Tag Archives: Nuart Theatre

TOM OF FINLAND

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“My aim is not to create an ideal but to draw beautiful men who love each other and are proud of it.” — Touko Laaksonen (Tom of Finland)*

Uniforms, muscles, and same-sex abandon aside, a key component in the liberating force of Laaksonen’s art was the smiles his lumberjacks and leathermen exchanged while they went about their business, giving and taking pleasure.

Laaksonen’s imagery provided a necessary tonic to the “tragic homosexual” narrative that marked much of the twentieth century’s imagery and literature. By creating a shame-free culture, and “eroticizing the symbols of heterosexual musculinity and making them rebound onto themselves, Tom challenged the qualities read into them by straight society… He largely canceled out the image of the male as eternally dominant by consistently shifting the balance of power… His hyper-masculine universe is not a confirmation of male logic, but its violation.” — Micha Ramakers**

Tom’s life and work can be seen on the big screen in the new feature TOM OF FINLAND, directed by Dome Karukoski. Tom is played by Pekka Strang, who will appear in person on opening night.

 

TOM OF FINLAND, through November 2.

AMC DINE-IN SUNSET, 8000 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood.

amctheatres.com/movie-theatres/los-angeles/amc-dine-in-sunset-5

 

TOM OF FINLAND—PEKKA STRANG Q & A, Friday, October 20, after 7 pm show.

S.R. SHARP (Vice-President, Tom of Finland Foundation) and MARC BELLENGER (Mr. Long Beach Leather 2013) Q & A, Saturday, October 21, after the 7 pm show.

TOM OF FINLAND, through October 26.

NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

landmarktheatres.com/los-angeles/nuart-theatre/film-info/tom-of-finland

*Interview with Patrick Sarfati, Rebel.

**Micha Ramakers, title essay in Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 28.

From top:

Touko Laaksonen/Tom of Finland, untitled (from the story, Beach Boys 2), 1971. Image credit: Tom of Finland Foundation Permanent Collection, © Tom of Finland Foundation.

U.S. film poster, 2017.

Pekka Strang, as Touko/Tom.

DCF 1.0

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Protagonist's 'Tom of Finland' Picked in

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KOGONADA’S COLUMBUS

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To the list of modernist structures that have become cinematic characters in their own right—Casa Malaparte in Godard’s Le Mépris, Villa Necchi Campiglio in Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore—add the libraries, office buildings, churches, banks, and private homes designed by Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, Myron Goldsmith, Deborah Berke, James Stewart Polshek, and Edward Bassett that provide sanctuary for damaged souls and stand sentry against superfluity in the new film COLUMBUS.

Written and directed by Kogonada, and set in Columbus, Indiana—a modernist Oz 230 miles south-southeast of Chicago—COLUMBUS centers on Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a recent high-school graduate in her gap year (or two, or three), attuned to her city’s masterpieces, and grateful for the sense of order imposed by her surroundings. Her new friend Jin (John Cho), a new arrival, is the son of a visiting, and recently stricken, architect. At one point, Casey mentions to Jin that a building they’re walking toward is “asymmetrical, but also still balanced.” She could be describing herself.

The film takes the form of Modernism itself: spare, mysterious, inspiring contemplation, at times deliberately elliptical—but richly rewarding for viewers willing to stop and look and listen.

COLUMBUS, September 29 through October 5.

MUSIC HALL, 9036 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills.

Through September 7.

PLAYHOUSE, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

Through August 31.

LANDMARK, 10850 West Pico Boulevard, Rancho Park, Los Angeles.

MONICA FILM CENTER, 1332 2nd Street, Santa Monica.

Through August 24.

TOWN CENTER, 17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino.

laemmle.com/films/42766

landmarktheatres.com/los-angeles/film-info/columbus

COLUMBUS, through August 10.

Kogonada will participate in a Q&A after the 5 pm and 7:30 pm shows on Sunday, August 6.

NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

landmarktheatres.com/los-angeles/nuart-theatre/film-info/columbus

Also see:  landmarktheatres.com/columbus-filmmaker-letter

and:  kogonada.com

Bottom: Miller House, Eero Saarinen, 1953. Interior design by Alexander Girard. Garden design by Dan Kiley.

Image credit: Indianapolis Museum of Art.

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O ORNITÓLOGO AT THE NUART

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Last November, local audiences caught a single screening of João Pedro Rodrigues’ O ORNITÓLOGO at the AFI festival, and now it’s back for a full-week run at the Nuart.

“O ORNITÓLOGO is consistently unsettling, but it also simultaneously allows us to enter a meditative zone, savoring the stately grandeur of the images as well as the startling competency of Fernando, a fetishized stud from the Jason Statham Institute of Abs and Buttocks who weathers danger with comic unflappability.

“Rodrigues is a rapt and daring formalist, who stages suspense-film set pieces as if they’re moments from an observational documentary, grounding heightened tropes in a convincing faux-reality. He also has a perversely unruly streak that gradually comes to O ORNITÓLOGO’s fore. The first hour suggests the film that might have resulted if Tarkovsky had directed a 1970s Australian thriller, but Rodrigues is ultimately after different aesthetic game.” — Chuck Bowen

Rodrigues dubs Hamy’s voice throughout the film—a doubling that, by the end of the film, takes corporeal form.

O ORNITÓLOGO/THE ORNITHOLOGIST

Through July 6.

Nuart

11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

From top: Paul Hamy in O Ornitólogo (2016); Hamy (left) and Xelo Cagiao (2). Image credit: Strand Releasing.

DEVOS AND BAYE IN MOKA

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MOKA is the color of the car that killed Emmanuelle Devos’ son in a hit-and-run. Nathalie Baye, a beauty shop proprietor, is Devos’ quarry. MOKA—shot in the Lake Geneva area—is a French thriller, so things might not be what they seem. Olivier Chantreau co-stars as Vincent.

Director Frédéric Mermoud’s script is based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel of the same name. Mermoud: “As an actress, Devos embodies so many different emotions. Her face is a whole story unto itself. My aim was to exhaust Emmanuelle: to have the camera follow her face incredibly closely, to capture her soul, her tiniest vibrations. That was the origin of the project.”*

MOKA, through June 29 in Los Angeles.

NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Through July 6 in Berkeley.

SHATTUCK CINEMAS, 2230 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley.

landmarktheatres.com/los-angeles/nuart-theatre/film-info/moka

landmarktheatres.com/san-francisco-east-bay/shattuck-cinemas

*landmarktheatres.com/moka-filmmaker-letter

Nathalie Baye and Emmanuelle Devos in Moka (2017), directed by Frédéric Mermoud. Image credit: Film Movement.

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ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

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Three years ago, director Michal Marczak—not quite aged out of the scene—immersed himself in the club and party culture of Warsaw’s early-twenty-somethings, determined to cast and document this army of would-be lovers in their endless summer dance of intense and fleeting pleasures.

“I knew it was now or never,” Marczak said at a recent screening of ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, speaking of his need to capture the reckless abandon of his protagonists while he was still young enough to appreciate it.

During the filming of this poetic “feature-documentary,” the sense of disillusionment that the characters only flirt with descended on the country as a whole, as the Polish government took a hard-right swing into nationalism.

ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS won the Best Director award in the World Cinema—Documentary section at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and is now playing at the Nuart.

 

ALL THESE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, through April 13.

Saturday through Monday, and Wednesday and Thursday: noon, 2:30 pm, 5 pm, 7:30 pm, 9:50 pm. Director Q & A on Saturday after 7:30 pm show.

Tuesday, April 11 at noon, 2:30 pm, 5 pm and 10:10 pm.

NUART THEATRE, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles.

landmarktheatres.com/FilmCalendar/Nuart_calendar_2017_0310_0511.pdf

 

Image: All These Sleepless Nights press photo.

Krzysztof Baginski and Eva Lebuef in All These Sleepless Nights. Press photo.