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As a parallel to the community of the Hong Kong territory in the 1980s, the walls of Kowloon City, the one-time densest populated living area in the world, served opposing purposes. To keep out and to keep in; to bridge divides equally as to rupture connections. An endless inspiration in media as an enclave in which culture can evolve independently, featured in the spread that encompasses manga, video games, painting and literature, it now marks the second-highest grossing domestic film in Hong Kong’s history.
Raymond Lam’s Lok leads Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, the first in a proposed (and greenlit) blockbuster martial arts trilogy by Soi Cheang. A runaway refugee, desperately seeking board and security, finds himself under the support and practical tutelage of triad leader Cyclone (Louis Koo). He bonds with a small cohort of three other younger generational action talents to defend the sanctuary of the Walled City from the threatened invasion of Mr. Big (Sammo Hung) in a series of combative and political face-offs that turn familial, and thoroughly personal.
Twilight of the Warriors kicks off with an initial fight that may be its best, a multi-various cat-and-mouse chase with Lok on the run using every possible element at his disposal – yanked metal rebar slams into wood, scaffolding wrenched apart with makeshift blades, human beings thrown into concrete like CGI monkey limbs. What could be easily mistaken for vibes is Cheung Ka-fai’s seamlessly done edit job, choreographed between cuts and music, a balanced display of frenetic weaponry language that spontaneously creates new words.
It is immediately apparent that Twilight of the Warriors has two amazingly large graces, the second its inspiringly recreated production design work. Modeled after the original architecture, torn down in 1993, every lived-in detail about Cheang’s sets feel less as practical as they do authentic. Glances of printed copy, taped art and store shop advertisement go by while characters leap and fall between awnings and onto telephone wire, yet Cheang keeps a steady-enough alley-aligned view to give a sense of encampment that could never have been built overnight. The residents of Kowloon wear rags and garments in equal measure in a land where there is no outside, only the reconfiguration of value inside.
To make all of this out of Cheang’s aesthetic is entirely the point – to standalone, Twilight of the Warriors is book-ended by chapters of beginning and end to Lok’s journey, a sized-down epic that brings peasant into the coincidental alignment of civil royalty. This is the sort of drama that Westerners will easily align with Star Wars-types – a greater evil defeated, another protégé of said evil taking its place, the cycle continuing in formal ‘unrest’ fashion until the old guard is killed off, leading the way for a new guard to inhabit their trauma.
Tale as old as time, but for the modern Hong Kong (and broader Chinese) audience, Twilight of the Warriors hearkens to a stubborn desire, the kind that consciously fights in support of forgotten art. By the final climatic clash of Twilight, which draws on its protagonists to problem-solve their way out of a villain grown to American superhero-levels of untenable malevolence, Kowloon City has been in and out of beleaguered rule, torn between bureaucratic guards that all seek to support their own in a sanctuary bent keenly on living free from marginalization.
The cycle of evil self-perpetuates the cycle of good, as will the cycle of art and artists keep boosting Cheang and his contemporaries who want to put in the good effort to make an homage to cultural institution. Therein lies the philosophy of the once towering walled-complex – the sun never set on its story because it never organically rose there to begin with.
Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park
Have you ever wondered what it is like to run an art-house theater chain in the film capital of the world? Here’s our conversation with Greg Laemmle, the President of Laemmle Theaters, a family owned business that shows art, international, and independent films in Los Angeles.
Great to meet you Greg! How did you get into film distribution?
I went off to college at Berkeley to study Marine Biology, which is not best suited for the film business, but at the time there was still a thriving repertory film circuit with three or four theaters in town and film societies. My father gave me a pass to the UC Theater, operated by Landmark, and I figured that if I could get my studying done during the course of the day that would leave me free in the evening to see movies. I caught up on a lot of movies and realized how much I loved film. I still have that degree in marine biology, but shortly after that I realized that I would be moving in the direction of the family business.
Was your father, Robert Laemmle running the business when you were deciding?
Yeah, my dad was running it at the time whilst my grandparents were still alive. I was doing a few other jobs coming out of college but my grandmother got upset and pulled me into the theaters.
What do you like most about the job. It sounds like you’re doing everything, including picking the movies and managing the distributor relationships?
It’s kind of how we’ve always done it. It’s probably not the smartest thing, but I really love seeing the movies, working with the distributors, figuring out what to play and where to play it, and how best to get an audience to see it. Growing up working in the theaters, you see first-hand the impact that movies have on the faces of people coming out of the auditorium. So that idea of sharing and exposing people to something is really quite powerful and enjoyable.
Also, as we’ve gotten into the business, I’ve enjoyed working with communities to develop arts and entertainment districts. Asking how a movie theater fits into that world? How does Los Angeles evolve as a community? Figuring out where people are going, spending their leisure time, and how they are getting around. All those kinds of things. Running a Theater chain is a full-fledged opportunity to engage in urban development and the role the arts play in it.
A few of your theaters, such as the Monica Center and Royal are very close to other theaters. Do you think it is better to have more theaters in your area?
It’s a fine line. Sometimes you want some other theaters to help create the movie-going audience. The complexes we are building are not that large or historically built so at some level you know you’re going to be sharing the audience. You have to ask how many screens does it take to provide what the community wants. For example, we’re the only theater in Claremont. With only 5 screens there, it was difficult as there was always someone who was asking why we weren’t playing films x, y, or z. So that indicates a need for a higher number of screens in Claremont. In the current environment where there is a reduced number of commercial films coming from the major studios post-pandemic, you see the big movie theater chains such as AMC playing more art films, which becomes more competition for us. I don’t know if there is a magic number. If there are 12 screens in the community, it depends on how they’re programmed. In those kinds of situations, if that theater is ignoring the art films that are out there, then there is a need for something more.
The Laemmle Theaters are synonymous with art-house, independent, and international films. Why was this lane picked and why have you stuck with it?
It was a niche that was available. If you were not able to play commercial films, which may have been more lucrative, you were looking around to see what you could play. From a business standpoint, if you have an opportunity to play art and foreign films that other people are not playing, or play them in an area where they’re not being seen, or just by making a commitment to playing those types of films and creating an audience for them that becomes a business decision. Did that decision happen to mesh with a preference for those type of films; absolutely. I don’t dislike Hollywood films, but there is a world of cinema out there and being able to bring it all to Los Angeles became good business for us.
Well, it goes up and down. There are a lot of factors. It’s not that audiences have soured on these types of films, but we’re dealing with certain challenges coming out of the pandemic that are to a certain degree outside of our control.
I thought you navigated the pandemic well. You were quick to set up the Virtual Cinema which allowed an audience to continue to watch international and independent films. What was your perspective on the Virtual Cinema? Did it help or was the benefit very minute?
Very minute due to complicated rights issues in streaming. As much as distributors wanted to support our activity, they weren’t able to or there were competitive pressures. The Virtual Cinema was an opportunity to stay engaged with our customers about film but the numbers weren’t significant. In the post-pandemic period, that fell off even more and we were faced with a challenge to get people back in the movie theaters, so we decided to stop taking the content online. It’s not that it was losing a ton of money, but it wasn’t making much money and was taking energy away from what we really wanted to do which was getting people back in the movie theaters.
There are still challenges right now. Infection numbers are currently climbing and there is an audience that is very scared of getting sick. We’re seeing our audience change as a result. The older audience that used to be the most reliable for supporting art-house cinema, is still not back and may not come back. This is impacting the kind of films distributors are wanting to support theatrically. This will have an impact on the kind of films that get made.
Local film criticism has also declined. We’re sympathetic as local papers have their challenges too but it has severely impacted the ability of people to find out through independent sources what is playing and worth seeing. Obviously you can go on our website to see what we’re playing, but if you’re not the type of person that goes to websites, how are you getting that information about what is playing. It used to be that when you would open the Friday paper, you could see half a dozen or more film reviews of everything opening that day in Los Angeles and you could read about films you hadn’t heard about and potentially decide to watch that movie. When you are searching for reviews on Rotten Tomatoes or other sites, the assumption is that you are searching because you know what you are looking for and the process of discovering smaller films is made more difficult.
Apps like Letterboxd help but require a degree of technical comfort to understand that if you rate the films you’ve seen, the algorithm will start suggesting other films that you might like, and you will find out about that small Romanian film because you liked another Romanian film. A certain audience understands this and another does not. We need to build connections with all types of audiences and it’s taking longer than we would like. It’s partly because we’re still not in an environment where we’re entirely done with the shocks of everything.
Is the younger audience back to pre-pandemic levels?
It has recovered quicker and arguably accelerated. You can see that in the numbers – some theaters are doing as much business or more than they did before due to a younger demographic and the films we program there. The numbers are just super strong. Poor Things doing as much business as The Favorite is a testament of this. The younger audience is back and stronger than ever and hungrier to see these types of films.
Does this impact how you program your theaters?
It impacts distributor decisions about which films to acquire, how to support those films, and which way to release them. If distributors are not acquiring or supporting those films in the way that they’re used to it has a downstream impact. Print advertising has declined. I don’t want to sound like a Luddite or a person who’s not moving on, but there were lots of audiences that did respond to print advertising because they were not necessarily being reached in any other way and you could argue that this audience no longer knows what is playing or they’re not being informed through that manner that was most familiar to them. How do you reach that audience? Can you reach that audience? What are the other means of doing that? It’s not that this audience is totally gone, but the numbers clearly show that it’s only back to a certain degree.
How do you find all of the films that you program at the Laemmle Theaters?
It is generally distributors bringing films to us. I wish I had time to do attend more film festivals, but I try to pay attention to what is playing at the major festivals and networking with festival programmers and exhibitors. We tend to be very open to working directly with producers, but it does mean that they have to come to us and present something and we’ll figure out how to play it. If your film is not acquired by a distributor, it’s not over, but you have to take your film hat off and put your film seller hat on and do that yourself
The distributors that have already acquired the films use the festivals to build word of mouth. Even with the Palme d’Or, Sean Baker’s Anora will not have the built in awareness across the general population that Deadpool & Wolverine has, and certainly can’t afford to spend as much, so savvy distributors will use every step they can to build awareness, word of mouth, so that when the film is finally put to commercial release, it has a leg up towards finding an audience and getting people to see it. They will use things that come up during the course of the release to their advantage, such as reviews, nominations, and top 10 lists, to continue to build awareness. When successfully managed, you get films like Anatomy of a Fall playing in movie theaters for up to six months.
The quality of the film ultimately speaks to an audience, but getting an audience in to see the films is important and the marketing helps.
What do you like least about running Laemmle Theaters?
It’s very challenging in this environment, but nothing makes me want to quit. I love what I’m doing. It’s just being able to find a way from challenge to success. Sometimes that’s more difficult than other times. But I ultimately believe in what we do and that it’s of value to the public, and the general public generally expresses their affection that way in terms of support and attendance. When you’re in an environment that’s in flux, it’s not always possible to pivot as quickly as you want, you have leases, facilities and other things to manage. In many cases it requires an amazing degree of patience to see things turn around. There’s not a lot that I don’t like. Some things are harder than others, that’s all.
Thanks so much for your time! One last question. I know from Only in Theaters that you’ve moved to Seattle. How is the Cinema culture in Seattle?
There’s a terrific art house scene in Seattle where I’m now living. The Seattle International Film Festival runs year round programming at four locations: the Cinerama theater, the uptown, the civic center and the Egyptian. You also have the grand illusion, the northwest film forum so there is a number of niche art house operators in the area that do terrific stuff, so I’m very fortunate to be able to access that.
For more insight into the operation of Laemmle Theaters, watch Raphael Sbarge’s documentaryOnly in Theaters. You can also catch Inside the Arthousea new video podcast from Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge highlighting new releases from August 28th.
In the sparsest year for animation in some time, France has quietly put out what has been highlighted by the press as an “oddity.” Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds sports Juliette & Carmen, two young sisters staying with their neighbor Agnés for a spontaneous sleepover. Upon the first recess of supervision, they stumble into one of Agnés’ authored children’s books, are re-imagined as human-sized cats and seized by fantastically unevolved creatures. Within the book’s confinement they are assisted by Selma, an avian opera singer, who has connections to both the author’s past and to the most powerful figure in the land, the air-bound and unpredictable magician Sirocco.
Chieux’s Annecy Audience Award-winning feature is as simple as the art-house form ever presents itself, a fairy tale guided by so many instantaneous decisions the room to breathe compresses just short of heart-stopping. As Juliette and Carmen stumble into their neighbor’s tales, so does curiosity bite their new cat-like instincts near immediately, finding them in various states of ownership, imprisonment, freedom, and heroic resplendence within as little as 30 minutes of runtime. Nothing about Sirocco is hard to follow, a credit to Chieux’s knack for embedding a child’s perspective into his wonderland of immense proportions, yet the story’s constant moving target of new objectives does hinder its otherwise easygoing nature. Even in the opening minutes, the rug is pulled out by a change of perspective, the protagonist quickly redirected from a sleepy Agnés to the children’s hurricane of energy.
For what may prove more divisive in the Kingdom of Winds is Chieux’s choice of art-style. Sirocco is not crude-looking, per se, but intentionally rough and sparse in between the lines. Layers of atmosphere and Earthly settings in Selma’s world are rendered in light, ambient colors, near nothing to saturation, over layers of even further comparable color swatches. The character designs, aside from Selma herself, are rather spare – crowds of minions, flying beasts and assistants all with a bulb-like rounded figure, clone-like blobs fighting frenetic stick-limbed beings. Even the first fantastical character Juliette and Carmen encounter, a small wooden toy, humorously reminded me of a cheap Adult Swim character. Still, many will find the minimalism of anything presented at two dimensional-face value as charming these days.
Far and away, Sirroco’s biggest asset is its score – classical and orchestral, booming in its symphony, particularly in the theatrical setting it will get minimal playtime for in the United States. For all its public anime comparisons, the music of Sirocco is what ties it closest to recent Studio Ghibli efforts, a bountiful mixture of adventure and climactic overture to soundtrack the sights of Selma’s overhead journey. French vocalist Célia Kameni provides Selma’s singing voice, a baroque operatic performance that stuns in its un-poplike nature, her gorgeous, sustained notes an instrument in their own right.
If this review did not imply otherwise, Selma’s very existence is the only thing that holds Sirocco together as a story. Strong and goodhearted, but not without emotion, she keeps the value of a more considered, budgetary (real world) animation intact while engaging with naivete at every plot turn. Her most sagely words of wisdom echo what Chieux may have thought bringing her into this world: “Such a shame. The audience gets to see what artists they want. But the artists do not get to choose their audience.” With its bounty of unrestrained whimsy, Sirocco will be buried under other European efforts into the second half of this year, where it will advocate on its own modern merits for adolescent viewing attention. It should nevertheless not go unnoticed – many of life’s most pleasant joys are better stumbled upon, or into, anyway.
Radu Jude is no stranger to controversy or satirizing contemporary society. His previous feature, the Golden Bear winning Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, took aim at sexism, nationalism, and consumerism with COVID-19 and sex as a backdrop. Before that, he highlighted his country’s hidden involvement in the holocaust in I Do Not Care if we Go Down in History as Barbarians. Both of these films packed a strong punch of humor and cynicism, but Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is his most potent critique of the world today and a movie that will define the 2020s for later generations.
Don’t expect Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to be an easy watch. Unless you’re familiar with Radu Jude’s recent films, you might be confused why this film keeps cutting to an old communist-era Romanian film about a female taxi driver or why we spend the majority of the central narrative literally stuck in traffic. Don’t expect a resolution from the side-narratives either. All of the threads might seem random but they all contribute to the bleak and cynical tapestry of the modern world that Radu Jude creates.
You might be thinking; “why would I want to watch a cynical tapestry of the modern world? The world is bleak enough right now.” To which we say; “fear not, you will have a guide in the madness.” Ilinca Manolache’s Angela is like Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. She’ll show us the hellish signs of late-stage capitalism – wealth inequality, corporate indifference, virtue signalling – and fiercely confront them with her dark humor. She’s integral to Jude’s critique of modern life as her humor makes it digestible and more like a bad dream than a shameful reality.
You might also be thinking; “why does Jude keep cutting to an old Community-era Romanian film?” The film in question is Angela merge mai departe, shot during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s authoritarian rule. It follows a female taxi driver as she ferries a range of male passengers around the city. The film highlights the danger of being a woman – she’s caught eyeing a wrench to use as a potential defense against one passenger – and is on the receiving end of leering eyes of men on the street, which Jude intentionally shows in slow motion. But her experiences are not significantly different to that which modern Angela faces. By including this communist-era film within Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Jude forces us to compare the two eras. Ultimately, and depressingly, life under the dictatorship appears no worse than today. You might even interpret the 80s as better. For one, it’s shot in color vs. the monochrome of modernity so it looks warmer, and secondly 80s Angela is free from corporate exploitation.
Conclusion
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an era defining film. It’s bleak tapestry of the modern world marks a new low-point in Romanian (and modern capitalist) society. Just like Dante’s Inferno, we’re guided with dark humor through the hell of modernity and left to ponder how we got here.
Time-travel is a key ingredient of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. It holds an unnatural power to change the future and the past, adding the driving plot behind the Back to the Future and Terminator series from the 1980s and a few modern Christopher Nolan films. Over in Italy, Alice Rohrwacher has mastered the ability to use time-travel naturally. Instead of using it as the driving force of the plot and drama, it is the icing on the cake. She has combined time-travel with wholly Italian influences; De Sica’s Neo-realism and Fellini’s Surrealism, to make her own fantastic style.
La Chimera starts with a dream. Sepia-tinted snippets of a woman in a garden evokes the feeling of warm nostalgia. The dream is interrupted by a train conductor asking for tickets, which introduces us to our dreamer: Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor. He picks out a very old looking train ticket the size of a postcard and his train-cabin-mates pick up on his unusual accent and ask where he comes from. “Far,” is his one-worded answer, coding the mystery of his character.
So who is Arthur, and has he come from another era? He doesn’t reveal anything obvious on the train. It’s not clear where he’s going or coming from, and as per his one-worded answer in the paragraph above, we don’t know who he is or where he is from either. A few puzzle pieces are inferred from the following scenes, but these do not give us a complete picture. We find out that:
He’s English
He’s been in jail – likely as the fall guy for a troubadour group of associates
He’s looking for a woman
He has a special skill at finding treasures from the past
Whilst these attributes build his character, they also all add to his mysteriousness by leading to new questions:
Why is an Englishman in rural Italy with a group of grave-robbers?
What led to his capture and was he turned in?
Who is he looking for and what happened to them?
How did he get his supernatural skill?
This mystery makes him appear like he’s been picked up from another world and time and plonked into rural Italy.
Time-travel has popped up before in Alice Rohrwacher’s films. In her previous feature, Happy as Lazzaro, the titular character falls from a great height, blacks out, and reappears in a modern era, portaling from his previous life in feudal Italy. Whilst the time-travel is more metaphorical than literal, Rohrwacher makes the jump more believable by situating Lazzaro (the lead character) in a location stuck in the past; a small rural Italian town with old, decaying houses, no modern infrastructure, and no signs of modern technology, before transporting him to the modern city. The town that Arthur finds himself in is exactly the same setting as Lazzaro’s decaying town. His house is a DIY shack on the outside of the town wall, he visits the crumbling house of his lost lover, and electronic screens and electricity itself are practically non-existent. This setting, combined with Arthur’s mystery makes viewers accustomed to Rohrwacher’s films feel like Arthur is from another era and place, and has got lost in old-town Italy whilst searching for his lost love.
Conclusion
If the time-travel and mystery haven’t already sold you on watching La Chimera, know that watching La Chimera is like watching a bubbling pot of Italian Cinema influences whilst witnessing a new talent find their stylistic voice. There’s pieces of De Sica’s neo-realism in the poverty-stricken characters and tough world they exist in, fragments of Antonioni’s mood-driven mystery in their vague backgrounds and existence, and a large chunk of Fellini’s surrealism and panache in the bombastic scenes and cinematic magic. Rohrwacher in La Chimera manages to bring together all these influences whilst building on the natural time-travel of Happy as Lazzaro, forming her own style from the embers of the Italian classics.
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