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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.
The week’s most anticipated new release, shrewdly hitting theaters just in time for Galentine’s/Valentine’s Day, is Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
Fennell, of course, won a screenplay Oscar for her debut feature “Promising Young Woman” and created another controversial sensation with “Saltburn.” Robbie has produced all three of Fennell’s features via her production company LuckyChap Entertainment.
Robbie, Fennell and Elordi all spoke to Emily Zemler about the new film. Regarding the bold choices they make in their adaptation, Robbie said, “My hope is always: There’s got to be one person that watches this movie and thinks ‘That’s my favorite of all time.’ I want to make a movie that is someone’s favorite movie of all time and I’ll know how much that means to them. That it might save them in whatever ways movies can save you.”
Jacob Elordi, Margot Robbie and director Emerald Fennell, photographed in Los Angeles in January.
(Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)
In her review, Amy Nicholson admires the film’s look and craft, but feels it falters in the performances. Nevertheless, she adds, “Though ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a phony tease, I’m grateful that Fennell wants to titillate audiences. If they show up, they’ll help her convince the industry to move past chasing superheroes in codpieces and make more movies about messy, marvelous human sweat. The box office isn’t my personal kink; movie reviews are where you and I meet to talk about what gets us hot and bothered. But I hope Fennell, and other hedonistic filmmakers like her, get to keep whipping blockbusters out of their doldrums.”
And Malia Mendez broke down seven ways in which Fennell’s movie veers away from Emily Brontë’s original novel.
Other new releases this week include Bart Layton’s “Crime 101,” Gore Verbinski’s “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” and Matt Johnson’s “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in the movie “(500) Days of Summer,” chosen by our readers as an essential L.A. movie that we forgot to include in our 101 list.
(Chuck Zlotnick / Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Last month, we unleashed our ranked list of the 101 best Los Angeles movies and you had thoughts. Lots of them. After receiving an avalanche of emails, we selected the 14 best L.A. movies that didn’t make our list, as chosen by you.
Among the movies our readers were most passionate about, there are titles that, frankly, we should have made room for. (Send us to Richard Gere jail for not including “American Gigolo.”) But we still think “Crash” stole “Brokeback Mountain’s” Oscar and nothing will change that.
Nitrate Film Festival
William Powell in the 1936 movie “My Man Godfrey.”
(Criterion Collection)
This year’s American Cinematheque‘s Nitrate Film Festival at the Egyptian Theatre (one of only a small number of venues in the country that can still show the rare, combustible film stock) starts tonight with John Cromwell’s 1947 noir thriller “Dead Reckoning,” staring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott, screening in a print from the Library of Congress. Writing about the film in 1947, The Times’ Edwin Schallert wrote, “Summed up, therefore, this picture carries a different impact from some of its predecessors, while in outcome it is somber by comparison.”
A highlight of this year’s program will be the Valentine’s Day showing of Gregory La Cava’s 1936 class comedy “My Man Godfrey,” starring William Powell and Carole Lombard in a print from the Filmarchiv Austria. Writing about the film’s premiere at Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, Schallert noted of its stars, “It is their first picture together since before they were married, and a divorce has, or course, intruded since then. For which reason the production assumes characteristics of a news event.”
Other films in the series include William Wyler’s 1935 “The Good Fairy,” starring Margaret Sullavan; William Wellman’s 1937 “Nothing Sacred,” starring Lombard and Fredric March; and Mikio Naruse’s 1935 “Wife! Be Like a Rose,” starring Sachiko Chiba.
Points of interest
Archive Trailer Show
An image from the “Retro Romantics: An Academy Archive Trailer Show,” presented at the Academy Museum.
(Academy Museum)
The Academy Film Museum possesses what is said to be the world’s largest collection of movie trailers. And they are putting it to good use on Saturday with “Retro Romantics: An Academy Film Archive Trailer Show in 35mm.”
Programmed by preservationists Cassie Blake and Tessa Idlewine, the show promises to be full of surprises, per the program notes: “This vintage compendium of coming attractions explores the agony and the ecstasy of art-house amour, from red-blooded lust and lovelorn lotharios to feverish melodramas and tortured obsessions.”
It would make for a fun evening for film lovers whether it was Valentine’s Day or not.
Fassbinder’s ‘Querelle’
An image from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 “Querelle.”
(Criterion Collection)
Anyone made curious by the recent “Pillion” would do well to catch a Valentine’s Day show of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Querelle,” which would be the prolific German filmmaker’s final work before his death at age 37 in 1982.
An adaptation of the novel by Jean Genet, the film exists in a stylized fantasy world in which a young sailor (Brad Davis) visits a bar and brothel and soon finds himself confronting his own sexuality in new ways. The cast also includes Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero, the latter who, just this week, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Reviewing the movie in 1983, Kevin Thomas called it “one major gay artist’s tribute to another” and added, “More than anything else, ‘Querelle,’ despite Fassbinder’s characteristic tough-minded compassion, suggests the vulnerability of sexual fantasy to unintended humor.”
‘The Hunt for Red October’
Sean Connery, left, Alec Baldwin and Scott Glenn in the movie “The Hunt for Red October.”
(Paramount Pictures)
On Sunday in the Academy Museum’s David Geffen Theater, there will be a 4K showing of John McTiernan’s 1990 espionage techno-thriller “The Hunt for Red October” starring Sean Connery as the captain of a Russian nuclear submarine and Alec Baldwin as a CIA analyst.
A surprisingly lengthy set report by Jay Sharbutt from July 1989 notes that Connery was cast as a Russian submarine captain only after actor Klaus Maria Brandauer dropped out. Connery, coming off projects such as “The Untouchables” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” was paid a reported $4 million for the film.
In her review of the film, Sheila Benson wrote, “Its film makers know that a little technology goes a very long way, and if they hope to keep an audience’s attention they’ll have to do it with story, not hardware. … You may not be limp from accumulated tension when this hunt is over, but its cautiously upbeat global message leaves a satisfying glow and it operates with a crackerjack premise.”
