Movie musicals on the big screen, plus more of the week’s best films
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This week I reported exclusively on the new film series “Queer Rhapsody” that will run from July 19 to 28 and take place at five venues that should be familiar to regular readers of this newsletter: the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum; the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre and Los Feliz 3; the Broad and Vidiots.
“These are venues that we’ve gone to as community members as much as cultural workers,” said Martine McDonald, creative director and senior programmer.
Organized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the program will include eight feature films along with dozens of shorts. Among the features will be Fawzia Mirza’s “The Queen of My Dreams,” Susie Yankou’s “Sisters” and Silas Howard’s “Darby and the Dead.” (There will be a prom party at Vidiots after “Darby.”)
While this new series is not explicitly meant to replace Outfest (the collapse of which has left a gap for the exhibition of LGBTQ+ works in L.A.), its organizers recognize that it will fill that role somewhat in reality.
“I think queer audiences have always been really hungry for storytelling, to see themselves onscreen, to engage in spaces beyond any one moment,” said May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. “I would be remiss not to mention that, yes, of course there was this acknowledgment of what the community might be losing in the moment, and [us] stepping in and saying, ‘This is really for us to come together and do this.’ We wanted to center the filmmaking, the spaces, the stories in this moment.”
Movie musicals as they were meant to be experienced
The American Cinematheque will celebrate big-screen movie musicals this weekend with “It’s Showtime at the AC!” at the Egyptian and Los Feliz 3. The program, which mixes classic extravaganzas with more contemporary takes, kicks off Friday with Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and “Cabaret” at the Egyptian. Damien Chazelle’s charmingly lo-fi debut, 2009’s “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” will have a rare screening at the LF3.
Anyone who has had dinner with me over the last few months has likely heard me talk about Barbra Streisand following the publication of her memoir — I know she’s come up here a few times as well — and on Saturday a rare archival 70-mm print of 1969’s “Hello, Dolly!” directed by Gene Kelly and starring Streisand and Walter Matthau will play at the Egyptian.
In his original review of the film, Charles Champlin wrote, “The way things have been going, it’s all too good a question whether we’ll ever again see a Hollywood soundstage musical mounted on the super-extravagant, gosh-darn-the-torpedoes, go-for-broke scale of 20th Century Fox’s ‘Hello, Dolly!’ now at long last in residence at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Accordingly, it seems only right and proper that a glorious and golden era should end on a note of triumph, with a superbang and not a whimper. If the really-really big musical has to go, ‘Hello, Dolly!’ is a musical to end them all.”
Also on Saturday at the LF3 is Akiva Shaffer and Jorma Taccone’s 2016 “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” an uproarious satire of contemporary celebrity culture starring Andy Samberg as a hapless singer with an outsized idea of his own talents and relevancy.
Sunday will feature a 70-mm print of 1982’s “Annie.” Directed with swagger by the seemingly incongruous John Huston, the film stars Aileen Quinn in the title role, Albert Finney as Daddy Warbucks, Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan and includes some fantastic dancing by the peerless Anne Reinking.
There will also be a screening of the extended roadshow version of Bob Fosse’s 1969 “Sweet Charity,” which has the famed “Rich Man’s Frug” number, Sammy Davis Jr.’s ebullient “The Rhythm of Life” and Shirley MacLaine powering the whole thing along.
As Charles Champlin wrote at the time, “‘Sweet Charity’ is I should think the role which Shirley MacLaine has been building up to and waiting for all her Hollywood years. The congruence of personality and part is just the meeting all performers must dream of.”
‘Heartburn’ at Vidiots
Tonight Vidiots will have a screening of Mike Nichols’ 1986 film “Heartburn,” in which Nora Ephron wrote the screenplay adaptation of her own novel — a thinly veiled semi-autobiographical telling of her marriage and divorce from journalist Carl Bernstein. The film stars Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. That the evening is being introduced by the recently married couple of Abbi Jacobson and Jodi Balfour should only add to the excitement.
The movie’s reputation has grown considerably over the years, essentially in parallel to the shift in Ephron’s own reputation and legacy. When “Heartburn” was first released, it inspired both Times critic Sheila Benson and then-arts editor Charles Champlin to write negatively about its depiction of both the writers’ life and the dissolution of a marriage.
As Benson put it: “You can fret at ‘Heartburn’s’ flimsiness, may even find it insufferably smug in its portrait of ‘our set,’ but you probably won’t be bored by it. And it is peopled with adults, these days enough to make you whimper in gratitude. If only these talents were in the service of something.”
Champlin added: “It’s hard to imagine that the year will provide a more disappointing film than ‘Heartburn.’ Some films promise nothing and live up to the promise. But you had to figure that with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starring and Mike Nichols directing, “Heartburn” had to be something special. Wrong. As Sheila Benson pointed out decisively in her review last week, ‘Heartburn’ is a pain. Seldom has a Class A, platinum-plated movie made so many elementary mistakes.”
Dances With Films festival returns
The 27th Dances With Films festival began on Thursday night in Hollywood with the world premiere of Mahesh Pailoor’s “Paper Flowers” and continues until June 30 with the closing night world premiere of Terre Weisman’s “Max Dagan.”
The festival will screen some 232 films, including more than 50 features, 25 pilots and over 150 shorts. This year the festival has also entered into a partnership with what remains of Outfest to spotlight LGBTQ+ titles next Thursday.
Other titles include “Spyral,” a feature documentary on mental health from Bill Guttentag, a two-time Oscar winner for short films, and Razieme Iborra’s documentary on contemporary cowgirls, “How the West Was One.”
In a joint interview this week, festival founders Leslee Scallon and Michael Trent reflected on how Dances With Films has managed to continue while so many other festivals have faltered.
“First of all, we keep it lean and mean,” said Scallon. “We only do things that we know we can do well. We’re not doing huge galas with black ties and fancy-fancy. We tell our filmmakers very much what we simply are. We created this because Michael and I had a film that didn’t get into any of the industry festivals we wanted to get into, and we needed to do a screening. And we realized that the power of films like our own, where we didn’t have the connections and we didn’t have stars in it, is that they could band together. And that together you can really create an event that people want to come to. And basically from the very beginning we just never overreached.
Added Trent: “When we started this festival, there weren’t, like, 300 film festivals in Los Angeles. When we started out, you really had to know somebody, or you had to have a film with a name in it and you couldn’t get into any festival without that. There were rare exceptions, but if you didn’t have a name, you had to know someone and that kind of thing. So we wanted to create a film festival that was trying to be as politically free as possible, to level the playing field.”
“We are not a dream factory, but we’re definitely the dream incubator,” he continued.
Scallon recalled that one year, the slogan for the festival was “Dream. Dare. Do.” For her, that motto continues to sum up the ethos of the event.
“I think that really epitomizes who we represent,” Scallon said, “The people who dream something, who dared to do it and then got it done. So you’ve got a lot of very determined people to even get to this place, but now, for us, it’s about not letting them lose that enthusiasm or sight of what their goal is.”
Other points of interest
An Anna Faris double-bill at the New Beverly
The New Beverly Cinema is showing a double-bill this weekend of two films starring the delightful comedic wonder that is Anna Faris, with Gregg Araki’s 2007 “Smiley Face” and Keenan Ivory Wayans’ 2001 “Scary Movie 2.”
“Smiley Face” follows a young, frequently stoned, largely unambitious young actor (Faris) in Los Angeles who accidentally eats a plate of her roommate’s cupcakes without realizing how much pot was already in them. Now even more out of it than usual, she sets out on journey that takes her all across the city as she tries to replace his weed.
Writing about “Smiley Face” for The Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Gregg Araki’s delirious ‘Smiley Face’ is an unabashed valentine to Anna Faris, an opportunity for the actress to show that she can carry a movie composed of often hilarious nonstop misadventures. No matter how outrageously or foolishly Faris’ Jane behaves, she remains blissfully appealing — such are Faris’ fearless comedic skills and the freshness of her radiant blond beauty.”
“Scary Movie 2” is the second installment in the wildly successful franchise of horror-movie spoofs. In his review of that movie, Kevin Thomas wrote: “Certainly, the members of Wayans’ ensemble cast, which includes, besides Marlon and Shawn, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Chris Masterson, Kathleen Robertson and Tori Spelling, hurl themselves into their roles. But free-and-easy filmmaking has a way of sliding into the merely slapdash, and that’s what seems to have happened here, although youthful audiences may not care. The ads for ‘Scary Movie 2’ proclaim, ‘More merciless. More shameless.’ Maybe so, but it’s not as funny as last summer’s original ‘Scary Movie,’ in which Wayans had lots of fun poking fun at Dimension Films’ ‘Scream’ series.”
‘Fancy Dance’ in theaters
Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and was seemingly left adrift, as distribution with Apple TV+ was not announced until over a year later after Lily Gladstone saw her profile rise significantly following her Oscar-nominated role in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” (also distributed by Apple TV+).
In “Fancy Dance” — a character study and portrait of Indigenous life as well as an unexpectedly gripping thriller — Gladstone stars as a woman who joins up with her niece (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) to search for her missing sister.
Tremblay was one of the directors who took part in our yearlong project “The Independents” that charted the post-Sundance experience for several filmmakers.
Yorgos Lanthimos is back with ‘Kinds of Kindness’
Following up quickly from last year’s “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley from that film’s cast for “Kinds of Kindess,” a triptych of abstractly unsettling stories about relationships and power dynamics that sort of do and don’t relate to each other. Jesse Plemons picked up the best actor award at Cannes for his performance in the film.
Matt Brennan spoke to Plemons while in Cannes, touching on Lanthimos’ unusual working methods, which included a lot of theater exercises and games. As Plemons explained, at first he was bewildered and then enchanted: “You reach a point of ‘F— it!’ and it becomes so much fun and so liberating and so exhilarating and you start to realize, ‘This is going to be a completely different way of working.’ You’re still doing the same thing, but the rules don’t necessarily apply in the way they usually do.”
‘The Bikeriders’
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, “The Bikeriders” is inspired by a 1968 book of photographs taken by Danny Lyon of a motorcycle gang in the suburbs of Chicago. The film follows Benny (Austin Butler) as he is torn between his relationship with Kathy (Jodie Comer) and life with the gang’s founder Johnny (Tom Hardy).
Katie Walsh wrote of the film: “Watching ‘The Bikeriders’ feels like flipping through a photobook filled with arresting compositions and snippets of stories, and there’s a sketchy, snapshot quality to Nichols’ screenplay as well. The film is an evocation of character, place and time, the tempo alternating between moody and lively, like our central odd couple, laconic Benny and chatterbox Kathy.”
Steve Appleford spoke to Lyon about his original book of photography. He also interviewed “Challengers” actor Mike Faist, who plays Lyon in the movie. As Faist described Lyon: “He really has a soft spot for people that are just shunned from society, that are outcasts, that are told that they’re not allowed a seat at the table. He really loves these people.”
In other news
Donald Sutherland dies at 88
Donald Sutherland, the prolific actor who appeared in such films as “MASH,” “Klute,” “Animal House,” “Ordinary People” and the “Hunger Games” franchise, died this week at age 88.
When Sutherland received an honorary Academy Award in 2017, he reflected on the fact he had never been nominated for a competitive Oscar by saying, “I never expected to be nominated — ever. I’ve been an actor for as long as I can remember. The idea that I was making movies was beyond my expectation. The reality was working and doing the work as well as you could and avoiding reading reviews and getting to the heart of the truth of something with the director. And if the director was pleased and we had that connection, then that was wonderful.”
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