Arts & Culture

Stylistically, Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves is set in the same social milieu as Italian Neo-Realist films, the working class. But while its proletarian protagonists are similar in class to, say, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 drama Bicycle Thieves, Fallen Leaves is a romantic comedy. Blue collar boy meets girl on the wrong side of the tracks in Helsinki. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and the hard drinking Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are lonely thirty-somethings, searching for love and intimacy in this movie full of dry wit that’s likely to cause viewers to smile often, and perhaps laugh out loud a few times. 

Writer/director Michel Franco’s moving Memory is one of AFI FEST 2023’s most memorable movies. Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, who works at an adult daycare facility and is first glimpsed in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the recovering ex-drinker participates in a 12-step program in Brooklyn. At a subsequent high school reunion, Sylvia has a strange encounter with Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), who she goes on to (wrongly) accuse of having sexually abused her when they were students. As it turns out, Sylvia has a history of incestuous sexual molestation, which likely triggered her substance abuse. Saul, too, has his own afflictions.

The screen adaptation of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The
Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African
American director to win an Academy Award, is a cinematic masterpiece. Stamped from the
Beginning – which derives its title from a despicably racist 1860 speech delivered by Senator
Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy – is one of the greatest anti-racist nonfiction
motion pictures ever made, in terms of film form and content.
Stamped goes back in time to before the trans-Atlantic slave trade began in Europe, and shows
how racism was a construct to rationalize the brutality of slavery on the grounds that Europeans
were inherently superior to Africans. Blacks replaced Eastern European Slavs (the film contends
that term is the source of the word “slave”) for forced labor because due to the color of their skin,
it was harder for escaped Africans to blend in with the white population.
When slavery was exported to the “New World,” white indentured servants were given more

From global broiling to plagues to wars at Ukraine and the Middle East to mass expulsions/ Exoduses of civilians from Gaza and Nagorno Karabakh to the homeless epidemic to the rising scourge of domestic fascism and beyond, our beleaguered planet is reaching the boiling point. What’s a human to do? Aside from a worldwide socialist revolution to bring about an international workers’ paradise, I have another suggestion (if not a solution) as to how to cope with these mounting crises: Go see/hear Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 The Barber of Seville at LA Opera.

According to its mission statement, “AFI FEST… showcase[es] the best films from across the globe to captivated audiences in Los Angeles. With a diverse and innovative slate of programming, the film festival presents a robust lineup of fiction and nonfiction features and shorts… along with panels and conversations featuring both master filmmakers and new cinematic voices.” The American Film Institute’s annual film fete, which includes up to 141 productions this year, is taking place at the TCL Chinese Theatre (that iconic movie palace formerly known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with stars’ cement footprints in its famed courtyard), the nearby TCL Chinese 6 Theatre and right across the boulevard El Capitan Theatre, all conveniently located near one another on Hollywood Blvd.’s fabled “Walk of Fame.”

Writer/director Tim Venable takes off the gloves in Baby Foot, a searing three-hander that bravely dramatizes the struggle to overcome addiction at a recovery center. Alexis (Hope Lauren) is completing the 90th and final day of her treatment program and preparing to reenter the big, bad world-at-large when she encounters (the unfortunately named) Blackie (Daniel Dorr) on the very night he is admitted to the three-month-long sobriety ordeal. Throughout the 75-ish minute one-act play sparks fly, as this boy-meets-girl story with a cleverly concocted premise unfolds in the offbeat setting of a rehab facility located somewhere in deepest, darkest Los Angeles.

With a Sunday matinee plus Monday night performance, this is the last week for serious lovers of drama to see Rogue Machine’s repeatedly extended Heroes of the Fourth Turning at the Matrix Theatre. Playwright Will Arbery’s unique play first produced in 2019 is like Dogma – Kevin Smith’s 1999 philosophical excursion into obscure church doctrine – meets The Turner Diaries, a 1978 fictitious account of a racist rightwing insurrection (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was inspired by and carried a copy of this terrorist novel). 

As its 30th season opens, that crowd pleasing palace the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is mounting a musical perfect for capitalizing on the fact that as of this writing, it’s currently Hispanic Heritage Month. The title characters of On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan are, of course, real life musicians who were both born in Cuba. Given the Miami Sound Machine’s (and later iterations of Gloria’s band) hits, including “Dr. Beat,” the eponymous “Get On Your Feet” and the positively infectious “Conga,” I wondered if Feet! would actually have a plot per se or if this stage production would merely be a glorified excuse for a concert.

One of the very best things a work of art can do is to give the voiceless a public voice in
order to be heard. And award-winning playwright Preston Choi does that, loud and clear,
in his great new This is Not a True Story. In this thought provoking, highly entertaining
one-act play the characters of Cio-Cio-San (here called CioCio and played by Julia Cho)
from Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 Japan-set opera Madame Butterfly, Kim (Zandi De Jesus)
from the 1989 musical Miss Saigon, and the real-life Takako Konishi (Rosie Narasaki –
more below on Konishi, who has a bizarre tie-in to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 movie
Fargo) collide with one another, and especially in CioCio and Kim’s cases, with their
Caucasian creators. Hilarity, poignancy and above all, insight into the damage that racial
stereotyping causes ensues.
Kim, of course, is based on the Italian composer Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San in the adaptation
of Madame Butterfly that’s updated and reset in Vietnam in 1975 in Miss Saigon, with
music by Frenchman Claude-Michel Schönberg, book by Tunisian-born Alain Boublil
and Schönberg, lyrics by Boublil and Wisconsin-born Richard Maltby Jr. Note that while

In 2022, Getty Villa’s annual outdoor theater show, which – in keeping with the Romanesque museum’s décor and displays – are devoted to staging ancient Greek and Roman theater, mounted Sophocles’ Oedipus, about the ill-fated Theban king who, unwittingly, slew his father and married his mother. (Whoopsy!) Now, in that grand show biz tradition of “sequels,” this year Getty Villa is presenting a highly idiosyncratic version of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Which chronologically is the second part of dramatist’s Oedipal trilogy (with Antigone being his grand finale). The 17th annual Villa Outdoor Classical Theater production is entitled The Gospel at Colonus, an unlikely hybrid of Greek tragedy and African American gospel music and spirituality.