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A “Lost-and-Found Delight,” THE KING AND THE MOCKINGBIRD Finally Restored and on U.S. Movie Screens

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A animated classic, Paul Grimault’s THE KING AND THE MOCKINGBIRD, written by Grimault and legendary poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, has been restored and after many decades finally getting a theatrical release in the United States. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, this wildly satirical film follows a chimney sweep and shepherdess on the run from a tyrannical king. A masterpiece of traditional hand-drawn cell animation, THE KING AND THE MOCKINGBIRD is credited by celebrated Japanese animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata as inspiring the creation of their own studio, the now world-famous Studio Ghibli. Its influence can also be felt in such films as Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant.

Read Ben Kenigsberg’s recent New York Times review of the restoration:

The French animated film “The King and the Mockingbird” has been more influential than known or seeable, at least in the United States. The movie is belatedly opening here in a subtitled restoration, with special dubbed showings for children.

Released in France in the 1950s in a version that the animator Paul Grimault called “an impostor” and completed, after an overhaul, in 1979, “The King and the Mockingbird” is commonly cited as an influence on Studio Ghibli, from Japan. Yet in its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.

Adapting a Hans Christian Andersen story, Mr. Grimault wrote the screenplay with Jacques Prévert (“Children of Paradise”). The film takes place in Tachycardia, where King Charles XVI — the numbers are tallied aloud whenever his name is spoken — is an avid if inept hunter. That hunting makes him a nemesis of the hero, a showman of a mockingbird.

With its muted rose and yellows, the angular animation is classical but inventive, even surreal. Tachycardia collapses periods, combining an ostensibly medieval setting with a futurist streak. When the king rides a rocket-­shaped elevator to his secret apartment on the 296th floor, you could easily see it as a gag on “The Jetsons.” A giant automaton with spotlight eyes seems the source of the key design in “The Iron Giant.”

Still, a catalog of the movie’s pleasures barely does justice to this lost-­and-found delight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMnV6KCfOqQ&feature=youtu.be

Italy’s Great Toni Servillo Returns to U.S. Screens in VIVA LA LIBERTA

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Many U.S. arthouse moviegoers were wowed last year when they were introduced to Toni Servillo, one of Italy’s finest actors, in The Great Beauty. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Next Friday the 28th we are excited to open Mr. Servillo’s latest film to make the journey from overseas, VIVA LA LIBERTA. Servillo plays Enrico Oliveri, a politician who realizes that the decline of his party is inevitable and decides to disappear, fleeing to Paris to find peace in the home of his ex-girlfriend Danielle (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) while creating a panic within the party. His top aide and his wife decide to contact his twin brother, a genius philosopher suffering from bi-polar disorder and living in a psychiatric institution. The three of them concoct a dangerous plan.

We will open VIVA LA LIBERTA at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center on Friday, November 21.

http://www.vimeo.com/106627472
Toni Servillo

Frederick Wiseman’s Latest: “Inside the Secret World of London’s NATIONAL GALLERY”

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Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, now in his sixth decade of filmmaking, always gets good reviews but his latest, a film that immerses its audience in London’s National Gallery and we open November 21 at the Royal Theater, is garnering raves. From Manohla Dargis at the New York Times (“Like most of Mr. Wiseman’s work, the movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.”), to Tim Grierson at Paste Magazine (“Nourishing and enthralling, NATIONAL GALLERY is the work of a man still invested in the arts, in the world and in people.”), to David Denby at the New Yorker (“Holds the movie viewer in a state of intense and pleasurable concentration”), even the toughest of critics are telling us that Mr. Wiseman’s latest is not to be missed.

The Daily Beast just published a good piece about the film by Tim Teeman:

Inside The Secret World of London’s National Gallery

“Frederick Wiseman’s entrancing ‘National Gallery’ roves freely around the great British institution, turning its lens on both visitors and the people that run the show.
“Observing the observers observing: there is a brave and remarkable poise to Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary presently showing at New York’s Film Forum—before a wider release on November 21—which takes the viewer on an ambling, extremely nosey tour of London’s National Gallery, focusing on both visitors and the staff who run it.”The most wonderful thing about it, the moments Wiseman keeps studding the documentary with, are images of people looking at pictures on walls. This, unexpectedly, is fascinating: you watch as they/we crinkle our faces up, really looking at brushwork; or walk in front of a canvas, and then walk back; or quickly move on, and then return; or sit, rapt in contemplation; or look confused or elated, tired or utterly immersed.”Given the amount of explosions and dumb sex comedies on our cinema screens, how can you not applaud a three-hour film that explores our reception and appreciation of art, and how that art is curated, lit, and displayed for us?“National Gallery is Wiseman’s latest, burrowing journey into an institution in a film-making career that has spanned almost sixty years, including movies like High School (1968), Missile (1987), Central Park (1989), and La Danse (2009), about the Paris Opera Ballet. Wiseman goes to places or into the reality of a lived experience—a hospital, army basic training, or a police precinct—and quietly, without his presence overtly felt, interrogates and observes it.”There is something imperiously subversive about National Gallery. Unlike the loud, pantomimishly structured documentaries of today, the parade of freaks and freakish, combusting and self-combusting, and warzones in gruesome close-up, there is no dramatic arc, no salivating over conflicts, no set-ups. There are no captions explaining who anybody is, no explanations of what they are doing. There is no spoon-feeding of anything.”

Read the complete Daily Beast piece by clicking here.

Frederick Wiseman by Larry Busacca for Getty Images

PELICAN DREAMS in Newsweek: “Stuck with the Bill.”

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What’s it like to try to get to know a flying dinosaur? In PELICAN DREAMS, Sundance and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving (“The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill”) follows a wayward California brown pelican from her “arrest” on the Golden Gate Bridge into care at a wildlife rehabilitation facility, and from there explores pelicans’ nesting grounds, Pacific coast migration, and survival challenges.

Newsweek Magazine just published this piece about the film. It begins, “‘A friend of mine was in this traffic jam,’ Judy Irving recalls. ‘She said, ‘You’ll never guess why I was held up on the bridge.” It’s not unusual for traffic to come to a stop on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge: There’s the ever-more-L.A.-like traffic, the occasional protest or suicide jumper. But in this case it was a pelican that stopped the show and Irving knew she had her next movie.”

http://vimeo.com/102655510
Judy Irving (filmmaker) & Gigi (pelican) in the aviary at International Bird Rescue.

Indiewire Interview with FORCE MAJEURE Filmmaker: “The tourists dressed up in neon colors, and the goggles, the well-to-do people who don’t have problems in their lives. I was fond of the idea of messing things up for those people.”

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On October 31 we open the Swedish film FORCE MAJEURE, Ruben Östlund’s wickedly funny and precisely observed psychodrama about a seemingly model married couple who suddenly find themselves in crisis after the husband does something extremely cowardly and selfish. Written and directed by Östlund (Play, Involuntary), the film was a word-of-mouth sensation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard. Östlund recently sat for an interview with Indiewire’s Ryan Lattanzio to talk about this top contender for the Foreign Language Oscar:

Indiewire: What initially interested you about a couple in crisis?

Östlund: It started with the avalanche: I had been skiing a lot and when I was between 20 and 25, I was making ski films in the Alps, traveling around Europe and in North America. Then I went to film school, and I left the ski world behind me, and I was trying to go back to the ski world, and to highlight the absurdity of that world. I was inspired by a YouTube clip of a group of people sitting at an outdoor restaurant filming an avalanche tumbling down the mountain. I was interested in the three seconds where it goes from “wow, beautiful” to nervous laughter to total panic.

Then I developed the idea and got to the point where someone said, “What if the father is running away from his wife and his kids when this happens?” Immediately I understood that this situation is raising questions about gender, expectations on gender, the role of the man and the role of the woman. If you see the ski resort, it’s totally constructed around the nuclear family. All the apartments are made for a mother, a father and their kids. It was a setup of holiday, the avalanche, the man doing something that is so forbidden when it comes to the expectations of the man, and that made me dive into the questions in between the relationships after this incident.

Ruben Östlund



I read sociological studies about airplane hijacking. You can tell from this study that the frequency of divorce is extremely high after airplane hijacking. It points out expectations about how we should behave in a crisis situation and when a man isn’t the hero he’s expected to be, couples have a really hard time getting over that.

What’s so absurd about the world of ski resorts?

The tourists dressed up in neon colors, and the goggles, the well-to-do people who don’t have problems in their lives. I was fond of the idea of messing things up for those people, having them meeting human mechanisms that you mostly see in war or a nature catastrophe: they don’t have any experience how they would react when in survival instinct mood. The ski resort itself is like a metaphor: there’s a constant struggle between man and nature. The civilized, trying to control the force of nature. The resort is always trying to stabilize the snow. There was something about that that fit the subject of the film very well.

To read the full interview, go to Indiewire.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjjzVbTBF8o

 

LIFE INSIDE OUT: “Boy’s Triumph Over Autism Inspires New Film”

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From the San Diego Union-Tribune, October 2, by Pam Kragen:

“Boy’s triumph over autism inspires new film: Actress writes movie that draws on her onetime mentoring relationship with San Marcos college student.”

SAN MARCOS — When he was a toddler, Cal State San Marcos freshman Julian Kalb overcame an autism-related communication disorder with the help of L.A. actress Maggie Baird. Fifteen years later, he’s returning the favor as executive producer for Baird’s new film — a drama inspired by their long-ago mentoring relationship.

“Baird co-wrote and stars in “Life Inside Out,” the story of a mother who helps her socially awkward son find himself through music. Baird produced the low-budget, independent film — which opens a weeklong run Oct. 17 at the UltraStar Cinema Mission Valley — with the financial support of family and friends, including Julian, 20, of San Marcos, and his father, Ken Kalb, of Rancho Santa Fe.

“When Maggie started working with Julian, she was his helper and now, flash-forward 15 years, and he can help his teacher make her dream come true,” said Kalb, a film buff and entrepreneur who has started several software and telecommunications companies. He said he and his son cashed in some of their Apple stock to invest in Baird’s movie.

The title, “Life Inside Out,” comes from a song lyric in the film about discovering your inner self, something experienced in life by Julian and on film by the fictional teen son.

http://www.vimeo.com/106452628

“It’s about living your life authentically and being seen for who you really are,” Baird said. “In the film, the mother is dealing with a child who has not found his thing until music clicks for him, and Julian was definitely an inspiration for that.”

The Kalbs first met Baird in the late 1990s, when they lived on the same block in the L.A. neighborhood of Los Feliz. At the time, Baird was a member of L.A.’s comedy improv group The Groundlings. Kalb asked her if she could do some improv and theater exercises with Julian to help him better express his feelings. Beginning at age 2, Julian could only speak by parroting lines from cartoons and movies and he was unable to carry on a conversation, Kalb said.

Baird said she had no training as a therapist, but she decided to improvise when she first sat down with Julian. When he started talking to her with scripted lines he’d memorized from a Charlie Brown television special, she responded to him as Charlie Brown’s arch-nemesis, Lucy.

“I saw a light go on in his eyes when he saw that I was buying into it and we had long conversations as those characters,” she said. “Gradually over time, I expanded the dialogue so he learned the natural give and take of conversation.”

Baird worked with Julian for two years until the Kalbs moved to Solana Beach. With his newfound love for theater, Julian went on to perform in more than a dozen youth-cast musicals with J*Company in La Jolla. The Torrey Pines High School graduate now lives on campus at Cal State San Marcos, where he’s majoring in visual and performing arts.

“When I get onstage, I don’t feel very nervous at all,” he said. “It’s fun creating a character. I would like to work behind the scenes in the film industry as an executive producer and maybe work as a voice artist.”

Baird stayed in touch with the Kalbs over the years, and said she’s been impressed by how Julian has blossomed.

“He’s funny and charming and is still an amazing mimic,” she said.

Baird began writing the “Life Inside Out” screenplay in 2012 with her friend and fellow singer/comedian Lori Nasso. It’s the dual story of a mother of three who rediscovers her love of music at an open-mic night, and her social outcast son Shane, who finds his own musical voice along the way. She co-stars in the movie with her real-life son, 17-year-old Finneas O’Connell, an actor and singer who fronts the L.A. band The Slightlys.

Since its release on the festival circuit earlier this year, “Life Inside Out” has won 10 awards, picked up a distributor and is opening this month in several cities around the country.

“I’ve been delighted at how well it’s been received,” Baird said. “Audiences have responded so positively. Men and women have come up to me and said over and over ‘this is my story.’ ”

Kalb said that when he and Julian agreed to invest in the movie, they did it out of gratitude and friendship, not expecting it would become a festival hit.

“It’s been a remarkable experience and such a nice surprise,” he said. “We gave Maggie the money because we love her and she’s a life force, not because we expected it to become wildly successful. We’re just happy to be a part of it.”

pam.kragen@utsandiego.com

"Life Inside Out" co-producers Ken and Julian Kalb with screenwriter and star Maggie Baird at the film's screening at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Pillar of the French New Wave, Long Unavailable for Exhibition in the U.S., HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is Spectacularly Restored

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HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is the late Alain Resnais’ seminal debut film. A pillar of the French New Wave, long unavailable for exhibition in the United States due to rights issues, HIROSHIMA has been spectacularly restored. We open the film on October 17 at the Royal, Playhouse and Town Center.

Employing a radical use of voice-over narration and quickly-flashbacked scenes, the film tells the story of a brief relationship in post-war Japan between a French actress, played by Oscar nominee Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), and a Japanese architect, played by Eiji Okada (Woman in the Dunes). The Oscar-nominated screenplay was written by Marguerite Duras, who in novels like The Lover, often dealt with European/Asian relationships. Twenty fourteen marks Duras’ centennial. Don’t miss this very special chance to see this gem of world cinema as it was meant to seen, in a dark room, on a big screen, with an audience!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLts830aLlw
Emmanuelle Riva

Interview: “Viggo Mortensen on THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY, LOTR and What His Movies Teach Him”

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On Sunday the Newark Star-Ledger published a very good piece by film critic Stephen Whitty about actor Viggo Mortensen and his excellent new thriller THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY. It provides a glimpse into his unusual history and thoughts on acting, including what he likes about his latest role: “What’s great about this kind of story, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It provokes conjectures about meaning and motivation. It’s always great as an actor to play someone with a secret, but here you have secrets inside secrets… all the characters are lying to some degree, at least to themselves, and that makes for some very interesting roles.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPKvfxN-3UI
Viggo Mortensen and director Hossein Amini on the set of THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.