Why a boutique video label is taking over L.A.’s theaters, plus the week’s best movies
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Among this week’s new releases is “28 Years Later,” the third film in the series that dates back to 2002’s “28 Days Later.” The new project reunites the core creative team from the first movie: director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and producer Andrew Macdonald.
This time out the “rage” virus that turns people into crazed cannibal monsters has been isolated to the U.K., which has been quarantined from the rest of the world. A small community of uninfected survivors live on a coastal island and make their way to the mainland to hunt and for supplies. A teenage boy (Alfie Williams), having made one expedition with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes back with his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) in search of a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) rumored to be able to help them.
In her review of the film, Amy Nicholson wrote that it “has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It’s a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.”
“28 Years Later” is the first film in a planned trilogy, with the second film, directed by Nia DaCosta, having already been shot.
I spoke with Boyle, Garland, Mantle and Macdonald for a feature story that will be in print on Sunday. Whereas the original “28 Days Later” was notable for its use of consumer-grade digital video cameras, this time the production used modified iPhones to capture most of its imagery. The result is a fresh and distinctive look with both a sense of immediacy and an unexpected beauty.
“What was great about the script is that although you were inheriting some DNA from the original film, it was a completely original story,” said Boyle. “And deserved to be treated like that.”
Cinématographe heads to L.A. theaters
This week the boutique home video label Cinématographe is participating in screenings all over town, further cementing the evolving relationship between physical media and the local revival scene.
Curated and produced by Justin LaLiberty as an offshoot of the Vinegar Syndrome label, Cinématographe is among a handful of companies that create releases meant to look as nice on your shelf as they do onscreen. With beautiful restorations presenting the titles as optimally as possible, the releases come with many extras highlighting their production and what makes them special, alongside new critical essays on the films. Among the titles released by the company so far are John Dahl’s “Red Rock West,” Paul Schrader’s “Touch,” Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us” and Martha Coolidge’s “Joy of Sex.”
“Cinématographe has a very specific kind of curatorial approach,” said LaLiberty in a Zoom call this week from his home in Connecticut. “And it also has a mission in that it’s trying to shine a light on these movies that have fallen into obscurity for one reason or another.”
Working in conjunction with the local screening collective Hollywood Entertainment in pulling together some of the local events, LaLiberty got a sense of the current repertory scene in L.A. and hopes that putting on Cinématographe screenings here is something that can become a regular occurrence.
“What I like about L.A.’s cinema scene, without being there, is seeing how the spaces cater to different audiences,” said LaLiberty. “It happens in New York to an extent too, but I’ve noticed it a lot more with L.A. where I think just by virtue of geography, those theaters have to build a community that’s a lot more specific to whatever their mission may be or whatever audience they’re trying to cultivate is. So that’s what I tried to do with these screenings is kind of hone in on what demographic those spaces are going to reach and what film made the most sense for each one.”
On Sunday at Brain Dead Studios there will be a restored 4K screening of the exuberant 1983 remake of “Breathless” with director Jim McBride in person. That will be followed by the Los Angeles premiere of the 4K restoration of Bob Saget’s 1998 comedy “Dirty Work,” starring Norm MacDonald, in its newly created “Dirtier Cut,” which restores the film to a version screened for test audiences before it was chopped down to earn a PG-13 rating. Co-writer Frank Sebastiano will be in attendance.
On Monday, LaLiberty will be at a pop-up at the Highland Park video store Vidéotheque, selling discs from Cinématographe, Vinegar Syndrome and affiliated titles from OCN Distribution — including some that are out of print. (Discs will be on sale at all the events too.)
On Tuesday at Whammy Analog Media, 1994’s essential lesbian rom-com “Go Fish” will show in a 4K restoration with director and co-writer Rose Troche in person. On Wednesday, there will be a 45th anniversary screening at Vidiots of the 4K restoration of Ronald F. Maxwell’s 1980 “Little Darlings,” starring Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol as two teenage girls having a private competition at summer camp to lose their virginity.
On Thursday, in conjunction with Cinematic Void, the Los Feliz 3 will host a showing of John Badham’s 1994 action-thriller “Drop Zone” starring Wesley Snipes, with the director in person.
And while it may seem counterintuitive for a home video label to be encouraging people to go see movies in theaters, for LaLiberty the two go hand in hand.
“My ultimate mission is for these films to find an audience,” LaLiberty said. “‘Little Darlings’ is one of those movies that was out of circulation for so long that now that it’s back and people can find it — to me that’s the work. The end goal is that these films are brought back and that they’re available for people to see and talk about and share. Theaters can play them and have them look great. I don’t see it as cannibalizing. I see it as just being a part of the job.”
‘Rebels of the Neon Millennium’
The American Cinematheque is launching a series looking at films from Southeast Asia made around the turn of the 21st century and shot through with the energy of specific Y2K anxieties. These were films that felt cutting-edge and of the moment when they were released, but now perhaps function at least in part as memory pieces of their time and place. This is a sharp, smartly put-together series that contextualizes a group of films and filmmakers.
Kicking off with Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 “Fallen Angels,” the series also includes Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 “Millennium Mambo,” Tsai Ming-liang’s 1992 “Rebels of the Neon God,” Fruit Chan’s 1997 “Made in Hong Kong,” Shunji Iwai’s 2001 “All About Lily Chou-Chou” Jia Zhangke’s 2002 “Unknown Pleasures” and Lou Ye’s 2000 “Suzhou River.”
Writing about “Fallen Angels” in 1998, Kevin Thomas called it “an exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people. … Indeed, ‘Fallen Angels’ celebrates youth, individuality and daring in a ruthless environment that is wholly man-made, a literal underworld similar to the workers’ realm of ‘Metropolis’ — only considerably less spacious. Life proceeds at a corrosive rock music beat.”
Points of interest
‘Dogtooth’ in 4K
Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ second feature, “Dogtooth,” was his international breakthrough, winner of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and nominated for an Oscar. Yet even its most ardent admirers at the time would likely never have imagined Lanthimos would become the maker of commercially successful, Oscar-winning (and still weird) films such as “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.”
A new 4K restoration of “Dogtooth” will screen at the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 on Saturday, Tuesday and Sunday the 29th. The story feels abstracted and fractured, as a family lives in comfortable isolation, creating their own rules and language as the parents attempt to keep their children, now young adults, in a state of arrested development.
When it was first being released, “Dogtooth” struggled to find screens in Los Angeles. In my January 2011 review, I referred to it as “part enigma, part allegory and even part sci-fi in its creation of a completely alternate reality.”
When the film had its local premiere as part of the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival some seven months earlier, I spoke to Lanthimos, who perhaps pointed the way to some of his future work when he said, “It’s much more important to me for the audience to be engaged and to think about things themselves. If they miss any information, I’m OK with that instead of explaining every little detail and telling everyone what they should be thinking and how exactly things are.”
Lanthimos added, “People ask me if the film is about home-schooling or if it’s political, about totalitarian states or the information we get from the media. And of course all those things were not in our minds as we were making the film, but it was intentional to make the film so people can come in and have their own thoughts about it.”
‘The Seven Year Itch’ 70th anniversary
On Wednesday the Laemmle Royal will present a 70th anniversary screening of Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” introduced by film writers Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan. Starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, “Itch” was written by Wilder and George Axelrod, an adaptation of the hit Broadway play that also starred Ewell.
Though the movie does include the iconic scene of Monroe standing over a subway grate, it deserves to be remembered for much more than that. It’s a bracing satire of midcentury masculinity, with Ewell playing a mild-mannered family man who lets himself be taken away by fantasies of what may happen while he is on his own for a summer with a young single woman living upstairs from his New York apartment.
Writing about the movie in June 1955, Edwin Schallert said, “This picture is nothing for the moralists, though it may not quite satisfy the immoralists either, whoever they are.”
In other news
Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton among honorary Oscar recipients
This week the motion picture academy announced four honorees for the Governors Awards in November. Dolly Parton will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, while honorary Oscars will go to actor, dancer, choreographer and director Debbie Allen, production designer Wynn Thomas and actor and producer Tom Cruise.
As always, it must be noted how disappointing it is that these awards will be bestowed at an untelevised ceremony and not as part of the Academy Awards telecast itself. The idea of giving an award to Tom Cruise, who has recently refashioned himself as nothing less than an international ambassador for movies and Hollywood in general, and not putting it on TV is just beyond reason.
Here is hoping that Cruise will perhaps be able to do what his co-star in “The Color of Money” Paul Newman once did, which is win a competitive Oscar after already being given an honorary one.
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