The Official Blog of Laemmle Theatres.

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The official blog of Laemmle Theatres

The French Hit Comedy PAULETTE Stars Legendary Actress Bernadette Lafont in One of Her Last Roles.

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Next Friday, September 11th we’ll be opening a French comedy that stars the wonderful actress Bernadette Lafont in one of her last performances, playing the title character in PAULETTE. A brash and opinionated retiree, Paulette lives alone in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris. One evening, upon observing some mysterious dealings outside her building, she discovers a surprising way to supplement her meager pension: an unlikely but successful career selling cannabis.

Writing in Film Journal International, Doris Toumarkine wrote that “PAULETTE offers a heap of laughs and ultimately delights like a shelf of colorful fresh pastries.”

In his L.A. Weekly review, Chuck Wilson wrote that Lafont “died in 2013, at age 74, one year after PAULETTE became a hit in France. A working actress since she was 19 [IMDB lists 190 credits over the course of her career], Lafont was at the forefront of the French New Wave, with François Truffaut, who discovered her, once calling her, lovingly, ‘a wild child.’ It would appear that she remained so all her working life.”

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

Vox: “The quietly radical DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL turns the page on coming-of-age films.”

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This Friday, at five of our six venues, we’ll be opening a film we enjoyed immensely, THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL. The girl of the title is Minnie Goetze (fantastic newcomer Bel Powley), who is longing for love, acceptance and a sense of purpose in the world. She begins a complex love affair with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, “the handsomest man in the world,” Monroe Rutherford (Alexander Skarsgård). What follows is a sharp, funny and provocative account of one girl’s sexual and artistic awakening, without judgment.

Based on a 2002 graphic novel, film critics have embraced the film (it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing). Writing in New York Magazine, Bilge Ebiri exclaimed, “the first thing to know about THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.” In the L.A. Times, Rebecca Keegan wrote, “big summer action movies can be thrilling, but if you really want to feel your heart pounding out of your chest, try being a 15-year-old girl for 101 minutes.” In the New Republic, Elaine Teng called the film “a startlingly tough, authentic depiction of budding womanhood.” And in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis declared the film “exhilarating…the novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie – on the page and now on the screen – greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.”

The extended Vox review included this observation by the film’s director, Marielle Heller: “I think as a society, we’re just a little bit afraid of teenage girls, and we’re definitely afraid of their sexuality. There’s a desire to shelter girls and also to ignore what they might be feeling or experiencing. The result of that is if you’re a teenage girl who’s having thoughts about sex, you think something’s wrong with you.” This is the same approach to the topic as what you can find other people writing about, and what the reasons are it for, for instance on this Lovegasm blog article about sexual forward-thinking within the media.

THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL wonderfully rejects that path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2M9kqb5wVw

DEAL: Early bird tickets to 24 HOUR HOUR PARTY PEOPLE on 8/27 in NoHo are only $5 When Purchased Before Wednesday at Noon

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When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, choose the legend.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE stars Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records, the label that brought Manchester’s Happy Mondays, Joy Division, and New Order to the world.

Buy your tickets before Wednesday, 8/26 at noon and pay only $5! Full price tickets are $11.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE screens at 7:30PM on 8/27 at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and is part of our THROWBACK THURSDAY series in partnership with Eat|See|Hear.  The Farmer’s Belly Truck will arrive at the theater around 6:30pm. You can bring food from the truck into the theater! Click here to buy tickets.

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Riveting Brazilian Film THE SECOND MOTHER Opens Next Week

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An excitingly fresh take on some classic themes and ideas, THE SECOND MOTHER centers around Val, a hard-working live-in housekeeper in modern day Sao Paulo. Val is perfectly content to take care of every one of her wealthy employers’ needs, from cooking and cleaning to being a surrogate mother to their teenage son, who she has raised since he was a toddler. But when Val’s estranged daughter Jessica suddenly shows up the unspoken but intrinsic class barriers that exist within the home are thrown into disarray. Jessica is smart, confident, and ambitious, and refuses to accept the upstairs/downstairs dynamic, testing relationships and loyalties and forcing everyone to reconsider what family really means.

Variety film critic Geoff Berkshire called THE SECOND MOTHER “immensely endearing” and “a savvy, socially conscious crowdpleaser that occupies a rare middle ground between genteel and intellectual world cinema.” Hollywood Reporter writer Boyd van Hoeij declared “beautifully written and acted with precision, this film’s a winner.” We are extremely pleased to open THE SECOND MOTHER on August 28th at the Royal, September 4th at the Playhouse and Town Center, and September 11th at the Claremont.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOrbWcObwR4

ROSENWALD Filmmaker Aviva Kempner in the Forward: “To me, Julius Rosenwald is the best antidote to Donald Trump.”

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Aviva Kempner’s Rosenwald, which we open at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center on August 28th and the Claremont on September 5th, is the incredible story of Julius Rosenwald, who never finished high school but rose to become the president of Sears. Influenced by the writings of the educator Booker T. Washington, this Jewish philanthropist joined forces with African American communities during the Jim Crow South to build over 5,300 schools during the early part of the 20th century. The film sheds light on this silent partner of the pre-Civil Rights Movement. Rosenwald awarded fellowship grants to a who’s who of African American intellectuals and artists including: Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, the father and uncle of civil rights leader Julian Bond, Ralph Bunche, W. E. B. DuBois, Katherine Dunham, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence and Augusta Savage along with Woody Guthrie. Inspired by the Jewish ideals of tzedakah (charity) and tikkunolam (repairing the world) and a deep concern over racial inequality in America, Julius Rosenwald used his wealth to become one of America’s most effective philanthropists. Because of his modesty, Rosenwald’s philanthropy and social activism are not well known today. He gave away $62 million in his lifetime.

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

In a Forward article titled “Is Julius Rosenwald Our Greatest Philanthropist,?” Ms. Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg) recently spoke about his latest film, saying “to me, Julius Rosenwald is the best antidote to Donald Trump. You see how pompous rich people can be, but Rosenwald is quite the contrary; he is one of the greatest examples for American Jews of tzedakah, tikkun olam , and repairing the world without fanfare — doing it just because he wants to make a difference.”

New York Times: “In WE COME AS FRIENDS, Hubert Sauper Takes Flight to Survey the Pain Below in Sudan.”

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Academy Award® nominated director Hubert Sauper’s WE COME AS FRIENDS, which we are proud to open at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center on Friday, August 21, is a modern odyssey, a dizzying, science fiction-like journey into the heart of Africa. At the moment when the Sudan, the continent’s biggest country, is being divided into two nations, an old “civilizing” pathology re-emerges – that of colonialism, the clash of empires, and new episodes of bloody (and holy) wars over land and resources. The director of DARWIN’S NIGHTMARE takes us on this voyage in his tiny, self-made, tin and canvas flying machine. He leads us into improbable locations and into people’s thoughts and dreams, in both stunning and heartbreaking ways. Chinese oil workers, U.N. peacekeepers, Sudanese warlords, and American evangelists ironically weave common ground in this documentary, a complex, profound and bitterly humorous cinematic endeavor.

On July 31, the New York Times published Nicolas Rapold’s fascinating piece about the film in their Sunday Arts & Leisure section. Here’s how it starts:

There’s no shortage of jaw-dropping moments in Hubert Sauper’s new film, “We Come as Friends,” an illustrated essay on contemporary colonialism. But the most haunting may be a lightning-streaked nighttime visit to a South Sudanese tribal leader. Mr. Sauper brandishes a copy of a contract to confirm a terrible truth, and the leader’s moistening eyes and dejected bearing say everything. The old man has signed away hundreds of thousands of acres of land to a Texas firm.

“This was history unfolding in its best and most sarcastic form in front of my camera. And then the storm came,” Mr. Sauper said in a Skype interview from Paris. “As a filmmaker, it’s too good to be true. And it’s terrifying.”

It’s one example of how Mr. Sauper, the Austrian-born director of “WeCome as Friends,” portrays complicated contemporary realities through vivid and industrious reportage. Ten years ago his Academy Award-nominated documentary, “Darwin’s Nightmare,” sifted through the wreckage of globalization by way of the fishing export industry in Lake Victoria, the impact on local Tanzanians, and a fast-and-loose subculture of Russian cargo-plane pilots.

Read the rest of the piece here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0MgQLk2OCQ

Anniversary Classics + Tribute Screening: DOCTOR ZHIVAGO in Honor of Omar Sharif

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As a tribute to Omar Sharif, who passed away last month, we present a 50th anniversary screening of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, August 19th at the Royal. Los Angeles Film Critics Association President Stephen Farber will introduce the film.

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This lush romance directed by David Lean (a two-time Oscar winner) was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1965 and won five — best adapted screenplay (by Robert Bolt), cinematography, art direction, costume design, and music (by Maurice Jarre). Nobel Prize-winning author Boris Pasternak wrote the international best-selling novel and, when receipts are adjusted for inflation, the film version is one of the top grossing films of all time. In addition, when the American Film Institute named the 100 greatest romantic films in history, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO finished in the top ten.

Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, Sharif plays the title character, a physician and poet who, although married to someone else, falls in love with another man’s wife and experiences hardship during the First World War and then the October Revolution. The film features an all-star cast headed by Julie Christie, Rod Steiger, Geraldine Chaplin, Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson, Tom Courtenay, and Rita Tushingham, in addition to Sharif, who had been introduced to Western audiences in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia three years earlier.

Sharif went on to star in Funny Girl, The Tamarind Seed, Juggernaut, Monsieur Ibrahim, and many other films. Take advantage of a rare opportunity to see this sweeping romantic epic on the big screen!

Click here to purchase tickets.