Susan Marshall’s fetishized femmes
“Stop,” created by choreographer Susan Marshall, is a music video featuring an original score by Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang, played by members of the electric guitar quartet Dither and Mantra Percussion. “Stop” is a virtual companion piece to Susan Marshall & Company‘s new dance performance Play/Pause, which the Center for the Art of Performance ...
AFI: Los Angeles’ best film festival 1
Los Angeles is blessed—or burdened—with over four dozen film festivals of various shapes, sizes and makes, but there are three that dominate. Outfest, the country’s most successful LGBT festival, is consistently the biggest grossing event. Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) has the best title since the city is in its name. AFI Festival Los Angeles ...
Koehler Clips: An Impossible Choice
Like a few of the world’s other major movie-going cities, Los Angeles often presents impossible choices for the exploring cinephile. And tonight, Sunday, provides a doozy. Where to go? To Westwood, to the Billy Wilder Theater, where UCLA Film & Television Archive continues its remarkable “A Century of Chinese Cinema” survey with two exceptionally rare ...
Claire Denis’ City of “Bastards”
Her first feature, “Chocolat”—autobiographical, set in Africa, brazen in the extreme—announced Claire Denis as Europe’s most daring writer-director. She still is, with only a few filmmakers from Iberia (Pedro Costa, Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, all much younger than Denis) as serious competition. Her latest, “Bastards,” (at Laemmle’s Town Center 5 in Encino) ...
David beats Goliath in “Dallas Buyers Club”
Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, “David and Goliath,” arrives at the same moment as “Dallas Buyers Club.” Sometimes there’s harmonic convergence in the culture. Gladwell describes several cases of underdogs discovering their untapped strengths or advantages. “Dallas Buyers Club” takes Gladwell’s thesis into the stratosphere of high entertainment, tracing the incredible but true story of Texas ...
Koehler on Cinema: Clips
A new James Benning movie is enough news in itself and enough for a simple request: Just stop everything and see it. Now, Benning’s “Nightfall” (Los Angeles Filmforum, Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, Sun. 7:30 p.m.) isn’t exactly new. It was digitally shot in 2011 in the Sierras, near his property where he built exact ...
Brando’s bead on jazz in “The Wild One” @ L.A. Jazz Institute festival
We so enjoyed the opening-night concert of “Jazz Themes from Hollywood: West Coast Jazz at the Movies,” a four-day festival sponsored by the LA Jazz Institute now going on in a big subterranean ballroom at the LAX Marriott hotel. The concert paid tribute to the film music of Shorty Rogers and Leith Stevens, alternately composers ...
Around the world with Enzo Avitabile
One of globalization’s least noted benefits has been the rise of world music, led by a motley crew of legends ranging from Peter Gabriel and Mickey Hart to Djivan Gasparyan and Enzo Avitabile. Drums and frets form the basis for the cross-cultural exchanges, even though an artist like the Naples-born Avitabile is a singer and ...
“The Counselor” is out of order
The death of Elmore Leonard in August (I wrote about his legacy here) and the arrival of the movie,“Salinger,” provided a useful contrast between two utterly opposed writing careers: J.D. Salinger, self-consciously “literary” and perfectionist; Leonard, happily disobedient to literary niceties, prolific and cool. “The Counselor,” the first original screenplay of Cormac McCarthy — regarded ...
Friday night tights 2
On a Friday night, one guy puts on his tights. Directed, written, produced, edited by: Joonki Park A winner in the Canadian Film Centre‘s “Shorts Nonstop” competition. Thank you, Ian Birnie, for the share.