‘Nashville’ and the movie year 1975, plus the week’s best films in L.A.
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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.
Tim Grierson paid a visit to the Criterion Mobile Closet last weekend, as the cinephile totem made its first ever stop in Los Angeles, parked in front of Vidiots. Fans began lining up at 5 a.m. and the line was cut off at 9:30 a.m., before things had even opened. Folks waited in the rain for hours, with the closet staying open an extra hour to accommodate everyone.
What were they all waiting for? A chance to spend three minutes surrounded by every available title from the venerable home video label, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. (Attendees could choose three discs to purchase at a discount.) Videos of celebrities stopping by the supply closet of the company’s New York offices — Ben Affleck recently dropped in — have become an online phenomenon. The Mobile Closet extends that enthusiasm to everyday fans.
“For the 40th anniversary, we’ve been talking about, ‘What could we do that truly engages all the people that love film?’” Nur El Shami, Criterion’s chief marketing officer, explained about the Mobile Closet’s origins. “Somebody said, almost as a joke, ‘What if we put the Closet in a truck?’ We were like, ‘You know what? Maybe that’s exactly what we should do.’”
The truck will be at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica on May 6 and 7. Plan to arrive early.
50 years of ‘Nashville’ and the movies of 1975
The Egyptian Theatre is launching a series celebrating the movies of 1975. And it was quite a year.
On Monday there will be a 35mm screening of Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” which won the first Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. award for best picture (shared with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a tie). The screening will be introduced by LAFCA member Peter Rainer.
Werner Herzog will be present for a screening of “The Enigma of Kasper Hauser,” which won the grand jury prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. A screening of “Cooley High” will welcome director Michael Schultz and actors Glynn Turman and Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs for a Q&A moderated by Robert Townsend.
A Tuesday screening of Robert Altman’s “Nashville” will be introduced by Keith Caradine, who won an Oscar for his original song “I’m Easy.” Ronee Blakley, who plays country music queen Barbara Jean and also wrote several songs for the film, will be there for a Q&A after the screening moderated by critic and programmer David Ansen.
In true Altmanesque fashion, “Nashville” features 24 main characters woven together over five days leading up to a benefit concert for an outsider presidential candidate, all intersecting off one another across the city. The cast includes Lily Tomlin, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Timothy Brown, Gwen Welles, Shelly Duvall, Michael Murphy, Geraldine Chaplin, Keenan Wynn, Scott Glenn and Henry Gibson. In many ways the crown jewel of Altman’s sprawling, prodigious filmography, “Nashville” is a biting satire, by turns rollicking and disturbing, with a still-relevant perspective on the intersection of politics, celebrity and entertainment.
From the moment the film first came out, there has been a debate as to whether it is a cynical put-down of Nashville as an institution and a place, or a celebration of all its gaudy glory. Either way, the film is clearly intended as a broader metaphor for America at a moment when the country was racked by turmoil and transition.
“I think it could be all those things, depending on your viewpoint,” said Blakley in a phone interview this week. “But at the time, I stuck with what I considered it to be — a tribute. I didn’t consider it sarcasm. I thought it was profound and in some ways very deeply respectful of Nashville.”
As for what made the film so special and why its legacy has lasted for 50 years, Blakley said, “I think it’s the concurrence of a bunch of gifted people at that time and place. Nixon was resigning. Altman, I think might be called a genius. It was just a bunch of talent put together by a bunch of great people. And I don’t think you could put your finger on any one thing. You would have to say [cinematographer] Paul Lohmann did beautiful photography. The editing was superb. The performances were just beyond. And the political message, such as it was, is resonant even today.”
Other films in the series include Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” Hal Ashby’s “Shampoo,” Joan Micklin Silver’s “Hester Street,” Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” and Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”
‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’ at 20
The Academy Museum will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Judd Apatow’s “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” with a 35mm screening tonight with Apatow and star and co-writer Steve Carell in-person. Apatow’s debut feature as a director, the film was a key title in the 2000s comedy boom. Carell stars as a grown man who is, indeed, still a virgin and is desperate to find someone not only to be physically intimate with, but also to forge a romantic and emotional connection with. The cast, which features Jane Lynch, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Nancy Walls, Jonah Hill, Mindy Kaling, Leslie Mann, Catherine Keener and others, is truly stacked, and the film’s finale is so riotously joyful and unexpected that it alone is worth the price of admission.
I actually spent two days on the set of the film, seeing the shooting of a nightclub scene and the now famous poker scene. (I nearly ruined a take by laughing out loud.) “The Office” had only just started to air and Carell’s star was obviously ascendant. As Carell described the film at the time, “The name is misleading to a degree. … Just based on the title, you think it’s going to be this extremely bawdy, over-the-top summer comedy. There are elements of that — really funny set pieces and craziness — but we really wanted something that was grounded in a sense of reality.”
Carell added, “I’ve certainly played a few characters that have been rather broad. With this, I didn’t want to do that. We’ll see. I hope it plays.”
In a review of the film, Carina Chocano confirmed Carell’s hopes, writing, “Not to scare away the kids or anything, but what’s best about ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’ isn’t the business with a plastic medical model of a vagina, the projectile vomit or even the onanistic interlude set to the strains of an old Lionel Richie hit (though that constitutes one of the movie’s most enjoyable moments). What’s best about it — aside from the fact that it’s very funny — is that, for a movie in which the most sophisticated jokes are variations on ‘you’re so gay,” it’s refreshingly grounded in reality and (dare I suggest?) emotionally mature.”
Points of interest
‘Kingdom of Heaven’ director’s cut in 4K
Tonight the Egyptian Theatre will host the world-premiere screening of a new 4K restoration of the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s 2005 adventure epic “Kingdom of Heaven,” co-presented by the American Cinematheque and Beyond Fest. As with the extended cut of Scott’s “The Counselor,” the director’s cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” brings a clarity of focus to the film and is vastly preferred to the theatrical version.
Set in the 1100s, the story follows a French blacksmith, Balian (Orlando Bloom), as he joins up with the Crusades and travels to Jerusalem. The cast includes Liam Neeson, Edward Norton, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson and Marton Csokas.
In his 2005 review of the original theatrical cut, Kenneth Turan wrote, “‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is not one of those cheerful combat movies that believe bloodletting is the answer to everything. It is a violent movie that laments a peace that didn’t last, a downbeat but compelling epic that looks to have lost faith in the value of cinematic savagery for its own sake. If you combine this film with Scott’s [2001] ‘Black Hawk Down,’ you find the director in a place where he is no longer exulting in his ability simply to put violence on screen; he wants you to feel its searing effects as well.”
“Kingdom” screenwriter William Monahan also wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” which happens to be playing at the New Beverly on Saturday and Sunday.
‘M. Butterfly’ in 35mm
On Sunday there will be a 35mm showing of David Cronenberg’s 1993 adaptation of “M.Butterfly” — presented by Hollywood Entertainment and Skylight Books — to celebrate the release of Violet Lucca’s book “David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials.” Lucca will be there to introduce the film and sign books. Screenwriter David Henry Hwang will send in a video introduction. This is said to be the film’s first L.A. showing since 2022.
Hwang, who also wrote the libretto for the opera “Ainadamar” currently at the L.A. Opera, adapted his own play. In the film Jeremy Irons plays a French diplomat in 1960s China who begins an ongoing affair with an opera performer (John Lone) who he believes to be a woman and, it turns out, is also a spy for the Chinese government.
In her book, Luca describes the film as “frequently overlooked in Cronenberg’s filmography” while adding, “it also stands out as the director’s most overtly political work.” Lucca continues, “This tension is perfectly suited to the inexplicable nature of love and sex, the messiness that exists between the spark of desire and its carnal expression. It shatters the illusion that we really do know a partner, or even ourselves — a difficult lesson learned every every day, quietly and loudly, by all sorts of people under far more quotidian circumstances.”
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