The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens Friday, April 16

About the film
LA Times Critic’s pick!

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, ruthless computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from almost forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vanger’s are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is based on the trilogy of books by Stieg Larsson and has sold over 7 million copies worldwide.

Interview: Actress Noomi Rapace

Lisbeth Salandar, she’s such a prominent, well fleshed out character in the book, so I was curious about your and [director] Niels Andres Oplev’s collaborative process when you were trying to figure out how to play Lisbeth on screen?
Noomi Rapace: I always try to use myself and dig for myself as much as I can. I don’t like to pretend things. I don’t like to fake things. I have to fully understand the person that I’m going to be in a way and then translate experiences and feelings and emotions and things I’ve gone through into her. I read the book a couple of years before so when I met Niels I had a pretty clear picture of who I thought Elisabeth was, and I said to him that if you want me to play her, I think I know who she is and I want to transform into her and do a lot of things to become her. I wanted to change my body. I wanted to be a little bit more masculine and get rid of my female body. I wanted to be more like a boy. I wanted to be able to do all the fighting scenes, so I wanted to go into martial arts training. I trained a lot in Thai boxing and kickboxing with this crazy Serbian guy five days a week. I did a lot of preparation, and I also took motorcycle driving lessons, and I cut my hair and pierced myself.

Read the full article here.

Date Night, opening Friday, April 9th

About the film:

This action comedy tells the tale of mild-mannered married couple Phil (Steve Carell) and Claire (Tina Fey) who fear their relationship may be falling into a stale rut. During their weekly date night, they impetuously steal a dinner reservation, which leads to a case of mistaken identity. Turns out the reservation was for a pair of thieves, and now a number of unsavory characters want Phil and Claire killed. If they can survive a wacky life-threatening night, they may just rediscover the passion missing from their marriage. Directed by Shawn Levy. Mark Wahlberg, James Franco, and Rochester's own Kristen Wiig co-star.

Interview with Tina Fey, Steve Carell and director Shawn Levy:

Q: Tina, once they took your bag away, you didn’t have any props, but you did a great job ad-libbing. How hard was that?

Tina Fey: Thanks. Yeah once I lose my purse and coat, it was just me and my arms and the night. Just my bare arms.

Shawn Levy: I feel like we thought about…it was always what are the arms and hands doing in every scene?

Tina Fey: And I was trying to hide my arms behind like a doorjamb. The only thing they didn’t take was my heels. They didn’t take my high heels.

Shawn Levy: That’s right, because of course you would keep your high heels on as you are running for your life. Always.

Q: Did you wear the heels all the time?

Tina Fey: I mean, I took them off when we were in the car sometimes. You know I would cheat a little bit. And I think we had several sets. We had this sort of grandma set and a higher set and then the higher set.

Shawn Levy: Anytime Tina ran it was an inch and a half but with an athletic strap that went across the top of the foot.

Tina Fey: There was a steel reinforcement in the heel…but really Steve built all those shoes for me. He is also a cobbler.

Steve Carell: I am.

Read the full interview here.

The Runaways, opens Friday, April 9

About the Film
Of all the bands to come out of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene, The Runaways are by far the most uniquely fascinating. This is partially due to their music but more so to the fact that they were teenage girls whose wild and reckless lifestyle was the stuff of legend.

Focusing on the duo of guitarist/vocalist Joan Jett and lead vocalist Cherie Currie as they navigate a rocky road of touring and record-label woes, the film chronicles the band's formation as well as their meteoric rise under the malevolent eye of an abusive manager.

Acclaimed video artist Floria Sigismondi directs from her own script, and her luscious camerawork captures every sweaty detail—from the filthy trailer where the women practice to the mosh pits of Tokyo. What really makes the film cook are the sizzling performances by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart. Not to be missed, The Runaways is an ode to an era and a groundbreaking band.—from the Sundance Film Festival Notes

Interview with Cherie Currie:
So, is it strange having Dakota Fanning play you in a film?

Cherie Currie: Literally, it's like I am in a dream and I am not waking up. It is that surreal and that out of this world. I am literally living a dream. I feel like I'm dreaming right now. I keep waiting to wake up and I am not waking up. It's truly that unbelievable. I just can't comprehend it.

Read the whole interview here.

The Art of the Steal Opens Friday, April 9

About the film:

The Art of the Steal plays like a thrilling whodunit as it seeks to solve what happened to the world-renowned Barnes art collection, valued in the “billions and billions.” The collection's unrivalled holdings of post-impressionist and early modernist art are staggering in quantity: 181 paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cézanne, 59 by Matisse and 46 by Picasso, including many masterpieces.

Dr. Albert Barnes was a self-made man with a well-trained eye who assembled the art in the twenties. He snubbed the provincial elites in his hometown of Philadelphia by housing the collection in the suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania. Rather than grouping canvases by artist or era as in a typical gallery, he displayed work in an idiosyncratic way to express his own aesthetic vision. Barnes was more concerned with educating serious students in his vision than reaching casual tourists, so he restricted attendance and refused to loan paintings to other institutions. His individualism earned him antagonists (notably Walter Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer) but also many loyal supporters.

Upon Barnes's death in 1951, his will gave control of the collection to the trustees of Lincoln University, the first black university in the United States. Eventually, lawyers and business people swarmed to exploit its resources. In the nineties, a sampling of the collection travelled the world on a multi-city tour (including Toronto). Then a scheme was hatched to permanently remove the collection from Merion that some would later call the heist of the century.

Director Don Argott previously made the endearing documentary Rock School about another iconoclastic educator from Philadelphia. In The Art of the Steal, the filmmaker deftly adopts an investigative approach to unravel the complicated politics and personalities that determined the fate of the Barnes collection. Drawing upon research from John Anderson's book Art Held Hostage, the film tantalizes us with the sumptuous imagery of the paintings, and features interviews full of intense conflicting opinions.

The story is full of twists, turns and double-crosses. Along the way, multiple questions are raised: How is art best served? Should it be reserved for true connoisseurs or made available to the most eyeballs possible? And who decides?—From the film notes of the Toronto International Film Festival

Interview with the director:

So how did you go from documentaries about rock music and the NFL Draft to one that details the intricacies of the museum world? This film came to us from Lenny Feinberg, the executive producer. He’s a gentleman who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs. Being from this area you don’t have to go very far to get peoples’ take on the Barnes. The story stuck with him, and he was itching to tell it. He found us through [Genevieve Jolliffe’s] The Documentary Filmmakers’ Handbook, which [producer] Sheena [Joyce] and I were interviewed for. He just called us up. I knew a little about the [Barnes Foundation] and the more we delved into it, the more I thought it was an incredible story. We would be the first to tell this story from the ground up. There is a ton of misinformation out there.

Read the whole interview here.

Fish Tank Opens Friday, April 2nd

Fish Tank is a British drama film directed by Andrea Arnold. The film won the Jury Prize at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. It also won the 2010 BAFTA for Best British Film.

About the Film
A mother and daughter find themselves locked in an ugly battle over the same man in this drama. Mia Williams (Katie Jarvis) is 15 years old and lives in a shabby apartment block with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), and younger sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). Mia is a reckless and rebellious teenager who frequently argues with her mother and sister and has run afoul of the authorities at school, leading to her being suspended.

With plenty of time on her hands, Mia spends her days drinking when she can find alcohol and partying in a empty flat near her apartment. Joanne is a single mother, and she's begun dating a new man, Connor (Michael Fassbender); when Joanne brings him home to meet the girls, Mia is immediately attracted to him, and it's soon clear Connor feels the same way about her. Mia attempts to seduce Connor to take him away from her mother, and when she succeeds, Joanne's greatest anger is not with the man who has slept with her underaged daughter, but the girl who is now a rival for the affections of her lover.

An Interview with the Director:
LW: First off, one of the things that most impresses me is how concise and precise the images are in your films. You say everything you need to say within the least amount of frames. Obviously a lot of people are going to think of the kitchen sink realism of Loach and Leigh but there’s also a poetic, nearly Neorealist quality to your work. Can you talk a bit about your filmmaking influences?

AA: Ooh, I have quite a lot. Everyone from Terence Malick to the Dardenne brothers to David Lynch, Michael Haneke –

LW: “The White Ribbon.” Everyone hated it but me. (laughs)AA: Yeah, I saw it at Telluride. I don’t know if I was just in a funny mood that day, but it was the first time during a Haneke film that I wanted to leave the cinema.

LW: That’s good!
AA: Yeah, I know. He wants me to feel that way.

LW: Well, you direct in a similar way. I mean, you don’t have a comfortable filmmaking style at all. That seduction scene between older man Connor played by Michael Fassbender and Katie Jarvis’s teenage Mia, which is the centerpiece of “Fish Tank” – that’s damn hard to watch.AA: Yeah, one of my friends described it as “everything I didn’t want and everything I wanted.”

Read the full interview here.

Music & Art in the Cafe for April

April Music Schedule

Monday: Brad Batz Group

Wednesday: The Margaret Explosion

Thursday: Miche Fambro

Friday: Watkins and the Rapiers

Saturday: Nancy Perry

Art
Bernie Lehman

A Prophet Opens Friday, April 2

About "A Prophet" (from The Boston Globe review):
In most prison movies, anticipation is a survival skill. How long until I’m paroled? How long until I’m jumped? How long until I’m dead? In Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,’’ waiting runs a distant second to watchfulness. Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) puts his little brown eyes everywhere he can. He studies the fraught dynamics between his Corsican protectors and the Africans and Arabs in the prison yard. He observes how the Corsicans interact and learns their endangered species of a language. Malik is a young recidivist thug, serving his first adult stint in a French penitentiary for assaulting the police. This time he elects to give himself a Sorbonne-level education in cunning. Read the full review here.

A Prophet – Lead Actor Tahar Rahim interview

Did you do any other kind of research for the role?
I saw a lot of documentaries, and I saw movies and photos and I talked with ex-prisoners. But this only helped me for the second part of the movie. For the first part I had to forget all this to find another way of working with Jacques and talking and trying to think about the situation, the character and the way he acts at this moment. Malik was a virgin to the prison, so I am too. That’s why I discovered the set the first day of shooting. I knew that this could help me.

Which films inspired you most?
Mainly foreign jail movies. One I remember in particular was a film by Brazilian director Hector Babenco called Pixote. I watched those movies because I thought it could help me, but it wasn’t exactly like that.

Read the full interview here.