Oh, to be as ‘Driven’ as Tony Pearson
Oct
17
2023
I very much enjoyed Driven: The Tony Pearson Story, a documentary that is the labor of love of its director Andrew Menjivar. It details the life and career of legendary bodybuilder Tony Pearson, a product of several seminal training gyms up to and including Venice’s Muscle Beach and Gold’s Gym, where, ahem, I am a new member~! ...
Trio of ‘Priscilla’ female creatives take time-out from The King at movie opening
Last night at the Academy Museum’s Ted Mann Theater, film distributor A24 hosted the Los Angeles premiere screening of Priscilla, starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. Writer/director Sofia Coppola and executive producer Priscilla Presley were in attendance. The plot of the movie, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, goes like this: When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu ...
REVIEW: Hanging out with ‘The Holdovers’
“There are certain movies that you hang out with the characters so much that they actually become your friends. Those movies are usually quite long, because it actually takes that long of a time to get past a movie character where you actually feel that you know the person and you like them.” That now-famous ...
The Stone who stopped rolling: Nick Broomfield doc about Brian Jones
As a schoolboy aged 14, Nick Broomfield, later a British filmmaker and award-winning documentarian, met Brian Jones, by chance, on a train. Jones was at the height of his success. Six years later he would be dead. Nick Broomfield’s new documentary THE STONES & BRIAN JONES explores the legacy of Brian Jones, who, in this ...
Karel Zeman’s ‘painted cinema’: wondrous, playful, intriguing films @ The Panorama
Oct
2
2023
The Stolen Airship (1966) Live action, special effects, painted backdrops, puppets and animation are all ingeniously combined in the fantastic films of Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman. 50 years after the earliest days of cinema, Zeman returned to the magical techniques of Georges Mélies to create films of unmatched beauty. Now, courtesy of the Velaslavasay Panorama, ...
German Currents Film Festival a glimpse into latest & best European cinema
Sep
25
2023
We are fans and supporters of the Goethe-Institut’s spectrum of wonderful German/American cultural activities in Los Angeles, but since it’s Los Angeles we especially love the movies. That’s why we so anticipate a fun weekend at the annual German Currents Film Festival, lively ads for which you see posted on artsmeme now. Click on ’em ...
Opening the floodgates of early-cinema disaster movies at Laemmle Theatres
Sep
18
2023
Irving Cummings’ THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD (1926), a pioneering disaster and special effects movie, starring Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien, re-creates one of the greatest disasters in American history, when, in 1889, over 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, lost their lives. In her first major role, Gaynor plays a teenage girl smitten with dashing engineer O’Brien, ...
Meet Ernest Belcher’s prize pupil, Pola Negri 2
News of the digital restoration of The Spanish Dancer (1923) by Milestone Film & Video and the Eye Film Museum caught our fancy for several reasons. The silent movie is promoted as a “great romance epic,” and gosh, you can never get enough of that, right? In its making, director Herbert Brenon employed a “cast ...
The ‘Beauty’ of Disney-100 Thursdays
Aug
28
2023
We don’t have kids, so somehow lived through the 1990s (and beyond) without seeing Beauty and the Beast (1991). It was a great delight to make up for lost time. Last Thursday evening, we attended a centenary celebration of the Walt Disney Company at the marvelous El Capitan Theatre — to be enchanted and entertained ...
Smashingly trashy: John Waters retrospective at AMPAS Museum
Aug
8
2023
John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the eponymous artist’s contributions to cinema, opens at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on September 17, 2023. The exhibition will trace the grotesque, daring, tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year career of filmmaking and reveal how his movies have ...