Ramin Niami’s loving tribute to local legendary club owner “Mama” (Laura Mae Gross). “BABE’S & RICKY’S INN” has been opened at the Laemmle’s Monica on April 5.Moving to Los Angles in 1944,Laura Mae Gross worked at a carwash and for Douglas Aircraft Company until 1954 when her husband was robbed and killed. The single mother decided to go into business for herself. In 1957 she opened “Laura’s Bar-B-Q,” (near the corner of Wilmington and Imperial Boulevard.) Seven years later in 1964, she took over the Atlantic Club at 5259 Central Avenue, famed during the Central Avenue jazz scene that began…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
Boris Rodriguez’s comic horror-film “Eddie The Sleepwalking Cannibal is a cross between “Art School Confidential”, “A Bucket Of Blood” and “Little Shop Of Horror”. Black comedy all the way. It’s the second smart comic horror film this year. (The first was Don Coscarelli’s wonderfully wacky “John Dies In The End” which is sort of Doug Adams meets “Galaxy Quest”.)Once famous painter Lars (Thure Lindhardt-“Keep the Lights On”) has a painter’s block. Lars became an overnight success after an accident inspired a series of canvases, which made him and his opportunistic agent Ronny (Stephen McHattie) rich and famous. But he hasn’t painted…
Frontline producer and NSNBC Executive producer Janet Tobias’s “No Place On Earth” is a suspenseful Holocaust picture.Just when you think you know everything about the Holocaust, spelunker Chris Nicola unearths evidence of a life affirming story.In 1993, while exploring Priest’s Grott, a deep 77 mile-long gypsum cave in Ukraine, Nicola discovered cooking platforms and utensils, shoes, even buttons. Disbelieving Nicola began asking questions, learning nothing, until a local old-timer admitted “”Maybe some Jews lived there.” It took him ten years of searching before he connected with a man in the Bronx, who with 38 people from 4 interconnected families, who…
Robert Redford’s political thriller “The Company You Keep” relies on interesting 60’s characters and smart escape sequences (no special effects) to entertain.A smart script by Lem Dobbs (‘The Score”, “Kafka”), based on Neil Gordon’s novel, fills the story with aging student revolutionaries portrayed by a a who’s who of the era’s best actors, makes for a fulfilling watch. If only Redford hadn’t cast himself. He hasn’t aged well (this is what they used to say about actresses) and I felt uncomfortable watching him in this role. He has the chops to play the man of conscious, but the 70-something actor looks…
TV Director Ana Piterbarg’s “Everybody has A Plan” (Todos tenemos un plan) is the Argentine “A Stolen Life”. The 1946 twin-plotted psychological thriller was so successful for Bette Davis she remade it as the wonderful “Dead Ringer” (1964), and it was copied for the Delores Del Rio vehicle “La Otra” in 1946.There is a strong tradition of psychological thrillers, slow simmer films in Argentina and this is that in spades.Viggo Mortensen (in his third Spanish language film) plays twin brothers Agustín/ Pedro in this noir-inflected swamp-story Buenos Aires pediatrician Agustin’s marriage is on the rocks. Claudia’s “The Secret in Their…
Gilles Bourdos’ “Renoir” is a vacation for the senses. Reminiscent of Bertrand Tavernier’s delicious “A Day In The Country” (his homage to Jean Renoir’s film) the film celebrates a late summer in the life of the ailing painter. Based on “Le Tableau amoureux” a bio-novel by the painter’s grandson cinematographer Jacques Renoir.And what a step up for Gilles Bourdos. Working with cinematographer Ping Bin Lee (Ping Bin Lee “Millennium Mambo”, Wen Jiang’s brilliant 2007 “The Sun Also Rises”, ” Norwegian Wood”) Bourdos’ pastoral valentine to Renoir captures all the fruity palette of his later paintings, celebrated in last year’s traveling…
Ben Shapiro’s “Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounter” joins a short list of exceptional films about the art process. Thomas Riedelsheimer’s 2001″ Rivers and Tides” observes British artist Andy Goldsworthy, who creates intricate and ephemeral sculptures from natural materials such as rocks, leaves, flowers, and icicles, capturing them in natural movement in his camera. Jeff Malmberg’s stunning “Marwencol” studies folk artist/ photographer Mark Hogancamp whose self medication for the brain damage he suffered in a savage bar beating became the meticulously created 1/6-scale World War II-era Belgian imaginary of Marwencol, First time director Jeff Malmberg’s interest lead to a Gallery show in…
Swiss director Baran bo Odar’s debut feature is a gripping psychological crime film. Unlike most films in the genre, we know the perpetrators from the start but Intertwining character stories, an evocative sound design and off-beat cinematography keep us on the edge of our seats. Violence is kept off camera, but Odar is under our skin throughout. Friendship, complicity, perversion, grieving and guilt are the ingredients of this bleak film.Odar sets his story in a summery Bavarian countryside, as if to underscore the frightening banality of crime and the number of criminals, hidden in plain sight, who often go undetected.Germany,…
Theater Raymond Kabbaz will present the annual week of Francophone films March 18 – 22, 2013. Screenings starts at 7:45PM. Theater Raymond Kabbaz is located at 10361 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064. Tickets are free by RSVP to : rsvp.trk@lyceela.org. For more information go to www.trk.us.com Monday, March 18 ”Sister” (2012)Written by: Antoine Jaccoud and Ursula Meier . Directed by: Ursula Meier. Cast: Léa Seydoux , Kacey Mottet Klein Synopsis: Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) lives with his older sister (Léa Seydoux) in a housing complex below a luxury Swiss ski resort. With his sister drifting in and out of jobs and…
On Sunday March 10th, Filmforum is proud to present Thom Andersen’s most recent work, Reconversão (Reconversion), an essay on the architecture of Eduardo Souto de Moura. Thom Andersen will be present for a Q&A! “… an elegiac quest into the essence of Eduardo Souto de Moura’s architecture.” — Celluloid Liberation Front Reconversão portrays 17 buildings and projects by the Porto architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception,…