Laemmle's Music Hall 3

Turn on your spaceships and fire up the jukebox. In writer-director Paul Bunnell's supremely ridiculous tale, 1950s-style rebel Johnny X (Will Keenan) and his coed gang of dropouts, the Ghastly Ones, are exiled to Earth from their faraway planet.... More »

Turn on your spaceships and fire up the jukebox. In writer-director Paul Bunnell's supremely ridiculous tale, 1950s-style rebel Johnny X (Will Keenan) and his coed gang of dropouts, the Ghastly Ones, are exiled to Earth from their faraway planet. Their crime, it seems, is performing selfish deeds involving a powerful device called the Resurrection Suit (guess what it does). One year later, at a desert diner, they meet an opportunistic concert promoter who knows the whereabouts of a man Johnny has been seeking: aging rock 'n' roll singer Mickey Flynn (Creed Bratton, having a ball). Meanwhile, Johnny’s ex-girlfriend joins forces with a nebbishy soda jerk to keep Johnny from reuniting with the Resurrection Suit once and for all. Musical numbers add sass to the proceedings, but Grease this ain’t, and the lackluster songs and questionable singing abilities of the cast makes this at times feel like a high school theater production. The movie works in fleeting moments when it eases its death grip on eye-rollingly obvious homages to sci-fi B-movies and clichéd 1950s teen-speak (think "Daddy-o"s and finger-snapping) and embraces its own brand of irreverent weirdness. The script, while as uneven as the dusty desert roads the characters cruise in their Thunderbirds, offers up a few funny one-liners and sight gags. Who knows; The Ghastly Love of Johnny X could be another so-bad-it's-passable-entertainment cult hit Gen Y never knew it wanted. « Less

9:55 PM

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone... More »

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made and feels like a grindhouse version of a 1950s beach-party movie: Where the Boys Are Pimps and Gangstas. It’s impossible to say where exploitation ends and deconstructionism begins. Four undergraduate friends—Brit, Faith, Candy and Cotty—are jonesing for a primal escape. In a casting coup, the girls are played by Disney and Teen People princesses—Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, along with Pretty Little Liars star Ashley Benson—who set their good-girl images ablaze. These Cinderellas dream of the Florida ball (or, given the lewd drawings we see two of them making in their history-class notebooks, balls), but a cash-flow problem threatens to leave them stranded on campus. So, they opt to hold up a local diner with squirt guns, ski masks and a Godardian resolve to transform life into cinema: “Just fuckin’ pretend it’s a video game. Act like you’re in a movie or something.” What follows is nothing if not bravura moviemaking—a robbery filmed in one continuous take from the p.o.v. of the getaway car as it circles the outside of the building. As a corn-rowed, elaborately tattooed hip-hop star with a sideline in drug and arms dealing, James Franco a consistent astonishment. Franco and Korine are so suited to collaboration, it’s amazing it didn’t happen sooner—two prankster artists whose straight-faced self-parody can skirt the sublime. « Less

10:00 PM

This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars, but has its easy pleasures, and The Sapphires is likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, who played the... More »

This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars, but has its easy pleasures, and The Sapphires is likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, who played the laid-back highway patrolman in Bridesmaids (2011), stars as Dave Lovelace, a musician living out of his car who stumbles upon a gifted girl group in rural Australia circa 1968. The four young women are Aboriginals, and as such are shunned and abused by white neighbors they’ve known all their lives. When Julie (Jessica Mauboy), the one with the really great voice, sees an advertisement seeking acts to perform for American troops in Vietnam, she convinces the others (Deborah Mailman, Shari Sebbens, and Miranda Tapsell) to audition. After Dave encourages the girls to switch their repertoire from Merle Haggard to Otis Redding tunes, the girls soon find themselves performing in Saigon and the war zone beyond. First-time director Wayne Blair and screenwriters Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, adapting Briggs’ stage play, don’t shy away from the era’s social complexities, but they keep their eye on the ball, which in this case is the sweet pull of soul tune harmony. Why resist? « Less

(12:00 PM), 5:00 PM

A Jesus-and-Mary dynamic becomes psychosexually twisted-- replete with a horrific mother-son handjob-- in Pietà, an intriguing tale of redemption and rebirth from director Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring; Three-Iron) that... More »

A Jesus-and-Mary dynamic becomes psychosexually twisted-- replete with a horrific mother-son handjob-- in Pietà, an intriguing tale of redemption and rebirth from director Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring; Three-Iron) that eventually segues into a more conventional revenge drama. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a loan shark who cripples deadbeats in order to collect his money via insurance payouts; his life is upended after he's approached by a woman (Cho Min-soo) claiming to be his long-lost mom. This maternal figure soon transforms the thug through her saintly remorse for abandoning Kang-do and her benevolence toward him despite his nasty profession. It's during the first hour, however, that Kim's expertly modulated morality play is most gripping, presenting Kang-do's hand-smashing, leg-breaking brutality for profit as a reflection of a Korean society in which the industrial working class is crushed underfoot by corporate capitalist development. Alas, after establishing a central parent-child relationship rife with wacko biblical undertones, the director finds nowhere to take his story except into standard vengeance territory, a twist that leads to rote suspense that isn't enlivened by the climax's telegraphed ironies. A coda strives to capture a sense of tragically earned transcendence, but the film is far more fascinating when mucking around in hell. « Less

2:30 PM, 7:30 PM, 10:00 PM

It's time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of '60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. Once it gets its walkers moving, Robert Redford's The Company You Keep nearly plays like a green-granola-lefty counterpart to... More »

It's time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of '60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. Once it gets its walkers moving, Robert Redford's The Company You Keep nearly plays like a green-granola-lefty counterpart to The Expendables, a Hollywood Elderhostel reunion crowded with septuagenarian icons looking back on the righteousness and failures of the Nixon–'Nam era with rheumy retirees' eyeballs. The story, from Neil Gordon's novel about the contemporary fate of a few surviving Weather Underground fugitives, all but blows a trumpet for how rad rad used to be. First Susan Sarandon's Vermont housewife, her kids all grown up, throws in the secret-identity towel and surrenders herself to the FBI; from there, the dominoes tumble, leading cub reporter Shia LaBeouf to uncover the similarly fake ID of Redford's upstate lawyer, sending this suede-faced ex-Weatherman running. The FBI closes in, LaBeouf's annoying snoop pesters every single other character motivated only by his journalistic creed, and withering guest-stars (Julie Christie, Sam Elliott, Richard Jenkins, a phlegm-plagued Nick Nolte) emerge to crinkle and wheeze about the good old days of bank robberies and protests. Redford’s noble Methuselah isn't just self-preserving-- he's got an unseasonably preadolescent daughter to worry about, and a case for his own redemption to make. It's little surprise that The Company You Keep turns out to be politically chicken-hearted—the progressive cant we hear sounds idiotic, and political principles are seen as pathetic challenges to the demands of family and law and order. Redford succeeds only in defanging the idea of resistance altogether. Far from engaged, the film surrenders in an arthritic faint. « Less

4:30 PM, 7:20 PM

In April, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad resigned from office, five months after Palestine received non-member observer state status at the United Nations. The new documentary State 194 teases apart Fayyad's efforts to make Palestine the... More »

In April, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad resigned from office, five months after Palestine received non-member observer state status at the United Nations. The new documentary State 194 teases apart Fayyad's efforts to make Palestine the 194th member state of the U.N., and how those efforts were received in Palestine, Israel, and abroad. Filmmaker Dan Setton highlights the grinding political processes that halted the realization of a two-state solution and full recognition of Palestine. The best part of State 194 is its domesticity, its low-key approach to a conflict that has been widely sensationalized in the media. Fayyad is depicted not just as an international spokesperson for a peaceful struggle, but as a man whose wife criticizes him for not packing enough oil in with the olives. He is Westernized and palatable to American and Israeli leadership—and to many Palestinians. The heated, urgent talk here comes from activists-- from the rallying masses of youth in Ramallah calling for a united front rather than Fatah's and Hamas's factionalization of the Palestinian nationalist movement, to the rage-filled speech of an Israeli woman urging Palestine's recognition. Fayyad expresses hope for his country, but his personal comfort and privilege--the ability to travel, to access sufficient water-- suggest that his hardships are more ideological than the harsh realities faced by many Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Is the two-state solution more appealing to Westerners with the ability to ignore the conflict? Will Palestine gain international recognition? The film delivers no answers, but it ably articulates how important it will be to keep asking those questions. « Less

(12:00 PM), 2:10 PM

Danish director Phie Ambo, who previously made the Nicolas Winding Refn cine-portrait Gambler, set out to document the therapeutic effects of meditation after its techniques helped her recover from panic attacks. The resulting film’s advocacy of... More »

Danish director Phie Ambo, who previously made the Nicolas Winding Refn cine-portrait Gambler, set out to document the therapeutic effects of meditation after its techniques helped her recover from panic attacks. The resulting film’s advocacy of breathing exercises as an alternative to medication, especially for small children, seems medically plausible, even responsible. But Ambo’s argument is frayed by her arbitrary recommendations of meditation as a panacea for unrelated psychological difficulties. Even more baffling, the director neglects to define this culturally and geographically variable practice with any exactitude; one talking head’s description of meditation as “the study of kindness and compassion” is so insubstantial it may as well be a Zen koan. Ambo’s camera follows two PTSD-stricken ex-soldiers, Steve and Rich, as they participate in a weeklong meditation therapy, and an adorable kindergartner with ADHD named Will who slaps his own face as his classmates clap and sing. All three make compelling subjects, but the film could utilize them better by elucidating how Will’s empathy-building exercises—the kind of educational admonishments teachers pass out like carrot sticks during recess—relate to the veterans’ intense contemplation of the (rather silly) question, “Do you have a thumb, or are you your thumb?” Ambo likewise wastes her scientific experts by having them coo over the mysteries of meditation instead of explaining how compassionate thoughts alter neurochemistry. Devotees may enjoy seeing their practice in (proverbial) action, but the veterans’ therapy is too short and qualitatively evaluated to convince skeptics or would-be recruits. « Less

(1:00 PM), 3:10 PM, 5:20 PM, 7:30 PM