Newsletter: Indie Focus: Looking ahead with Holiday Sneaks plus ‘Loving’ and ‘Gimme Danger’
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This weekend’s print edition features the Los Angeles Times Holiday Movie Sneaks. As always, it is a great primer on the best of what to look for in the months ahead. Rebecca Keegan — whom we are sad to see leave The Times but happy to see land in a new position at Vanity Fair — wrote stories on actress Amy Adams and the directors of the animated film “Moana.” Critics Kenneth Turan and Justin Chang give a seasonal overview. Amy Kaufman examined the real Los Angeles locations featured in “La La Land.” Josh Rottenberg has a rundown of the season’s comedies. Tre’vell Anderson spoke to Janelle Monae on her transition to acting in “Moonlight” and “Hidden Figures.” Steve Zeitchik looks at Kenneth Lonergan and “Manchester by the Sea.” And Glen Whipp provides a cheat sheet on this year’s Oscar conversations.
And oh, yes, I went to Warren Beatty’s house to talk about his new film “Rules Don’t Apply” and more generally what it’s like, you know, being Warren Beatty. Of his time away from making movies, he said, “I got caught up in the urgencies of life … You might say that I luxuriated in that thing that fame affords, which is access.”
“Rules Don’t Apply” will be the opening night film for this year’s AFI Fest film festival. The festival is again providing a great opportunity for local audiences to catch up with films from earlier in the year alongside a few new titles. L.A. will get its first glimpse at films such as Pablo Larraín’s “Jackie” and “Neruda,” Sophia Takal’s “Always Shine,” Agnieszka Smoczynska’s “The Lure,” Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama,” Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women” and lots more. And if the programming didn’t already make it one of the tent poles of the annual L.A. moviegoing calendar, public tickets are free!
There are also a lot of great Times screening events coming up, including Tom Ford’s “Nocturnal Animals,” Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” and Maren Ade’s “Toni Erdmann.” We’ve got a lot more awards season screenings and Q&A events coming soon. For more information, check in with events.latimes.com
‘Loving’
The new drama “Loving” is the real-life story about the couple Mildred and Richard Loving, who fought the state of Virginia over its interracial marriage ban. With gentle, nuanced performances by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the film, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, takes on a quiet power.
In his review for The Times, Kenneth Turan called it “an unpretentious film about unassuming real people, but don’t let that mislead you … Just as Richard and Mildred Loving ended up overturning the status quo and making American legal history, so this feature on their lives by writer-director Jeff Nichols turns out to be a film of quiet but quite significant strengths.”
In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film “plucks two figures from history and imagines them as they once were, when they were people instead of monuments to American exceptionalism. It was, the movie insists, the absolute ordinariness of their love that defined them, and that made the fight for it into an indelible story of this country.”
For the Village Voice, Bilge Ebiri noted that “While ‘Loving’ is intimate, it’s not indulgent; it seems to have absorbed Richard Loving’s eyes-on-the-road humility and his wife’s down-home pragmatism … We get no broad cathartic moments — no great breakdowns, speeches, or confrontations. By the end, though, don’t be surprised if your face is awash in tears.”
And The Times’ Steve Zeitchik spoke to Nichols when the film premiered at Cannes.
“You look at this film from a distance and there are so many pitfalls for melodrama or histrionics,” the writer-director said in an interview with The Times. “But then you start to look at these people and they’re not melodramatic.”
He added, “The big decision wasn’t ‘Let me move away from any cliché.’ It was ‘Let me confine myself to these people and see where that takes us.’ And where it takes us is a very restrained film.”
And Rebecca Keegan spoke to Negga about the story’s contemporary resonance.
“We’re living in a very tumultuous time,” Negga said. “People are looking for integrity somewhere, for a direction to take. The Lovings’ story isn’t over.”
‘Gimme Danger’
“Gimme Danger” is a documentary by Jim Jarmusch on the high-energy, high-drama rock band the Stooges, best known for launching the career of singer Iggy Pop. I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Pop and Jarmusch together recently.
Of the band’s hard-scrabble early days, when their live shows could become confrontations with angry audiences, Pop said, “The original group was, right from the beginning, repeatedly rejected, aggressively rejected. And it made me angry. Angry in the way of, ‘Hey, we’re fighting bears here.’ This is not a joke. We’re talking survival.”
In her review for The Times, Sheri Linden observed, “Jarmusch puts his cards on the table and his heart on his sleeve, declaring the Stooges ‘the greatest rock ’n’ roll band ever’ in the film’s opening minutes. ‘Gimme Danger’ is essentially a family album assembled by an enamored outsider … The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With ‘Gimme Danger,’ Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.”
Ty Burr of the Boston Globe wrote, “If ‘Gimme Danger’ never quite solves the secret of Iggy’s onstage atavism — how he pushed the myth of sheer, unhinged rock ’n’ roll abandon until he embodied it better (or worse) than anyone else, ever — it reminds us of when he was, verily, the velociraptor of popular music.”
Ann Hornaday at the Washington Post called the film “bracing and atmospheric,” while adding, “A bittersweet, elegiac tone can’t help but suffuse a film animated by so many anarchic spirits who have since left the planet, but it leaves viewers with the exhilarating, inspiring reassurance that we still have Iggy. To adopt his own highest praise: That’s cool.”
‘Blonde Crazy: Joan Blondell’ at UCLA
The UCLA Film and Television archive has begun a tribute to the actress Joan Blondell with the series “Blonde Crazy: Joan Blondell.” In her long career she appeared in such films as “Blonde Crazy,” “Three on a Match,” “Footlight Parade,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night,” all of which are among those in the series.
In a look at Blondell’s career, Kenneth Turan wrote, “Always a super-trouper, rarely a stand-alone star, Joan Blondell is an unexpected choice to be the focus of a full-dress Barbara Stanwyck/Greta Garbo-style UCLA Film & Television Archive career retrospective.
“But here she is front and center … big as life, twice as sassy and something of a revelation.”
Curiously, it was just announced that actress Kathy Bates will play Blondell in Ryan Murphy’s upcoming television anthology series “Feud,” about the relationship between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.
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