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Q&A’s for RESTORING TOMORROW, Inspiring Documentary About the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

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This just in…

RESTORING TOMORROW filmmaker Aaron Wolf will participate in Q&A’s at select screenings with a variety of special guests. Join the conversation. Join the movement. This is a special moment for all cultures to come together and join the discussion, leaving with hope and a drive to take action.

Confirmed Q&A’s at Encino Town Center after the 7:30PM screenings on August 24th, 25th and the 3PM screening on August 26th.

August 27th at 7:30PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts.

August 28th at 7:30PM at the Laemmle Glendale.

August 29th at 7:30PM at NoHo 7.

August 30th at 7:30PM at Pasadena Playhouse 7.

Rabbi Steve Leder will join Aaron for the August 26th and 27th screenings. Other special guests TBA.

https://vimeo.com/119387836

You can also see the filmmaker interviewed on Good Day L.A. here.

35th Anniversary Screenings of THE MAKIOKA SISTERS on Wednesday, August 22 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest offering in our Anniversary Classics Abroad program, Kon Ichikawa’s poignant family drama, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS.

One of the great Japanese masters, Ichikawa is perhaps less widely celebrated than his countrymen Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. He began directing features in the 1940s, and his films The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain, Tokyo Olympiad, and others found passionate critical defenders.

One of his later films, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS, is adapted from a popular Japanese novel by Junichiro Tanizaki and follows the fortunes of four sisters from a wealthy family in Osaka. Set in the 1930s on the eve of World War II, the film stars Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, and Yuko Kotegawa as the orphaned sisters, heirs in a wealthy manufacturing family. Their marriages and romantic relationships are a source of tension and jealousy.

The sumptuous art direction and costume design help to create the lush atmosphere of the film. Reviewing the film at the time of its American release, the Los Angeles Times’s Kevin Thomas called it “exquisitely, subtly sensual.”

John Powers of the L.A. Weekly agreed that “this is an uncommonly vibrant and beautiful film.”

And the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called it “the most pleasurable movie I’ve seen in several months…the rich colors, the darkness, the low-key lighting—they’re intoxicating.”

THE MAKIOKA SISTERS (1983) screens on Wednesday, August 22, at 7pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray

Kenneth Turan Extols the “Quietly Ferocious” ‘1945’ & Its Encore Engagement.

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We reopen the Hungarian drama 1945 today. L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote about it the other day:

The premise is simple but compelling: Two strangers get off a train in a small town and nothing is ever the same again. It could be the setup for a classic western, but the town is in rural Hungary, the two men are Orthodox Jews, and the year, as the title indicates, is 1945.

Photographed in luminous black and white and returning to theaters by popular demand, this 2017 Hungarian film is a quietly ferocious piece of work that puts a particular time and place under a microscope, revealing hidden fault lines and differences that have been ineffectually papered over. Simple, powerful, made with conviction and skill, it is set in a world that is gone, the better to deal with issues and difficulties that are not even close to being past.

ART IN THE ARTHOUSE presents: CALEY O’DWYER: SCORING MOVEMENT in NoHo

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ART IN THE ARTHOUSE proudly presents our latest NoHo exhibit CALEY O’DWYER: SCORING MOVEMENT. These bold, modern mixed media works are for sale and on display till October, 2018. Come on in and check out our gallery.

About the exhibit
CALEY O’DWYER is a practicing artist, writer and therapist based in Los Angeles at the Brewery Arts Complex. His body of work serves as unmistakable proof that the professional triangle of Art, Writing, and Therapy inform each other. In this series, O’Dwyer explores multiple selves through deft application in a variety of media. Each figure moves through space playing with time and boundaries, visually appearing as a horizontal musical score. Gouache and collage cutouts, and literal scratching to create and understand surface, are key aesthetics. The dynamic intersection of pluralism and the singular self through syncopation and movement is the result of O’Dwyer’s intelligent, clear vision.

As a licensed therapist, O’Dwyer works with artists and creatives. The “artist as therapist as artist” is a very real dialogue that plays itself through line and the duplication of lithe figures, both urban in their action and oceanic fresh in lime colors and tones.After earning an MFA in creative writing from UC IRVINE, O’Dwyer was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. He currently teaches creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles. He enjoys being able to present new creative writing prompts to his students and have them submit such different variations of the same prompt. Teaching people how to explore prompts and improve their writing really motivates him to improve his own work. O’Dwyer’s second book, Light, Earth and Blue, features poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of MARK ROTHKO. The poems were featured at the TATE MODERN in London as part of a 2008 Rothko retrospective. Enjoy this exploration of the artist moving through a post-modern space.

– Joshua Elias, CURATOR

NoHo 7
5240 Lankershim Blvd.
North Hollywood, CA 91601
310-478-3836

 

 

Q&A’s with the PUZZLE Filmmaker this Weekend in Encino & Pasadena.

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PUZZLE director Marc Turtletaub will participate in Q&A’s at the Town Center on Friday, August 3 after the 4:10 and 7 PM screenings and at the Playhouse on Saturday, August 4 after the 4 and 7 PM screenings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl_SoMNi0rw

LAEMMLE LIVE presents: McCabe’s Guitar Shop Sunday, August 5

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RSVP ON EVENTBRITE
This is a Free Event

We are SOLD OUT
Email sheryl@laemmle.com
For wait list information

They’re back! Our good friends from McCabe’s grace us once again with their musical gifts on Sunday, August 5. LAEMMLE LIVE presents McCabe’s Guitar Shop for a free pop-up celebration of all things guitar and other choice instruments. McCabe’s renowned teachers and students share their wit and wisdom with lively performances and demos. Hosted by Head of Music School Denny Croy at the Monica Film Center.

It began in 1958. Furniture designer Gerald McCabe repaired guitars for his folk-singer wife’s musician friends who had no local music store. Gerald and his friend Ed Kahn decided to open a small music shop on Pico Blvd in Santa Monica. They began repairing instruments, selling folk music books and records, carrying Mexican guitars and old banjos. Word spread and local musicians began hanging out, relishing one of the only guitar shops in the Southern California area. One of those young musicians was Bob Riskin. Bob started as an employee in 1960. In the early 60’s lessons and classes were added. In 1969 McCabe’s began presenting live concerts. Bob Riskin became sole owner in 1986. Bob and his wife Espie are still running McCabe’s today! Over the years, musicians from all aspects of the musical spectrum, from gifted amateurs to seasoned professionals, have come to appreciate McCabe’s friendly, knowledgeable sales staff, expert repair shop and world class teaching staff.  Join us for memorable music from a local treasure!

EVENT DETAILS
Sunday, August 5, 2018
11:00 AM
Monica Film Center

RSVP USING EVENTBRITE
This is a Free Event

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 20th Anniversary Screenings on Wednesday, July 18 in Encino, Pasadena, and West LA

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present the latest offering in our Anniversary Classics Abroad series: 20th anniversary screenings of the Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film of 1998, Roberto Benigni’s LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.

The film was nominated for seven Oscars in all, including Best Picture of the year, an unusually strong showing for a foreign language film. It also won an Oscar for Benigni as Best Actor, the first time in the Academy’s 70-year history that a male actor had won the top prize for a foreign language performance.

Nicola Piovani also won for his lyrical musical score. In addition to its awards, the film scored an enormous success at the box office. It became the highest grossing foreign language film at the U.S. box office up to that point, and its success reverberated all over the world. With well over $200 million earned worldwide, it remains one of the most financially successful of all foreign language titles.

Benigni was primarily known as a comic actor and filmmaker when he decided to shift gears and tackle the dark realities of the Holocaust in this daring tragicomic fable. The first half of the film plays as a romantic comedy, with Benigni cast as a Jewish Italian bookshop owner who is determined to woo a spirited teacher (played by Benigni’s real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi) despite formidable obstacles. After they marry and have a young son, the tragic realities of the Second World War intrude on their lives, as they are all sent to a Nazi concentration camp. In a desperate desire to save his son, Benigni’s Guido devises an elaborate game to keep the boy distracted from the horrors around him.

Benigni, who directed and wrote the screenplay with Vincenzo Cerami, said that he was inspired by the memoirs of a Jewish Auschwitz survivor named Rubino Romeo Salmoni, whose book, In the End, I Beat Hitler, told how a sense of dark humor helped him to transcend his enslavement. The cast of the film also includes Giorgio Cantarini as the couple’s young son, Giustino Durano as Guido’s beloved uncle, and veteran German actor Horst Buchholz as a German doctor who befriends Guido and his son in the camp.

Although there were a few critics who were discomfited by the film’s whimsical approach to a historical tragedy, most endorsed the film enthusiastically. The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan called the film “sad, funny and haunting.” Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “its sentiment is inescapable, but genuine poignancy and pathos are also present, and an overarching sincerity is visible too.” Leonard Maltin hailed “a unique and beguiling fable that celebrates the human spirit.”

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL screens Wednesday, July 18, at 7pm at the Royal Theatre, Town Center, and Playhouse. Click here for tickets.

Format: Blu-ray

Milos Forman’s THE FIREMEN’S BALL Screens Tuesday, June 26 in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A.! Q&A with Co-Screenwriter Ivan Passer at the Royal.

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In conjunction with an American Cinematheque tribute to the late Oscar-winning director Milos Forman, Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of Forman’s final Czech film, THE FIREMEN’S BALL. The picture, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 1968, is part of our popular Anniversary Classics Abroad series. THE FIREMEN’S BALL co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.

Forman was part the Czech New Wave, a group of talented filmmakers (also including Jan Kadar, Jiri Menzel, and Ivan Passer) who emerged during the 1960s. Forman’s 1966 film, Love of a Blonde, was also an Oscar nominee and put him on the map as a director to watch. His wry sensibility received even fuller expression in The Firemen’s Ball, a dark but raucous satire of the chaos that ensues when a group of local firemen try to mount a celebration for their retiring chief. Forman got the idea for the film when he was in a small Bohemian village working on another script, and he happened to attend a real firemen’s ball. The script was co-written by Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jaroslav Papousek. The cast consisted mainly of nonprofessional actors, including Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, and Vaclav Stockel.

The film, which was widely interpreted as a sly critique of the Eastern European Communist system, was made during a brief period of artistic freedom that came to be known as the Prague Spring. But when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, The Firemen’s Ball was banned, and Forman and other leading Czech directors fled the country. As TV Guide later wrote of the film, “This ingratiating farce is perhaps the last noteworthy film of the Czech renaissance before the political crackdown forced most filmmakers into exile.” After arriving in America, Forman went on to achieve many Hollywood successes, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ragtime, and Amadeus.

Among the stellar reviews for THE FIREMEN’S BALL, Time magazine acclaimed “a delicious parody-fable of Slavic bureaucracy,” and Variety paid tribute to “a lively, brimming comedy on human conduct and small-town life.” In his four-star review, Roger Ebert added, “This is a very warm, funny movie.”

This Just In: Co-screenwriter Ivan Passer will participate in a Q&A after the June 26 screening at the Royal. Laemmle Theatres president Greg Laemmle will moderate. Passer also worked with Forman on LOVES OF A BLONDE and is perhaps best known for directing the 1965 film INTIMATE LIGHTING and the 1981 film CUTTER’S WAY.

Milos Forman’s THE FIREMEN’S BALL (1968) screens Tuesday, June 26, at 7:00pm in Encino, Pasadena, and West L.A. Click here for tickets.