Due to the overwhelming response of its first announced screening, the American Film Institute will be holding a second screening of David Lynch’s Inland Empire on Sunday, January 14 at 11:30 p.m. General admission tickets are $15, with a $3 discount for AFI members. For more information, visit AFI’s eponymous web site.
Category Archives: Screenings
Foreign Language Film Nominees Symposium Announced
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will hold its Foreign Language Film Award nominees symposium on Saturday, February 24, 2007, at 10 a.m. at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, moderated by producer Mark Johnson (The Notebook, Rain Man). The annual event, which began as a small, intimate gathering of directors representing
their nominated films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, has turned
into a standing-room-only gathering as entertaining as it
is informative. Admission is free, but advance tickets are required, and this event typically sells out. For more information, click here.
MoMA Weighs in on Jets vs. Sharks
its ongoing retrospective of the work of producer Walter Mirisch, on both Saturday, December 2 at 3 p.m. and Sunday, December 10 at 2 p.m. For more information, click here.
Snoop Dogg Does Segmented Horror
Does anyone else remember 1995’s Tales from the Hood? Hell, does anyone even remember Rusty Cundieff? I mean, like, including his mother?
It sounds like Snoop Dogg might, actually. Xenon Pictures is announcing that Hood of Horror, an anthology directed by Stacy Title, will screen as the special ninth film in the forthcoming “HorrorFest: 8 Films to Die For” (no word on what that does to the series’ promotional campaign), a weekend of hardcore horror flicks that, if you live in Los Angeles, you’ve seen the flippin’ billboards for everywhere.
Featuring Snoop himself, Proactiv candidate Danny Trejo, Anson Mount, erstwhile Playmate Brande Roderick, Lin Shaye, Billy Dee Williams, Jason Alexander, Method Man, Ernie Hudson and others, Hood of Horror will screen in 35 markets and in over 500 theaters
on Sunday, November 19 at 10 p.m. before its general release in early 2007.
Xenon Pictures is also offering a contest on www.jumpcut.com,
where contestants can use animated clips to create a new trailer for the film. The
two winning entries will walk away with $250 cash, and have their efforts film’s
web site and eventual DVD release. For more information on this and Hood of Horror in general, click here.
Free Screening of The History Boys
For those on the left coast or planning to for some reason be in Los Angeles next week, Fox Searchlight is offering up free seats at a promotional screening of The History Boys, its new film from director Nicholas Hytner, on Thursday, November 16 at 7:30 p.m. The movie tells the story of a class of bright but unruly history students in pursuit
of an undergraduate placement at Oxford or Cambridge. Richard Griffiths plays their maverick
English instructor, while Clive Merrison is a headmaster obsessed with results. RSVPs are accepted on a first come, first served basis. For location information and to RSVP, click here.
Aardman Animations Efforts Screen in NYC
Flushed Away and last year’s Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the
Were-Rabbit. The program includes the deliriously funny Rex the Runt (pictured above), plus Penny, Pib & Pog, Angry Kid, Morph, the groundbreaking “Sledgehammer” music video for Peter
Gabriel and installments of the company’s Wallace
& Gromit and Creature Comforts
shorts.
Recommended for ages 10+, the compendium screens at 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, November 18 and 19, at the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue at West Third. For more information, click here, or phone (212) 349-0330.
MoMA Showcases New York Double-Dip
part of its ongoing Made In New York” series this evening, Wednesday, October 25. The former screens at 6 p.m., still leaving plenty of time for a Scorsese double feature with his excellent new film, The Departed, while Manhattan screens at 8:15 p.m. For more information, click here.
New Beverly Double-Dips Antonioni
the New Beverly Cinema,
located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea — Blow-Up and The Passenger, which is part political mystery, part lilting character study of infidelity and personal reinvention. For more on the latter film, in the form of its DVD release from earlier this year, click here.
New Beverly Does Documentary Two-Fer
For those in the Los Angeles area and looking to indulge a political interest, two of the year’s best, most interesting documentaries, An Incovenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car?, screen tonight and tomorrow evening, October 18 and 19, as a $7 double feature at the wonderful New Beverly Cinema, located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea. Each title comes out on DVD in a few weeks — after Election Day, unfortunately — but this is a great way to experience a peek behind the curtains of incentivized stasis, and yet also draw hope from the notion that energized, collective socio-political will is among our greatest renewable resources.
MoMA Does High Society
For more information, click here.
New Beverly Double-Dips Waters
For those in the Los Angeles area and looking to kill an evening in retro fashion, filmmaker John Waters’ Hairspray and Cry-Baby screen this Sunday afternoon and evening and Monday night as a $7 double feature at the downright spiffy New Beverly Cinema, located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea.
On James Dean and Joe E. Brown
One
only made three movies, but left an undeniable mark on American acting,
the other got his start on the circus and vaudeville circuit — extinct
toiling ground for a performer today — and went on to crank out
lighthearted fare largely forgotten today.
I’m talking first, of course, about James Dean, who channeled his own personal demons and estranged relationships into instinctive and raw work of surprising vulnerability in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. His death at 24 years of age in an auto accident sealed in the public’s mind his impetuous, headstrong image, and though the films are available on DVD, if one prefers the big screen, they’re both screening through Tuesday night, August 29, at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles,
located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea. The double
feature costs $7 for general admission, $6 for students with ID and $4
for seniors and children.
Alas, Joe E. Brown, on the other hand, captured no
such lasting appeal; he’s perhaps best known to mainstream audiences as
millionaire Osgood Fielding III in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.
For classic film fans, a new two-disc DVD set attempts to right that
wrong, offering up a look at some of the movies of an actor who
seamlessly pulled off a variety of physical comedy and in his later
years won hearts by bucking up the spirits of American G.I.s abroad.
Most of Brown’s best — movies like Top Speed, Elmer the Great and Alibi Ike — aren’t included here, but one can certainly do much worse than the value this set affords.
The first disc features 1938’s Wide Open Faces and The Gladiator,
the latter of which is probably the best film herein. In it, Brown
plays Hugo Kipp, a gangly college student who is injected by a mad
scientist with a serum that imbues him with extraordinary athletic
prowess. This allows Kipp to capture the attention of pretty coed Iris
Bennett (June Travis), among many other benefits. The second disc
includes Flirting with Fate, in which Brown is cast as the
desperate manager of a vaudevillian act. Stranded in South America, he
schemes to take out a life insurance policy and then attempt to get
himself “killed” by bandit chieftain Sancho (Leo Carrillo). Mayhem
ensues. The final film is the awfully titled Earthworm Tractors,
which finds Brown amusingly exercising his gift for gab as a
fast-talking salesman, an archetype of the era. While actor biographies
and trailers are a welcome addition on the set, even more history on
Brown and some interview footage with film historians and/or critics
would be a welcome addition. Still, four classic, heretofore
commercially unavailable movies for under $20 isn’t a bad deal for
discerning cinephiles.
Screenings Galore, Many Free
For
those in the Los Angeles area and refusing to bow to New Line’s
penultimate act of desperation and cowardice — which is to say its 10 p.m. “money grab” screenings of Snakes on a Plane — there’s a free screening of writer-director Bart Freundlich’s Trust the Man being held at the ArcLight Theatre in Hollywood.
A smart, sophisticated comedy about the challenges of love and marriage amongst modern day New Yorkers, Trust the Man centers on the romantic escapades of two couples: a successful actress (Julianne Moore) and her stay-at-home husband (David Duchovny), a former advertising executive; and said actress’ younger, slacker brother (Billy Crudup) and his long-suffering, aspiring novelist girlfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
The film follows this flawed, friendly foursome on their pointed, often
surprising and frequently hilarious collective search for love in the
midst of careers, family, temptations of infidelity and the
ever-daunting search for Manhattan street parking. RSVPs for the 7:30 screening are required, so click here to do so.
In Friday, August 18 tidbits, Black and Blue: Legends of the Hip Hop Cop,
an interesting documentary about the New York Police Department’s covert rap
intelligence unit, screens for free at 3 p.m. at Rehab L.A. in Los
Angeles, followed by a Q&A with director Peter Spirer. For
directions and more information, phone (310) 566-7943. At the New Beverly Cinema,
located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea, two films
from director Lindsay Anderson starring Malcolm McDowell — If… and O Lucky Man! — screen as a double feature for only $7 admission. Mike Judge’s brilliant Office Space, meanwhile, screens at midnight at the Nuart Theatre; wear plenty of flair. Hey, plan your day just right and that’s four movies for under $17.
Free Screening of The Fountainhead
For those interested and in Los Angeles, a free screening of the 1949 version of The Fountainhead,
based on Ayn Rand’s classic text, will be held Sunday, August 13, at
the Directors Guild of America at 7920 W. Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles.
Doors open at 2:00 p.m. and the screening starts at 2:30. Following the
screening, a panel discussion and Q&A on the movie and its
production designer, Edward Carrere, will be held, moderated by
screenwriter and Art Directors Film Society founder John Muto.
Panelists include Jeff Britting, manager of the Ayn Rand Archives, and
filmmaker and author James Sanders. RSVPs are required, and may be made either by clicking through here to this web site or by phoning (818) 762-9995.
New Beverly Double-Dips Altman
For those in the Los Angeles area and looking to kill an evening in retro fashion, filmmaker Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud and Nashville screen this Monday and Tuesday evening as a $7 double feature at the wonderful New Beverly Cinema, located at 7165 Beverly Blvd., one block west of La Brea.
Free Screening of Pulse
the Weinstein Company’s Pulse in Los Angeles.
A remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 Japanese film — which is entitled Kairo and screened theatrically late last year in limited release from Magnolia — Pulse details a series of increasingly horrifying supernatural events that consume the life of Mattie Webber (Veronica Mars‘
Kristen Bell, above) after she receives an e-mail from her boyfriend
begging for help beyond the grave. Her investigation of the mysterious
e-mail leads to unexpected answers and terrifying conclusions.
The screening is scheduled for tonight, Thursday, July 27, at 9:30
p.m. at the Harmony Gold Theater, 7655 Sunset Blvd. As an added bonus, free
pizza and beer are also being served beforehand, thus necessitating the
21-year-old age requirement for all attendees. Ample parking is
available directly behind the theater and in the surrounding
residential neighborhood, but be sure to arrive early to guarantee
admittance, as seats will be doled out on a first-come, first-served
basis. Pulse releases in theaters on August 11.
Screenings: Get Short-y/The Music Man
In two other tidbits for SoCal natives and/or traveling left-coasters, the Alex Film Society will present a special screening of 1962’s The Music Man,
at which co-star Shirley Jones will be present, on Saturday, July 29 at
8 p.m. For more information, phone (818) 754-8250 or visit alexfilmsociety.org.
Also, the 10th annual Los Angeles International Short Film Festival
will be held September 5-13 at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood. For
more information, visit the festival’s semi-eponymous web site by clicking here.
On The Limbo Room
For those in Los Angeles, meanwhile, the estimable Ray Greene mentioned
to me that the American Cinematheque’s sneak preview, “Alternative
Screen” presentation of The Limbo Room on Thursday, July 20
features a striking new voice in American independent film in the form
of actress-turned-director Debra Eisenstadt. Both David Mamet fans and
disgruntled college professors, of course, will remember Eisenstadt —
who made her debut as a writer-director with 2001’s Daydream Believer
— from the 1994 film version of Mamet’s incendiary two-hander Oleanna, in which
she played the female lead opposite William H. Macy. Both that
experience and the text of Oleanna itself inform this feature, which Greene calls “an intriguing blend of Michael Haneke and All About Eve,”
about the blurring of reality and fiction in the lives of a group of
New York stage actors working on a play involving an onstage rape. The
film played at Slamdance earlier this year, and is currently seeking
North American distribution. More to soon follow…