A summer trip to Italy with ‘Vera,’ plus more of the week’s best movies in L.A.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
It has been an incredible time for going to the movies in Los Angeles, but the revitalized scene took a hit this week with the closing of the Westwood Village and Bruin theaters. The Westwood Village has long been a location for glitzy movie premieres, while the Bruin may be best remembered for its indelible appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s ”Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” when Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate goes there to see a movie starring herself.
Meg James reported that Thursday was the last day for both venues. Regency Theaters, which has managed the two houses for the last 14 years, saw their contracts come to an end on July 25.
The Village Theatre which opened in 1931, is expected to reopen under the ownership of a consortium of filmmakers spearheaded by Jason Reitman. The exact timeline and details of that reopening are uncertain.
“We have an exciting vision that includes dining, drinking, moviegoing, gallery viewing and programming of new and old films, and we cannot wait to share that with everybody,” Reitman said in a February interview with The Times.
The fate of the Bruin, which opened in 1937, is unknown.
Summertime in Italy, a visit with ‘Vera’
This time of year, most everyone longs to get away, to put life on hold and just travel somewhere else. Not everyone can actually make such a luxury happen and so the American Cinematheque has put together the series “How I Spent the Summer in Italy”
The series includes such films as David Lean’s 1955 “Summertime,” starring Katherine Hepburn, Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 “Call Me by Your Name,” starring Timothée Chalamet, Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 “Journey to Italy” and 1950 “Stromboli” and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
The series opens tonight with Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s “Vera” which won the directing and actress prizes in the Horizons sidebar of the 2022 Venice Film Festival. (The film was also Austria’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards for the international feature Oscar.)
The fictionalized docudrama follows Vera Gemma, daughter of famed Italian spaghetti Western actor Giuliano Gemma, as she drifts through her life. What begins as a portrait of an aging party girl takes a turn to something more emotional and vulnerable when, after Gemma’s driver accidentally hits a small boy and his father, she finds herself increasingly entangled in their lives.
Highlights of the film are scenes in which Gemma visits with her real-life friend Asia Argento, daughter of director Dario Argento, as the two talk of the struggles of growing up in the shadow of a famous father. They visit Rome’s famed Cimitero Acattolico (non-Catholic cemetery) to stand before a grave marked as Goethe’s son, with no name of his own.
I spoke to Gemma earlier this week while she was in Los Angeles. When the filmmakers first approached her about doing a project, she assumed they were looking for money, not that they had written something for her to star in.
The notion of beauty becomes a running theme throughout the film, as Gemma struggles to see herself outside of her father‘s on-screen image.
“It’s a nightmare in my life, the idea of beauty, because my father was very beautiful,” Gemma said. “He was one of the most beautiful European actors. So I never felt enough, compared to him. And in Italy, they are still very bad with me. They told me all the time, ‘Oh, the father was so beautiful. She’s not beautiful.’ And I really think I am very beautiful now and I don’t understand how people can’t see my beauty.”
Gemma is rarely seen without a cowboy hat, a seeming nod to her father, but it also comes to make her seem like some sort of Western hero, a lone figure moving through the landscape, determined to press on.
“Life is not always perfect, but never give up, never stop believing,” Gemma said. “I told this to the directors. I said I wanted this to be a Western. And they were more into the mood of Fellini’s ‘Giulietta degli spiriti’ [‘Juliet of the Spirits’], then they realize that with me, automatically, the movie was becoming a Western. And not just for the hat, I think for an attitude.
“I have Westerns in my blood. I grew up in a Western movie, so this belonged to me in some way,” Gemma said. “I wear the hat not because it is fashion, but because this is my story of my family.”
The “Vera” screening is being hosted by screenwriter Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith and Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Sean Baker, followed by a Q&A with Gemma moderated by Baker. Via email, Smith noted her immediate response after first seeing the movie.
“I didn’t know anything about Vera before seeing Tizza and Rainer’s movie,” Smith said. “I was captivated by the movie and by Vera. She’s so witty and funny and vulnerable and honest and unique. Her essence made an impact on me the way Madonna or Courtney Love made an impact on me when I first saw them interviewed. I was just like, Who is this woman?! I was instantly obsessed with her.”
Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng land in L.A.
The American Cinematheque is launching a 14-film retrospective of the Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang with the filmmaker in attendance, as well as his signature star Lee Kang-sheng. Simply seeing these films in a theater is exciting enough; to have Tsai and Lee there too is something else.
The series starts Wednesday with a 30th anniversary screening of “Vive L’Amour,” which finds three characters intersecting in a supposedly empty apartment. The series’ centerpiece will be a screening at the Egyptian of Tsai’s melancholy and mystical 2003 film “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” about the goings-on at a movie theater showing King Hsu’s wuxia classic “Dragon Inn” on the last day before it closes for good.
In a review of Tsai’s 2002 film “What Time Is It There?” The Times’ Kevin Thomas wrote: “Tsai’s films are studies of loneliness and isolation set in Taipei, which has become a modern, impersonal metropolis in a nation that has undergone wrenching social changes with rapid economic expansion and the end of martial law. Those who have not seen any of Tsai’s previous films, all of which are austere and demanding, would be surprised to know that ‘What Time’ is actually his lightest work, its open ending offering a ray of hope. The dark absurdist humor that runs through Tsai’s films is stronger here than in any of his previous pictures.”
For a rerelease of his 1992 debut feature “Rebels of the Neon God,” I interviewed Tsai via email. Regarding his evolution as a filmmaker and storyteller, Tsai said: “Why do we always assume that shooting a film is to tell a story? ‘Rebels of the Neon God’ apparently is not about telling a story. Even now, I still don’t think it is conventional. My works have always been about expressing life experiences and sensations. In terms of the format, I am not passionate about ‘storytelling,’ but rather I approach movies more in the prosaic or poetic way. ‘Rebels of the Neon God’ has been just like this. When I was shooting a film, I would constantly remind myself that ‘I am shooting a film, but not telling a story.’ With this approach, I have been freer.”
Points of interest
‘Eno’ is never the same movie twice
Gary Hustwit’s documentary “Eno,” a portrait of the musician, artist and producer Brian Eno, will play at Vidiots on Friday and Saturday. A bespoke generative AI program created by Hustwit and his collaborator Brendan Dawes makes it so the film never plays the same way twice, shuffling some 500 hours of footage from Eno’s own archives along with original interviews, while maintaining an overall sense of shape and control.
“The generative approach was something that was really organic to what [Eno has] done,” Hustwit said in an interview prior to the film’s premiere earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. “He’s been very much an early adopter to new technology and ways to integrate it into the creative process. So approaching a movie about him that way made sense.”
Eno had long resisted the idea of having a documentary made about him exactly because he didn’t want a film that would take a singular line through his career.
“I thought, well, this sounds like a better approach — to actually make a generative piece where it will be different every time,” Eno said. “Which is of course how it is in memory as well. It’s only if you keep a diary regularly, which I do, that you realize how fallible your memory is. You have a memory of a time in your life and then you look back to the diary and you realize you had a completely different experience from what you later imagined you were having.”
‘Dìdi’
One of the freshest films I saw at Sundance this year was Sean Wang’s “Dìdi,” a film that endearingly captures the awkwardness of adolescence. Set in the summer of 2008, the film follows 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang) as he gets ready to start high school. The film has the same wild energy as someone who hasn’t yet learned the restrictions of worrying about being cool, as Wang’s performance conveys a sense of playfulness, imagination and freedom.
Sean Wang’s documentary short “Nai Nai and Wài Pó,” about his two grandmothers, was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year and is streaming on Disney+.
In a review of “Dìdi” for The Times, Katie Walsh wrote: “Sean Wang’s commitment to realism means that some of the storylines don’t feel entirely finished — just as storylines in life often don’t. Chris messes up, he wallows, he does his best to make things right and they don’t always wrap up neatly. He keeps moving forward, trying to figure out who he is, what he wants and to feel secure enough to savor those short, blissful moments of connection and freedom. Friends come and go, but family remains. We watch his journey to arriving at that simple but profound realization and, well, I guess this is growing up.”
Two tellings of Watergate
In what may be one of the best double-bill pairings of the year, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the New Beverly will play Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 “All the President’s Men” along with Andrew Fleming’s 1999 “Dick.”
“All the President’s Men” is, of course, the story of how Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) relentlessly chased down the story of a burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., and uncovered a scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon. The film won four Academy Awards, including supporting actor for Jason Robards as editor Ben Bradlee and adapted screenplay for William Goldman.
“Dick,” on the other hand, is the fanciful tale of how two 1972 D.C. high schoolers (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) inadvertently land themselves in the middle of the emerging Watergate scandal. Here Woodward and Bernstein are played by Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch, while Dan Hedaya’s portrayal of Nixon may be the venerable character actor’s finest turn.
In his original review, Kevin Thomas wrote: “At the heart of the film is the transformation of two perfectly normal teenagers, who intuitively sense that the Vietnam War is wrong but who are momentarily charmed by their president, who assures them that he is laying the groundwork for peace as he speaks. Their inadvertent firsthand experiences, however, leave them as disillusioned with Nixon and his administration as the American public would soon be. … Dunst and Williams are a constant delight, making clear that the girls’ naivete does not mean that they are in any way stupid.”
In an interview at the time, Fleming said: “How do you make a satire out of a farce? There were so many shenanigans and so many kooky characters, we kind of felt freer to be more broad. These people were being so irreverent with the public trust, we didn’t feel we were being irreverent to them.”
Also in the news
TIFF takes shape
The Toronto International Film Festival has begun to unveil larger sections of the programming for this year’s event, which runs Sept. 5 to 15. Among the titles in the Gala and Special Presentations sections will be the world premieres of Angelina Jolie’s “Without Blood,” Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” starring Pamela Anderson, and Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball,” co-written with “Reservation Dogs’” co-creator Sterlin Harjo.
Other notable titles include Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” Morgan Neville’s animated doc “Piece by Piece, and Michael Gracey’s “Better Man.”
Later in the the week it was revealed that the Discovery section will include the world premiere of Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse” starring Chloë Sevigny, Lily McInerny and Claes Bang, while the Midnight Madness section will open with the North American premiere of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
