Rarely viewed “The Great Gatsby” starring Alan Ladd opens film noir festival 4
Apr
21
2012
An unusual choice for the opening act of the Noir City film festival: The Great Gatsby (1949, Paramount) in a new 35 mm print. The festival, now on at the Egyptian Theatre, is co-produced by the Film Noir Foundation and the American Cinematheque. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great masterwork from 1925 is far from pulp fiction. ...
Vibrato Grill to groove April 30 – Intl Jazz Day monster jam session
Apr
18
2012
It’s the first annual International Jazz Day this coming April 30. To celebrate, Herb Alpert’s swank and intimate jazz bar and restaurant, Vibrato Grill, presents an evening of continuous jamming with Pat Senatore – featuring some of LA’s top jazz musicians. A way-cool roster of top players is on tap for the bandstand. In Paris ...
Stars light up Hollywood Boulevard, once more, at TCM Fest
TM & (C) Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Photographers: Edward M. Pio Roda, Mark Hill, Adam Rose, Jason Merritt
TCM Fest: Good god! Peggy Cummins heats up “Gun Crazy”
Apr
15
2012
It was a wild ride watching “Gun Crazy” (1950) projected on the humongous screen of the Egyptian Theatre yesterday afternoon at TCM Fest. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s pulpy film-noir concerns a pair of newly weds; played by John Dall and Peggy Cummins, they’re just doin’ what newly weds do. They’re livin’, lovin’, workin’ … and they’re ...
TCM Fest: “Frankenstein’s gonna bite me and kill me,” said 5-year-old Mel Brooks 1
Apr
14
2012
In conversation with Turner Classic Movies creative exec, Tom Brown, prior to the TCM Fest screening of his great comedy classic, Young Frankenstein (1974), director Mel Brooks dug deep into his memory bank. Asked by Brown what spurred his ribald take-off of the James Whale horror flick, Brooks recalled: “In 1931, I was five years ...
“Travis Banton inspired my dressing Cher,” says Bob Mackie at TCM Fest
In a curtain talk with costume historian Deborah Nadoolman-Landis prior to a TCM Fest opening-night screening of Cleopatra, Bob Mackie described an early influence. It was designer Travis Banton’s amazing costumes for Claudette Colbert in Cecil B. DeMille’s at-turns-camp, at-turns-sumptuous Roman romp. “I was thirteen, I lived in Inglewood, there were three movie theaters there. An ...
Misha acts at Broad Stage, then Tavis Smiley chats him up
I enjoyed watching Mikhail Baryshnikov prowl the Broad Stage, supple as an alert deer, in director Dmitry Krymov’s “In Paris.” Playing a rigid retired military man, Nikolai Platonovic, Barysh speaks mellifluous Russian, his mother-tongue, and Russian-inflected French. The 80-minute dance-drama, an adaptation of a Russian short story by Ivan Bunin, opened Wednesday night in Santa ...
Midori, humble page turner 2
Apr
11
2012
[click photo to find Midori] The bohemian-style classical music series, Classical Underground, offered a rich roster of Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla and Mozart Monday evening at the funky-junky art atelier of Alexey Steele and Olga Vlasova. The two music mavens, soon to be the parents of twins, host the five-year-running series at their marvelous artist digs, ...
Ruth Weisberg’s guided gallery tour @ Jack Rutberg Fine Arts
Apr
10
2012
Get thee to Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, where a strong show now hangs, “Ruth Weisberg: Now & Then,” works by the Los Angeles artist pictured above. This Saturday afternoon, Ms. Weisberg will personally guide a tour through her paintings and drawings that are on beautiful display in the LaBrea Avenue gallery. The exhibition reveals Weisberg’s ...
George Balanchine dances in British film from 1929 1
What we have here is not “Apollo.” That’s putting it mildly. But it’s still a very amusing, even amazing, piece of historic dance footage that’s making the rounds on Facebook. George Balanchine himself dances in a rather crude bit of his own choreography “Dark Red Roses,” in a British-made early talkie. Appearing in the pas ...