Arts & Culture

The 11th annual DTLA Film Festival took place Oct. 23-27. According to the Festival’s website: “Our programming reflects downtown L.A.’s vibrant new urbanism, the unique ethnic and cultural diversity of its neighborhoods, its burgeoning independent film community, its singular blend of late 19th and 20th century architecture, and the seminal role it played in the early days of American cinema (epitomized by the world’s largest group of vintage movie palaces located in the Broadway Theater District).”

DTLAFF screened features, shorts, documentaries etc., at two primary locations: Regal L.A. LIVE 1000 West Olympic Blvd., L.A., CA 90015 while the Dome Series is at the Wisdome Immersive Art Park in DTLA’s Arts District, 1147 Palmetto St., L.A. or the Vortex Dome Theater at L.A. Center Studios. Panels, parties, etc., were being presented at various Downtown L.A. locations. For info on the DTLA Film Festival see: https://www.dtlaff.com/.

POISONING PARADISE

007 Fights the Ultimate Bond Villain: The Agrichemical Industry

Let me just start by clarifying that this review of Psycho should not be confused with a biopic somebody’s bound to make about Trump called Psychopath. Rather, this is a review of an exceptional Halloween screening of the 1960 classic movie Psycho directed by Alfred Hitchcock, accompanied by LA Opera Orchestra performing composer Bernard Herrmann’s eerie, sometimes screeching score.

Psycho is widely considered to be a movie masterpiece, largely because of its striking visuals organically linked to Herrmann’s music which brilliantly (and terrifyingly!) expresses the story of psychotic mama’s boy Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) running amok at a moody motel and California Gothic house of horrors (which you can actually see at the Universal Studios tour). According to LA Opera’s publicist Vanessa Flores Waite, the Orchestra (which has up to 61 core members) performed Herrmann’s chilling score live as a “special version of the film that doesn’t include the soundtrack” was projected onto the screen above the dimly lit stage of the Theatre at Ace Hotel where Louis Lohraseb conducted his “macabre” musicians.

DTLA FILM FESTIVAL Film Reviews

By Ed Rampell

The 11th annual DTLA Film Festival is now underway. According to the Festival’s website: “Our programming reflects downtown L.A.’s vibrant new urbanism, the unique ethnic and cultural diversity of its neighborhoods, its burgeoning independent film community, its singular blend of late 19th and 20th century architecture, and the seminal role it played in the early days of American cinema (epitomized by the world’s largest group of vintage movie palaces located in the Broadway Theater District).”

DTLAFF is screening features, shorts, documentaries etc., at two primary locations: Regal L.A. LIVE 1000 West Olympic Blvd., L.A., CA 90015 while the Dome Series is at the Wisdome Immersive Art Park in DTLA’s Arts District, 1147 Palmetto St., L.A. or the Vortex Dome Theater at L.A. Center Studios. Panels, parties, etc., are being presented at various Downtown L.A. locations. For info on the DTLA Film Festival see: https://www.dtlaff.com/.

AMERICAN WOMAN Film Review

Citizen Hearst

DTLA FILM FESTIVAL Film Reviews

By Ed Rampell

The 11th annual DTLA Film Festival is now underway. According to the Festival’s website: “Our programming reflects downtown L.A.’s vibrant new urbanism, the unique ethnic and cultural diversity of its neighborhoods, its burgeoning independent film community, its singular blend of late 19th and 20th century architecture, and the seminal role it played in the early days of American cinema (epitomized by the world’s largest group of vintage movie palaces located in the Broadway Theater District).”

DTLAFF is screening features, shorts, documentaries etc., at two primary locations: Regal L.A. LIVE 1000 West Olympic Blvd., L.A., CA 90015 while the Dome Series is at the Wisdome Immersive Art Park in DTLA’s Arts District, 1147 Palmetto St., L.A. or the Vortex Dome Theater at L.A. Center Studios. Panels, parties, etc., are being presented at various Downtown L.A. locations. For info on the DTLA Film Festival see: https://www.dtlaff.com/.

INDIRECT ACTIONS

A Futuristic Film Form for a Traditional Struggle

1984 Theater Review

Watch Big Brother Watching You: Actors’ Gang Stages Oracle Orwell’s Prophetic Thought Crime

By Ed Rampell

[NOTE: This review may contain plot spoilers for those unfamiliar with 1984.]

Halloween is the spookiest time of the year, when scary shows are de rigueur on stage and screen. For example, Oct. 25-31 Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 scream-fest Psycho is being screamed - uh, I mean screened - in Downtown L.A.’s ornate Theatre at Ace Hotel, accompanied by LA Opera Orchestra performing live Bernard Herrmann’s hair-raising score. (See: https://www.laopera.org/performances/201920-season/psycho/.)

Maori moviemaker Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 anti-Nazi masterpiece The Great Dictator. Rabbit blasts off with a laugh-out-loud sequence comparing Beatle-mania-like celebrity worship to the Third Reich’s cult of personality for the Führer. In this tragic-comic satire Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is a boy growing up during World War II who fantasizes that Adolph Hitler (Waititi, who also wrote and directed) is his best friend.

The picaresque picture follows Jojo’s misadventures in wartime Germany (but actually shot in the Czech Republic), where he joins the Hitler Youth, the Nazis’ militaristic counterpart to the Boy Scouts. Aided by goofy true believer Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), the Hitler-Jugend unit is commanded by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), a wounded soldier transferred from the frontlines back to the homeland to train the Aryan youngsters for combat. As they blunder through exercises such as tossing grenades, Rockwell slyly portrays the one-eyed officer as realizing that the Hitler Youth are, like National Socialism and the war effort, futile and farcical.

LA Opera’s latest star-studded production, The Light in the Piazza, is a version of the musical that opened on Broadway in 2005, based on the 1960 novella by Elizabeth Spencer. This love story about an American mother and daughter, Margaret Johnson (legendary Renée Fleming) and Clara (Disney actress Dove Cameron), visiting Florence has a unique twist: Clara is developmentally challenged. While in Italy she falls in love with the Florentine Fabrizio Naccarelli (English actor Rob Houchen, a Les Mis co-star of a West End show production), son of a shopkeeper (two-time Tony Award-winner Brian Stokes Mitchell and Tony-nommed in 1998 for Ragtime; Mitchell’s film/TV work includes playing Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku in the 1999 TV-movie Too Rich).

Relationships are like apparel in that one size does not fit all. For centuries in American patriarchal society marriages were between one male and one female, and this heterosexual norm was widely expected to be the standard in premarital romances, too. Of course, just as the customary view as to whether straight people could have sex outside of marriage has shifted the entire notion of gender and more has radically changed over the years.

Enter writer/director Brian Reynolds, who tackles the notions of these altering societal norms by injecting how sexual partnerships and marriage are evolving into his subversive take on romantic comedy (complete with “cute meets”) in Mono/Poly. The title is clever as it refers to not only the real estate board game but to the idea that monogamy is a form of monopoly in the sense of ownership.

Calcutta-born playwright Dipika Guha’s comedy Yoga Play is the latest installment in the tradition of works about and interactions between “mystical” Easterners encountering Westerners living in the material world who seek enlightenment. As Yoga Play drolly dramatizes, sometimes those partaking of this spiritual quest in our corporeal realm get their wires crossed. The search for inner illumination can be monetized in a society dominated not by piety but by materialism, turning serenity into obscenity and putting the nasty into “Namaste.”

In Guha’s two-acter Jojomon is a multi-national corporation manufacturing garb used by practitioners that is rocked by a scandalous revelation. To counter what could be a monsoon of bad PR Jojomon executive Joan (Susi Damilano, an Off-Broadway and award winning actress from San Francisco, where Yoga Play had premiered), a beleaguered woman competing in the male-dominated corporate world, decides to take desperate measures to save the image conscious company’s reputation (and stock prices).

Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 La Bohème is the beloved archetypal opera about Parisian artistes and their lovers set in mid-19th century France. Based on Henri Murger’s semi-autobiographical 1851 book, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, this musical masterpiece opens in the attic of an apartment house in Paris that serves as the studio and living space of four young struggling starving artistes.

Rodolfo (Albanian tenor Saimur Pirgu) is a wannabe poet. Marcello (South Korean baritone Kihun Yoon) is a striving painter, although in this production helmed by Australian Barrie Kosky the dauber also dabbles in daguerreotypes, the then-emerging new photographic medium. Philosopher Colline (Alabama bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee) and musician Schaunard (New York baritone Michael J. Hawk) complete the foursome. The relationship of these artsy friends living an unconventional bohemian lifestyle is characterized by great bonhomie, camaraderie and good humor. Indeed, this inseparable

garret quartet could be called “Les Bro-hèmes.”