There's nothing more enraging to me as a moviegoer than that dreaded moment when, in the middle of a movie, the unmistakable, un-ignorable glow of a cell phone screen cuts through the glorious darkness in my field of vision and takes me out of the viewing experience. Texting, sexting, checking emails, Tweeting -- I don't care what your excuse is, it's not okay to ruin everyone else's experience by using your phone (or talking or shaking the entire row of seats with your nervous-boredom knee jiggle or letting your stank feet air out in the aisles or snoring, you selfish prick.) So why would theater owners or studio heads, whose job it is to deliver an enjoyable movie-going experience to their paying customers, ever even entertain the notion of allowing or encouraging texting in a movie theater?
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Director Mark Romanek's dystopian sci-fi romance Never Let Me Go never seemed to quite receive its due when it was released in 2010 and subsequently written off as a commercial disappointment. But many found the restrained Kazuo Ishiguro novel adaptation gorgeous and hauntingly heartbreaking, among them New Beverly Cinema programmer Julia Marchese, who recently wrote about her quest to bring Romanek and his film to screen in Los Angeles for a two-night engagement that starts Wednesday, January 11.
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First time writer-director Evan Glodell spent years obsessing over his feature debut Bellflower, a raw tale of love, betrayal, and apocalyptic-level emotional tumult set among a group of near-nihilistic twenty-somethings in Southern California. (Part of that obsession? Custom-building the badass, fire-breathing Mother Medusa muscle car, which figures into the film.) After the jump, see a new exclusive image from Bellflower and find out how you can see it in Los Angeles before it opens on Aug. 5.
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Quentin Tarantino fans have been holding their collective breath for the combined version of Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2 for years (a home video release is still TBA), but Sunday night in Los Angeles the holy grail of special cuts debuted theatrically at the New Beverly Cinema with more gore, more severed limbs, and a handful of minor changes. On Tarantino's birthday!
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