evocative that he makes your bones ache.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post
The subsequent films in our Anniversary Classics Abroad series are:
Wednesday, April 19: Yojimbo (1962). Akira Kurosawa’s energetic, tongue-in-cheek samurai Western had an enormous influence on filmmakers all over the world. Toshiro Mifune stars as the amoral swordsman who strides into town and manipulates the opposing factions in a turf war.
Wednesday, May 17: Divorce Italian Style (1962). This Oscar-winning film from director Pietro Germi is a ferocious black comic dissection of Sicilian mores. The picture helped to cement Marcello Mastroianni’s position as a rising international superstar.
Wednesday, June 21: Smiles of a Summer Night (1957). To coincide with the summer solstice, we present Ingmar Bergman’s elegant romantic comedy set on a Swedish estate on the longest night of the year. Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Gunnar Bjornstrand star in the film that Pauline Kael called an “exquisite carnal comedy.” The film later inspired Stephen Sondheim’s musical, A Little Night Music.
Again, we will show all Anniversary Classics Abroad films on the third Wednesday of each month at three venues, the Royal, Playhouse, and Town Center, at 7 PM. Come experience these classics of world cinema as they were intended to be experienced, on a big screen in a dark auditorium full of fellow cinephiles.
REVOLUTION: NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD filmmaker Margy Kinmonth will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 PM screening at the Royal on Wednesday, March 8.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG3lMDQYdgA
LOVESONG director/co-writer So Yong Kim will participate in a Q&A following the 3:10 PM screening at the Playhouse 7 on Sunday, March 5. Her husband and co-writer, Bradley Rust Gray, will moderate.
WATER & POWER director Marina Zenovich will participate in a Q&A following the 7:40 PM screening at the Monica Film Center on Friday, March 3.
MARINA ZENOVICH (director, executive producer) is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker whose films have been praised for their powerful storytelling and thoughtful and sensitive approach to difficult subjects and controversial people.
Zenovich is best known for her compelling portraits of Roman Polanski and Richard Pryor and her sensitive retelling of the notorious Duke lacrosse case. Her films reframe familiar, high-voltage stories in new ways and always spark intense conversation and debate.
Zenovich’s breakthrough film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim and considerable media attention, and won the award for Best Editing. It then screened at the Cannes Film Festival as a Special Screening. Soon afterward, Roman Polanski’s lawyers used the film as evidence to reopen his 30-year-old case.
“Wanted and Desired” was selected by the National Board of Review as one of the Best Documentaries of 2008. The film also won Emmys for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming (shared with Joe Bini and P.G. Morgan). Zenovich’s follow-up film, “Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out,” premiered at the 2012 Toronto and New York Film Festivals.
In 2013 Zenovich turned her attention to Richard Pryor, another electrifying and provocative figure. “Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic” premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and then debuted on Showtime. The film was the highest-rated documentary on Showtime in the past 10 years and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Editing.
Zenovich’s latest film, “Fantastic Lies” — about the Duke lacrosse scandal — screened at SXSW in 2016 and then premiered on ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series to great acclaim. The film generated an enormous amount of social media coverage and was subsequently repeated on ABC. “Fantastic Lies” has been seen by an estimated five million people and is often rated as one of the top five episodes of “30 for 30.”
Zenovich’s directing credits also include a range of imaginative and innovative shorter films. They include “Who Is Bernard Tapie?” about the French former politician and convicted criminal turned actor, and her fascination with him; “Independent’s Day” about the struggles of independent filmmakers set in Park City, Utah; and “Estonia Dreams of Eurovision!” about the wacky world of Tallinn, Estonia, as it prepares to host the Eurovision Song Contest. She has also made short films about Julian Schnabel, Takashi Murakami, Vanessa Beecroft and Robert Wilson, among others.
Join Laemmle and Eat|See|Hear for a “March Crime Wave” at the NoHo 7 in North Hollywood! Every Thursday in March our Throwback Thursday (#TBT) series presents one of our favorite crime films. It all starts Thursday, March 2nd with DIRTY HARRY. Doors open at 7PM, trivia starts at 7:30PM, and films begin at 7:40PM! Check out the full schedule below. For tickets and our full #TBT schedule, visit laemmle.com/tbt!
March 2: DIRTY HARRY (1971)
When a mad man calling himself ‘the Scorpio Killer’ menaces the city, tough-as-nails San Francisco Police Inspector Harry Callahan is assigned to track down and ferret out the crazed psychopath. Get tickets.
March 9: HEAT (1995)
A stellar cast sizzles in Heat, a taut psychological drama about an obsessive detective and a brilliant thief whose fates are linked in the aftermath of a high-stakes securities heist. A brilliant L.A. cop (Al Pacino) follows the trail from a deadly armed robbery and becomes fixated on a deadly but equally brilliant master thief (Robert DeNiro) and his crew (Val Kilmer and Jon Voight) who are taking Los Angeles to the cleaners, Tom Sizemore, Ashley Judd and Natalie Portman also co-star. Heat also includes one of the most spectacular shoot-outs in film history as DeNiro and Kilmer rip through downtown Los Angeles with guns blazing. Get tickets.
MARCH 16: BULLITT (1968)
Robert L. Pike’s crime novel Mute Witness makes the transition to the big screen in this film from director Peter Yates. In one of his most famous roles, Steve McQueen stars as tough-guy police detective Frank Bullitt. The story begins with Bullitt assigned to a seemingly routine detail, protecting Mafia informant Johnny Ross (Pat Renella), who is scheduled to testify against his Mob cronies before a Senate subcommittee in San Francisco. But when a pair of hit men ambush their secret location, fatally wounding Ross, things don’t add up for Bullitt, so he decides to investigate the case on his own. Unfortunately for him, ambitious senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), the head of the aforementioned subcommittee, wants to shut his investigation down, hindering Bullitt’s plan to not only bring the killers to justice but discover who leaked the location of the hideout. Get tickets.
March 23: ROBOCOP (1987)
In a dystopian, crime-ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg haunted by submerged memories. Get tickets.
March 30: BLADE RUNNER (1982)
Ridley Scott’s final cut of his stunning sci-fi classic based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In the year 2019, ex-detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called out of retirement to track down and eliminate a team of humanoid androids that have escaped from an outer space mining colony and have taken refuge on Earth. Rutger Hauer, M. Emmet Walsh, Edward James Olmos, William Sanderson, Joanna Cassidy, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah co-star. Get tickets.
PUNCHING HENRY star Henry Phillips and filmmaker Gregori Viens will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:40 shows and introduce the 10:15 shows at the Monica Film Center on Friday and Saturday, February 24 and 25. Actor-comedian Tig Notaro, cinematographer Bryce Fortner, and moderator Lesley O’Toole will join them for the Friday, 7:40 show Q&A.