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The official blog of Laemmle Theatres

Bronx Bomber Yogi Berra bio-documentary IT AIN’T OVER opens May 11 with 2-for-1 discounts.

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Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra is one of baseball’s greatest. He amassed ten World Series rings, three MVP awards and 18 All Star Game appearances. He caught the only perfect game in World Series history. Yet for many his deserved stature was overshadowed by his simply being himself and being recognized more for his unique personality, TV commercial appearances and unforgettable “Yogi-isms,” initially head-scratching philosophical nuggets that make a lot more sense the more you think about them. In telling the whole story, It Ain’t Over gives Berra his due in following the life of a savvy, commanding, bad ball-hitting catcher with a squat frame but also a D-Day veteran, loving husband and father and, yes, product endorser and originator (mostly) of his own brand of proverbs now ingrained into everyday life. Granddaughter Lindsay Berra tells his story along with his sons, former Yankee teammates, players he managed, writers, broadcasters, and admirers (such as Billy Crystal), plus photos and footage on and off the diamond. Berra famously said, “I’d be pretty dumb if I started being something I’m not,” and It Ain’t Over lovingly makes clear he stayed who he was for the benefit of baseball and everyone else.

We open the film on Thursday, May 11 at the Royal and Friday, May 19 at the Town Center, Newhall, Glendale and Claremont.

On Thursday, May 11 and Sunday, May 14, we’re running a two-for-one promotion: buy one ticket for any screening of It Ain’t Over at the Royal on either day and get a second one for free. The only restriction is you have to buy your tickets at the Royal box office, not online.

“Yogi Berra lived the kind of life we wish our heroes to have: filled with love, respect, and integrity. This is a film fans can embrace and younger generations can learn from. I loved it.” ~ Leonard Maltin, leonardmaltin.com

“More emotional than you’d expect from a doc about a hard-hitting catcher.” ~ Dan Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter

THE TAKING Q&As in Santa Monica & Glendale May 10 & 11.

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The Taking filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe will participate in Q&As following the May 10 screening at the Monica Film Center and the May 11 screening at the Laemmle Glendale. Historian Will Linn will join him for the May 10 screening. John Bucher will moderate.

Bios: Alexandre holds a Masters Degree in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has written and directed numerous award-winning films and documentaries, many of which take on the role of unpacking the most influential works of master filmmakers. Most recently, Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist (Venice ’19, Sundance ‘20) and MEMORY: The Origins of Alien (Sundance ’19), 78/52 (Sundance ’17).

John Bucher is a mythologist, storyteller, and writer based out of Hollywood, California. He serves as Executive Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is an author, podcaster, and speaker. He has worked with government and cultural leaders around the world as well as organizations such as HBO, DC Comics, The History Channel, A24 Films, Atlas Obscura, and The John Maxwell Leadership Foundation. He has served as a producer, consultant, and writer for numerous film, television, and Virtual Reality projects. He is the author of six books including the best-selling Storytelling for Virtual Reality, named by BookAuthority as one of the best storytelling books of all time. He holds a PhD in Mythology and Depth Psychology and has spoken on 6 continents about using the power of story and myth to reframe how individuals, organizations, cultures, and nations believe and behave.

Will Linn is a co-host of Myths: The Greatest Mysteries of Humanity, which airs on ZDF, Sky and History Channel. He is the founder of mythouse.org, an online community and resource center for mythologists and storytellers, and the founding chair of general education at Hussian College, where he teaches myth and story to filmmakers and performing artists. Will served in various leadership positions for the Joseph Campbell Foundation between 2011-2021, and he holds a PhD in mythological studies.

 

“We made this movie for ‘the kids’…with style and color, wit and heart, music and dance.” Parker Posey on PARTY GIRL, opening Friday.

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We’re pleased to open the restoration of Party Girl, the 1995 classic directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, this Friday at our Glendale theater. The film launched the career of star Parker Posey, in the now-iconic role of Mary, the titular Soho party girl-turned-librarian, and marked an important turning point in the world of NYC indies. The director will participate in a Q&A after the 7:30 pm screening on Saturday, April 29. Filmmaker Miguel Arteta will moderate.

“We made this movie for ‘the kids’ – as we called them – young people from small towns, who had big dreams, and who weren’t, for whatever reason, conforming to the status quo,” says Parker. “Our intention was to nurture them — with style and color, wit and heart, music and dance. I’m happy the film’s out with a re-release, to inspire again – the unconventional path many of us live today. A special shout-out to the librarians, who also enjoy being silly on a dance floor — and while I’m at it, to the art of DJ’ing and other arts that keep us moving and free.”

Party Girl follows Mary (Posey), a NYC nightclub scenester and social butterfly who rules the underground party scene. By day, however, she lacks purpose and enough funds to make rent. When her aunt gets her a job at the local library, Mary initially waffles under the constraints of the system, but then unexpectedly flourishes as a librarian (and does a lot of growing up along the way). The film features a laundry list of notable actors, including Liev Schreiber, Guillermo Diaz (Scandal), and John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos), and is brilliantly shot on location in pre-gentrification Lower Manhattan.

The “tender, sexy, very French” OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center.

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Other People’s Children, the French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski’s romantic drama about a Parisian high school teacher who falls in love with the single father of a little girl, was nominated for four Lumiere Awards, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, and Actress, winning the latter. The film “sneaks up on you, with a depth and complexity of feeling that throws [its] glossy, idyllic opening moments into bittersweet relief.” (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)
 
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: “When a woman falls in love in the sensitive French slice of life Other People’s Children, you may fall, too…while [Zlotowski is] very good at making the character’s romantic intoxication feel vivid and real — you vibe on the heady dreaminess of this new love — the filmmaker isn’t inside that bubble. Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies…By the end, with delicacy and with a sympathetic if unsentimental gaze, Zlotowski has gathered together the story’s seemingly disparate, charming and aching pieces — a song, a tantrum, an illness, a misunderstood boy, a traumatic childhood accident — and turned these fragments of life into a life, one that’s as worth living as it is worth watching.”

“Deftly written, directed with a light hand and acted with honesty and heart, the picture captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality.” ~ Wendy Ide, Guardian

Rebecca Zlotowski’s Director’s Statement: I began by adapting Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, a novel that confronts a man’s impotence head on. But something resisted. Not because I couldn’t project myself into this man who was unable to get hard, or who feared no longer being able to, but perhaps because I could identify too well. Gradually I recognized my own impotence, that of a 40-year-old woman without children, who wants one, and in part raises those of another woman. A stepmother without being a mother herself. As painfully commonplace as male impotence, this situation was nevertheless the starting point of a story worthy of being told, having hardly been told before.

It seemed to me that the bond which can link us to the child of another, a man we love, whose life and therefore family we share, not only has no name – we speak of motherhood, of fatherhood, not ‘step-motherhood’ or ‘step-fatherhood’ – but is also rarely depicted.

There was a kind of gap between comic book representations on one hand – the evil ‘Disney’ stepmother from a world in which women died in childbirth and were replaced by young women unwilling and ill-equipped to love children who weren’t their own, burdens that came with marriage, and on the other hand overwhelmed stepmothers in reconstituted families in unevenly successful romantic comedies.

Rebecca Zlotowski

Where was the woman who nurtured an intimate and precious connection with the child or children, she was raising for years without having any herself, while accepting the risk of being erased from the equation once her relationship with the father ended? What is to be done with this relationship when it weighs heavily on decisions of the heart? How can you still live in the same city with people you have been with, loved, cared for, but who are already sharing their lives with others?

I wanted to write this film about this secondary character using the tools of cinema. But a cinema of secondary characters, as opposed to the cinema of protagonists experiencing passion and excess in conflict. To have a new matrix of emotions prevail: friendship between men and women, tenderness between women, frustration rather than betrayal, the melancholy of missed rendez-vous with life but also the joy of successful encounters with desire, eroticism, the consolations of happiness. To focus on those transitory loves we experience between great romances… what the Americans call “on the rebound”. Rebound girl, rebound boy.

I imagined Other People’s Children in its literary and melodic dimension. Each fade out and in, every iris in and out, the skies that show the passing seasons, all should be read as chapters in a countdown in the life of a woman, of a couple and their desire.

I thought a lot about those studies of human nature from the early 1980s at which American cinema excelled: Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, Kramer vs. Kramer, An Unmarried Woman… definitive films about ordinary, collective experiences, with a sort of musical generosity and classical simplicity in their structures, a modesty in their depiction of these relationships that develop and disintegrate, that struggle and break apart.

Other People’s Children owes almost everything to its cast, which isn’t the case with every film. Roschdy Zem, my great ally since Savages, and Chiara Mastroianni, who agreed to join us for several scenes and who during the shoot agreed that we were breaking the rule that dictates that there is room for only one great female role in a film, not two. The film above all compensated for – I was going to say avenged! – my missed appointment over the years with Virginie Efira, who contributed with her “erotic brain,” to use the phrase coined by Anne Berest (who also acts in the film). The intelligence of her acting, her generosity, her dignity renders her the heir to the stars of those studies of human nature whose guiding spirit hovered over the film: Jill Clayburgh, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton… Women who touched me and in whom I recognized myself, for whom femininity is not a given, but something of their own making. Action, diction, reaction, seduction: there is nothing ‘in itself’ about Virginie’s femininity, but a fierce and stubborn will to be. To construct the person you want to be. And I loved her.

In a sort of ironic twist of fate, having no longer hoped for it, I discovered during prep that I was pregnant, and I shot the film while expecting a child who was born several days after we finished mixing. I felt that I was filming this love letter in solidarity with childless women – nulliparous, as the doctors say – while no longer belonging to their community without having yet joined the other.

With Other People’s Children, I wanted to simply make the film I needed to see. ~ Rebecca Zlotowski, Paris, June 8th, 2022.

“Wincingly funny, stealthily emotional,” Kelly Reichardt’s SHOWING UP opens Friday.

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Oregonian filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with actress Michelle Williams is a quietly brilliant and funny portrait of an artist and her MFA milieu. It’s also further confirmation that Williams, who can manifest characters as varied as Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Fabelman, Gwen Verdon and now Lizzy of Showing Up, is a talent as rare as the finest actors in the language, including Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep. We open the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center and Laemmle Glendale, April 28 at the NoHo, and May 5 at the Newhall and Claremont.

“Reichardt reflects an abiding respect for artists and their freedom to explore and process while Williams inhabits the soul of a creative being in every frame and every second.” ~ Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

“It’s about who will turn out to be firmly on Lizzy’s side when all is said and done… The answer surprises her as well as us, and it brings this wincingly funny, stealthily emotional movie to a conclusion that feels both casual and momentous.”  ~ Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“Showing Up is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Brilliantly nuanced and meticulously observed.” ~ Claudia Puig, FilmWeek (KPCC – NPR Los Angeles)

“That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the ‘masterpiece’ side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.” ~ David Sims, The Atlantic

“Kelly Reichardt… turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.” ~ Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post

“We must switch over — and fast.” Oliver Stone on his new documentary NUCLEAR NOW, opening April 28

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As fossil fuels continue to cook the planet, the world is finally becoming forced to confront the influence of large oil companies and tactics that have enriched a small group of corporations and individuals for generations. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy- science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th
century, first for bombs and then to power submarines and the United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid 20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests. This campaign would sow fear about
harmless low-level radiation and create confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, iconic director Oliver Stone explores the possibility for the global community to overcome challenges like climate change and reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy- an option that may become a vital way to ensure our continued survival sooner than we think.

We open Nuclear Now for a week-long engagement April 28 at the Monica Film Center with one-night screenings at our Newhall, NoHo, Town Center and Claremont theaters on May 1.

DIRECTORS STATEMENT:
Climate change has brutally forced us to take a new look at the ways in which we generate energy as a global community. Long regarded as dangerous in popular culture, nuclear power is in fact hundreds of times safer than fossil fuels and accidents are extremely rare.

So, how can we lift billions of people from poverty while rapidly cutting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane — and, in many countries, coal? “Renewables” like wind and solar power can certainly contribute to this transition but are limited by weather and geography. While miracle batteries are not arriving to save us, engineers have been commercializing new, smaller nuclear reactor designs that can be mass-manufactured at low cost.

We must switch over — and fast.

This is, in my mind, the greatest story of our time — discussing humanity’s arc from poverty to prosperity and its mastery of science to overcome the modern demand for more and more energy. – Oliver Stone April 2023

“Nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama” CADEJO BLANCO opens April 21 at the Laemmle NoHo.

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The intense drama Cadejo Blanco follows a working-class girl from Guatemala City who travels to a small coastal town hoping to infiltrate a gang and find her sister, who has gone missing. Writing in the Austin Chronicle, film critic Ali Juell called the film “a vivid and multi-dimensional story as the audience sees Sarita join Andrés’ gang…Cadejo Blanco provides international audiences with a perspective they would largely be unexposed to otherwise and confronts some of the issues facing Guatemalans today.” Demetrios Matheou of Screen Daily described the film as “a nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama that is very much a part of the country’s burgeoning film output.” We open the film on Friday, April 21 at the Laemmle NoHo.

Writer-director Justin Lerner wrote the following about the creation of the film:

Guatemala has been my second home since 2016 when I moved there to help start a film school in the capital. The development of Cadejo Blanco began a year after I arrived, when I visited Puerto Barrios, a picturesque port city on Guatemala’s northeast Caribbean coast. I was invited by one of my students, an aspiring filmmaker, who wanted to discuss the possibility of making a movie together in his hometown. While he spent days showing me possible filming locations, I was introduced to many young men and women involved in “clicas,” small disorganized gangs of young people who engage in illegal activity (robberies, drug dealing, violence, and sometimes murder) in order to survive and to make money.

Over the course of the next two years, I formed friendships with present and former members of these clicas. I interviewed dozens of them (some who were very open and let me record our talks, and others who would only talk off the record). I toured their neighborhoods, homes, and hidden places of business (called ‘safe houses’), and I even got to know some of their families.

At one breakfast I was invited to, I sat next to a funny and charismatic man who I later discovered was a professional hitman. Inspired by all the stories told to me by the young people I’d met, I put together a feature screenplay about a teenager from the capital, Sarita, who comes to Puerto Barrios in search of her missing sister. Sarita tracks down her sister’s ex boyfriend, Andrés, who is a gang member in Puerto Barrios. Positive that Andrés has something to do with her sister’s disappearance, Sarita uses a fake name and finds a way to join his clica, hoping to learn more about what happened.

Watching the news at my hotel, I was astounded by the regularity of reports of girls who had gone missing, last seen on a bus that had been robbed or taken from their houses in the middle of the night. But I also learned that unlike in other parts of Central America, where women are often relegated to selling drugs or sex, women in Puerto Barrios clicas can be given a great deal of power.

In writing the screenplay, I relied heavily on real experiences related to me by a few young women affiliated with Puerto Barrios gangs. They opened up about the dangers of being a woman forced to join a clica to survive in a city with very few opportunities. They’d lost friends and family members to violence and crime and seen other female friends disappear right after joining.

Once a full draft was finished, Mauricio Escobar introduced me to Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz, who won Cannes Film Festival’s 2019 Critics Week Prize and Camera d’Or for his film NUESTRAS MADRES (OUR MOTHERS), and he advised me through rewrites of the script, lending his perspective as a Guatemalan filmmaker, and helped me shape the film in post as my editing partner. He also served as an Executive Producer.

Early in pre-production, I met Rudy Rodríguez, a twenty-one year old who responded to a open call, coming in on his lunch break from the auto shop where he worked. In his audition, Rodríguez, a non-actor with a history of gang involvement, spoke openly about his former affiliations with gangs in Puerto Barrios, the infant daughter he just had with his girlfriend, and the significance of the tattoos he had on each shoulder, black-inked stars, which he got to remember his deceased mother and murdered father.

When I decided to cast Rodríguez as Andrés, the film’s male protagonist, I planned out several trips back to Puerto Barrios to spend more time with him. I brought our lead actress, Karen Martínez, who I’d cast after long admiring her work in the film LA JAULA DE ORO. With the help of Tatiana Palomo, an acting coach who studied at Carlos Reygadas’ film school in Mexico and specializes in training non-professional actors to perform on film, Karen and I worked with Rodriguez to help him feel comfortable on camera.

My Guatemalan lead producer, Mauricio Escobar of La Danta Films, was able to help establish a partnership between the film and Movimientos de Esperanza, an NGO based in Puerto Barrios, who partially sponsored Rudy’s experience working on the film. Through donations, the NGO was able to bring Rodríguez to the capital to live for months before the shoot, to train with me and Tatiana Palomo. The NGO was also able to provide Rodríguez with psychological and financial counselling through the duration of pre-production and production.

The rest of the casting process lasted for two more years and involved months of meeting locals at youth centers, churches, schools, and parks. I also sought the direct participation of current and former gang members who I had done interviews with previously, offering some of them significant roles in the film playing versions of themselves. For over a year leading up to the actual shoot, I conducted workshops and rehearsals aimed at making them feel comfortable improvising on screen.

Once I had a shareable draft of the script in Spanish, I shared it with certain members of the non-professional cast and asked them to rewrite it with me, so that each scene would fit each performer’s own voice and the film would maintain authenticity to their city. I encouraged each of them to revise the script as they saw fit, even during shooting. It was a process that caused delays, and even arguments, but it helped to ensure that the realities of their lives were being properly represented on screen.

I also added a handful of professional actors from Guatemala City to the supporting cast. Brandon López, Karen Martínez’s co-star in LA JAULA DE ORO, who shared the same award at Cannes and also won an Ariel award for his performance in that film, was the only trained actor to be cast as a gang member. He led my rehearsals with the non-professionals from
Puerto Barrios, also serving as their on-set acting coach. They looked up to him, having seen him in films, and on YouTube. Juan Pablo Olyslager, who I had seen in Jayro Bustamante’s films TEMBLORES and LA LLORONA, and veteran theater actress Yolanda Coronado, were also cast in supporting roles.

After seeing the film COCOTE at a film festival, I tracked down the cinematographer, an Argentinian named Roman Kasseroller and shared an early draft of the script with him. He agreed to work on the film, and within a few months he was able to meet me in Guatemala. As we scouted locations in Puerto Barrios, Roman met most of the locals I had cast. To get them comfortable with Roman putting a camera in their faces and being around the approximation of a crew, we staged several photo shoots and even filmed a scene from the script on a digital SLR.

Throughout the development process, I would periodically return to Los Angeles to share footage with producer Ryan Friedkin of Imperative Entertainment, who provided script and casting notes, advice and helped with strategy to get the film fully financed. Once we cast all the roles and finalized the script, Friedkin brought on producer Jack Hurley from The Orange
Company, who put together the rest of the financing with Escobar of La Danta Films.

A few months after the shoot, one of the Puerto Barrios cast members, Geobanny Alvarado, was tragically murdered. Most details of his death are unknown, but he was a valuable contributor to the film, having spent months with the crew, helping us find shooting locations, as well as offering revisions to the script, not only for his own dialogue, but for other parts of the screenplay that took place in Puerto Barrios.

The film will be dedicated to Alvarado’s memory, to honor the significant role he played in the project, both on screen and off. The NGO Movimientos de Esperanza, in partnership with the film, will also be securing a number of financial scholarships and work opportunities for the actors. They will be presented in Alvarado’s name.

One of the small hopes I have for those who watch Cadejo Blanco is that they will be able to feel like they got to live in Puerto Barrios for a few hours. I also hope that in watching the film they felt they got to know Alvarado, and his cast-mates, and will miss spending time with them when the film is over, as I do.

Justin Lerner, writer-director, Cadejo Blanco

“One of the most original American thrillers in years,” HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE opens Friday.

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Thrilling film critics (and alarming a Kansas City intelligence agency enough to release a bulletin calling the movie a security threat), we’re excited to open How to Blow Up a Pipeline this Friday at the Laemmle Glendale and Monica Film Center and April 21 at the Newhall, NoHo and Claremont.
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“Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision.” ~ Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

“One of the most original American thrillers in years, and one that draws from a deep well of movie history as it develops its characters and sets up its plot twists.” ~ Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com

“The way that filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber pulls off what feels like a tightly wound Hollywood potboiler on what we imagine is little more than a studio caterer’s budget is, in itself, a textbook how-to example.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone
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“An incendiary, ticking-clock thriller about a group of self-styled insurgents with echoes of Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves and Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama.” ~ Adam Nayman, The Ringer