Monday, June 21, 2010 5:30PM - By Tom von Logue Newth
The fact that Argentinian director Leopoldo Torres Nilsson is barely spoken of these days is cause for outcry. Happily, the LA Film Festival has programmed a mini retrospective of four of his 30-plus features from the fifties to the mid-seventies. In his day, his was a name was one to watch at the European film festivals, a world cinema auteur ranked with Welles, Bergman, and Buñuel. The first of Nilsson’s films I’ve been able to see, La casa del angel (House of the Angel, 1957) is remarkably worthy of the comparison…
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Monday, June 21, 2010 3:57PM - By Tom von Logue Newth
The 16th Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off on Thursday with Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are Alright. But I forbore from braving the downtown Lakers insanity by starting on Friday with the Danish prison movie R. And this is what it’s like:
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Monday, June 21, 2010 1:00PM - By Tom von Logue Newth
The second film in the LA Film Festival‘s mini retrospective of Argentinian Leopoldo Torres Nilsson was 1959′s La Caída (The Fall). A once-highly respected director, his profile has plummeted since his heyday of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and his presence at the festival is a valuable opportunity for at least a partial return to the pantheon.
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010 11:03AM - By Tom von Logue Newth
The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival opens this Thursday in its new downtown location. I can’t say I am especially pleased at its moving from the comfortable leafy environs of Westwood to the soulless consumer-trap island of the LA Live complex, but then again I hardly one to stand against urban regeneration and the festival has picked up a raft of eager new local sponsors, so overall it’s probably for the best.
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Thursday, July 2, 2009 10:38AM - By Mali Elfman
Last week at the LA Film Festival, writer/director Sophie Barthes premiered her third film Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti (check out the trailer and poster). After the screening, both of them got up to talk about making a comedy about a world where soul-removal is the new Xanax.
In a world were consumers can have anything they want people choose to go soulless as easily as they decide to give up carbs. Of course, an actor struggling with Chekov is the perfect subject for someone looking to lighten their mood.
In the film Paul Giamatti plays several different versions of himself in search of the best performance of the character, unfortunately everything goes wrong when his soul gets mysteriously “misplaced” and he finds himself in Russia searching for it…
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009 2:29PM - By Tom von Logue Newth
The LA Film Festival wrapped up on Sunday night with the closing gala of Ponyo, Miyazaki Hayao’s latest. Not being a great fan of animation, Miyazaki, or twee children’s dross I gave it a miss, although I may just be a curmudgeonly old cinephile with no soul. But if I’d seen that I’d have missed the sole screening of United Red Army, which was well worth the effort: a three-hour docudrama about the paramilitary student radical movement in Japan in the sixties and first two years of the seventies, culminating in a recreation of the Asama-Sanso Incident police siege for which the director used and destroyed his own house.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009 11:18AM - By Mali Elfman
Ready to laugh your ass off and cry your eyes out? Probably one of the most honest, heartfelt, and feel good movies of the LA Film Festival is After the Storm directed by Hilla Medalia.
The film follows a group of legendary New York Broadway actors Gerry McIntyre, James Lecesne, Randy Redd, who were inspired to help the youth of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The problem is, they didn’t know what to do, so they decided that the best way for help was to do what they knew best, put on a show!
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009 11:01AM - By Mali Elfman
Definitely one of the best films at The LA Film Festival was Branson. When you think of some of the great places to see a live show, where do you think of? Broadway? Hollywood? Vegas? I bet Branson, Missouri isn’t the first thing that pops into your head, but it is quickly becoming THE place for singers, dancers, and performers to strut their stuff on stage.
Director Brent Meeseke, set out to make a documentary about a family who tried to eBay their son, when suddenly everything fell apart and he found himself and a camera crew alone in Branson. Just when he was about to give up, he looked around him and realized his real story was right around him.
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Monday, June 29, 2009 7:08PM - By Tom von Logue Newth
Wakamatsu Kôji’s United Red Army - the Path to Asama Mountain Lodge was the the final installment of the “films that got away” at this year’s LA Film Festival. Its Japanese premiere was in Yufuin back in 2007 and it has since played to great acclaim in Berlin, London and Turin, finally making its way to the US last night.
The film divides roughly into three sections across its three-hour running time and culminates in the infamous 1972 mountain lodge siege, the last stand refuge of five members of the radical leftist student group, the United Red Army. A title announces at the start that the film is factual, but with fictional elements interposed, and it begins with a dizzying documentary recap of radical student action from 1960 to 1971, comprised of newsreel footage, statistics of actions and arrests, and a frankly bewildering number of name and age captions for the actors and actresses who gradually pop up. From the humble beginnings of objections to raised tuition fees the various student groups combine, divide, get bitten by the bug of communism, fight amongst themselves, hijack aeroplanes, train in Palestine and eventually two of the paramilitary factions join forces to become the United Red Army.
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