Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
In the biggest news of the week, the Sundance Film Festival announced it will be moving to Boulder, Colo., beginning in 2027. The board of the Sundance Institute selected the city over two other finalists, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City, from an initial lineup of some 67 locations that expressed interest in hosting the festival.
"There was overwhelming support for Boulder," said Ebs Burnough, Sundance Institute's board chair, in our interview on Thursday morning. "There certainly was robust conversation, but we as a board have been going through this process for about 18 months now, so there's been a lot of consistent conversation and an evolving conversation and evolving process."
"It's an awesome town," added Amanda Kelso, Sundance Institute's acting CEO. "It has this wonderful vibe to it. You can go hiking or biking nearby. But it's also an art town, it's a tech town, it's a college town. So it's a really vibrant place."
The Boulder Theater will be a venue for the Sundance Film Festival when it moves to the city in 2027. (Sundance Institute)
During its more than 40 years in Utah, the Sundance Film Festival has helped boost filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Ava DuVernay, Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler and countless others, while seeing the film industry through multiple eras of change. The festival will now try to create a new home in Boulder as it moves with the industry into an uncertain future.
"As change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival," said Robert Redford, Sundance Institute president and founder, in a statement. "This move will ensure that the festival continues its work of risk taking, supporting innovative storytellers, fostering independence, and entertaining and enlightening audiences. I am grateful to the Boulder community for its support, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for the festival there."
Alan Rudolph on 'Choose Me'
Lesley Ann Warren, left, Rae Dawn Chong and Keith Carradine in the movie "Choose Me." (Joyce Rudolph / Criterion Collection)
On Thursday, the Laemmle Royal will host a screening of the 4K restoration of Alan Rudolph's 1984 film "Choose Me" with cast members Keith Carradine and Lesley Ann Warren and producer David Blocker in attendance for a Q&A. The evening will be a tribute to Robert Laemmle, longtime head of the local art-house chain and a passionate supporter of Rudolph's, who died in January at age 89. "Choose Me" had a successful run of several months at the Royal when it was originally released.
"It is probably the only film I made that people actually liked," said Rudolph, 81, in an interview this week from his home in the Pacific Northwest. "So it's a special one. It was probably the most complete experience of making a film in a positive way."
The film, which was also just released to 4K UHD/Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, follows a group of characters who all circle around Eve's Lounge, a dive bar in Los Angeles. Eve (Warren) runs the place and frequently becomes emotionally entangled with the patrons. Nancy (Geneviève Bujold) provides love advice on her radio call-in show but is herself lovelorn and dejected. Mickey (Carradine) recently left a mental institution and his tales of a fantastic life may not be true.
The project had its origins when Rudolph was offered some $500,000 to make a music video for the Teddy Pendergrass song "You're My Choice Tonight (Choose Me)," in an effort to assist the singer, who was paralyzed in a 1982 car crash. Instead, Rudolph suggested making a feature film for a few hundred thousand dollars more. The film's opening credits sequence, in which people dance in the street outside the bar, captures the moody sensual vibe of the song.
"I took the song home and just listened to it the way you would read a Russian novel," said Rudolph. "I tried to absorb it and figure out what it meant."
For Rudolph, that meant a fluid attitude toward love and commitment.
"I came up with the phrase in my mind: It's romantic roulette," he said. "And so I started to think, well, what is it? You go together with somebody for a night? What's the opposite of that? Well, you get married. This dichotomy of surface reality and underlying truth, I started playing with that."
Keith Carradine in Alan Rudolph's "Choose Me." (Joyce Rudolph / Criterion Collection)
In putting "Choose Me" at #5 on her top-10 list for the year, ahead of such films as David Lean's "A Passage to India," Milos Forman's "Amadeus" and Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas," Times critic Sheila Benson wrote, "A blithe original, this is a romance for those afraid to be in love, a trenchantly L.A. movie, hip, outrageous and beautiful as neon."
In his films such as "Welcome to L.A.," "Remember My Name," "Trouble in Mind," "The Moderns," and very much in "Choose Me," Rudolph often explores a tension between languid, stylized worlds and the very real emotions his characters are working through.
So what draws him to this tension between style and emotion?
"I think I'd have to lay down on your doctor's couch" said Rudolph with a laugh. "I can tell you this — and this is the truth, Dr. Olsen — I've always had a very tenuous grip with reality. There's an absurdity to life that seems more honest to me than what we're supposed to accept. Now, when you get inside of real moments, when it's vital and mortal and it overwhelms you, that's reality.
"And it seems to me that the acceptance of the absurdity is what keeps societies together," said Rudolph. "They say, 'OK, I accept that because we're all weird.' They may not articulate it that way, but that's the way I look at it."
'Emotion in Color: A Kaleidoscope of Indian Cinema'
An image from the movie "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge." (Academy Museum)
The Academy Museum's series "Emotion In Color: A Kaleidoscope of Indian Cinema" uses color as a way to introduce audiences to the breadth of filmmaking in India.
"My interest in putting this together was to give people the knowledge to see Indian cinema in its full diversity, to get an idea between all kinds of movies," Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, who programmed the series, said during a recent video call from Mumbai. "You can have a very popular commercial film of the '70s of a big Indian superstar and, at the same time, you can have a very avant-garde alternative film, very different, because I wanted people to be able to see all genres."
Screening on Saturday is the film "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge," directed by Aditya Chopra. The film has notably continued to play every day in Mumbai for three decades since its release in 1995.
Dungarpur, a filmmaker and founder of the Film Heritage Foundation dedicated to the preservation of India's cinema history, noted the film makes a good point of entry for American moviegoers looking to begin exploring Indian cinema.
"'Dilwale' was a trendsetter, in terms of locales, in terms of freshness," said Dungarpur. "It was the emergence of Shah Rukh Khan, the big Indian superstar, and the storytelling which touched a lot of Indians because it was reflecting the times.
"It seemed all very real in that romantic sort of new-age kind of a film in '95, with popular songs and wonderful actors who became heartthrobs. It just struck a chord with a lot of young people and college students and it continued to inspire many romantic films after that."
Also to come in the series is a 35-mm showing of 1962's "Kanchenjungha," the first color film directed by Satyajit Ray, still India's best-known filmmaker around the world. The series will conclude with Kumar Shahani's 1972 "Maya Darpan," an example of the Parallel cinema movement that emerged as India's answer to the new waves of filmmaking in France and Czechoslovakia.
Dungarpur described how in India, cinema can become almost like a religion, with literal temples to popular stars. Audiences found connections with the lives onscreen they could often not find in the real world.
"Seeing larger-than-life images, I think it struck a chord with them," said Dungarpur. "In the evenings you wanted to just go to a cinema hall, shout, shriek, emote with people. And many of them became political messengers for social reforms and it almost transcended into change. Many of the commercial films were reflecting what was happening in India at that time, but also the actors were portraying it larger than life and bringing it back to the people.
"People saw hope, they saw the future," said Dungarpur. "And they saw themselves in it."
Points of interest
Paul Schrader's 'Blue Collar' and 'American Gigolo'
Richard Gere wears an Armani blazer in the 1980 film "American Gigolo." (Giorgio Armani)
The New Beverly will have a double bill of Paul Schrader's 1978 "Blue Collar" and 1980's "American Gigolo" running from Tuesday to Thursday.
"Blue Collar" stars Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel as factory workers on an auto assembly line who hatch a plan to rob the safe at their union headquarters. Sharp and funny, the film has a consciousness of the intersections of race and class that is still rare today.
"American Gigolo" stars Richard Gere as Julian Kaye, a male hustler in Los Angeles whose clientele is mostly wealthy, lonely women. He finds his well-curated life collapsing around him after one of his clients turns up dead. With photography by John Bailey, production design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, clothes by Giorgio Armani and music by Giorgio Moroder, the film has a sleek, seductive style.
In his review of the film at the time, Charles Champlin drew comparisons to "Midnight Cowboy" and "Shampoo," noting, "There is a lingering sense of traditional moral outrage, as in Schrader's 'Hardcore.' But if there is a sense of sin, there is also a feverish fascination with sin at its most opulent. Nothing, neither bosom nor buttock, is photographed more lovingly than the [Mercedes] 450 SL — those taillights, winking provocatively in the velvet night, such as to drive men mad. They are somebody's objective correlative, presumably Julian's. But, I sense, not his alone."
Schrader, heroically quotable even at age 33, addressed his film's critics in a February 1980 interview with Clarke Taylor by saying, "Critics have a stake in seeming to know more than the people they're talking to, and they don't know what to make of this narcissistic male bravado in a cloak of spirituality. So they take a condescending view, masking their ignorance as superiority. We all have this problem, but most of us don't have to commit it to print."
Reconsidering Maria Schneider in 'Being Maria'
Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon in the movie "Being Maria." (Kino Lorber)
Directed and co-written by Jessica Palud, "Being Maria" is adapted from Vanessa Schneider's book about her cousin, the actor Maria Schneider, who achieved infamy for her role in Bernardo Bertolucci's sexually explicit 1972 drama "Last Tango in Paris" at age 19. Schneider would go on to appear opposite Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 "The Passenger."
"Being Maria" approaches Schneider's story with great sensitivity and understanding, exploring how the trauma of making "Last Tango" left her forever changed as her life spiraled into a long struggle with addiction leading to her death in 2011.
Anamaria Vartolomei, who has also appeared in Audrey Diwan's "Happening" and Bong Joon Ho's recent "Mickey 17," gives a riveting performance in the lead role as Schneider. Matt Dillon brings nuance to his role as Marlon Brando.
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