Gene Schiavone

Eifman Ballet in Rodin

This week's dance events include the return of Dance Camera West dance film festival and Eifman Ballet's sensual bio-ballet Rodin.

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Latest Theater Reviews
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

5. A moving and movable Dance Film Fest
L.A.'s internationally recognized festival of dance on film, Dance Camera West, begins with this year's events moving among downtown's Music Center, West L.A.'s Getty Center, Santa Monica's Annenberg Beach House and mid-Wilshire's L.A. County Museum of Art. This year's theme Get Wet is carried out with a live performance involving a water feature at most venues prior to the screening of festival films. Parties on the opening and closing days as well as the screenings offer multiple chances to chat with the filmmakers. For a complete listing of events and venues go to www.dancecamerawest.org. At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Thurs., May 2, 7 p.m.; $15; Reception at 9 p.m., $20; Also at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd., mid-Wilshire; Fri., May 3, 3 p.m., 5 p.m.; 7:30 p.m., $15. 323-857-6000, www.lacma.org. Also at The Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, W.L.A.; Sat., May 4, 4 p.m., free. 310-440-7330, www.getty.edu/museum/. Also at Annenberg Community Beach House, 415 Pacific Coast, Santa Monica; Sun., May 5, 5 p.m., $20 afternoon, panel discussion free with reservation. 310-458-4904, www.annenbergbeachhouse.com. For a complete listing of events, venues & tickets go to www.dancecamerawest.org.

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Safe in Hell

Hollywood Boulevard during the TCM Classic Film Festival is mostly business as usual: Captain Jack Sparrow and Marilyn Monroe walk up and down the street to the delight of camera-wielding tourists, Jimmy Kimmel Live staffers give away free tickets, aspiring rappers hand out CDs before not-so-subtly requesting payment. But there, in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre, is a barricade meant to protect anyone walking that night's red carpet from said hustle and bustle, a small bit of steel dividing Hollywood as it chooses to present itself from Hollywood as it actually is.

This particular strip of Los Angeles, always one of my least favorite in the entire city, has long struck me as somewhat of an odd venue for such an ostensibly glamorous event. The celebrities and flash bulbs in front of the TCL Chinese (formerly Grauman's) maintain the facade well enough, but there's little masking the fact that this is one grimy tourist trap. In a sense, I suppose that might actually make it perfect: seeing the illusion coexist with the reality tends to be more interesting than witnessing either one on its own.

Funny Girl opened TCM Fest on Thursday evening; a new restoration of The General closed it last night. I attended neither, opting instead to practice what I preached last week by focusing on lesser-known movies I'd never seen before, often at the expensive of bigger draws: I skipped Airplane! for Try and Get Me and Three Days of the Condor in favor of Safe in Hell, a pre-Code nasty that was such a hit on Thursday night they decided to re-screen it yesterday.

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Auschwitz survivors show their tattoos in Numbered

It's been over sixty years since the Holocaust, but time has not faded the memories for those who survived it. And as part of this year's 27th Israel Film Festival, a tribute will be made to the Holocaust survivors and their families with a special screening of the documentary Numbered at the Saban Theater on Sunday, April 28 at noon.

This event will highlight the Second Generation movement, which sheds light on the cross-generational transference of trauma and/or coping skills from Holocaust survivors onto their children -- and even their grandchildren.

Numbered shares the tales of those who survived the worst concentration camp, Auschwitz -- the only camp that tattooed its prisoners with numbers -- showcasing the different ways these survivors have coped with the horrors of their past and others' reactions to them since. But it also shows how the children and grandchildren of survivors are getting tattoos of the same numbers their ancestors got, in the spirit of family solidarity.

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Nadia Takla

The Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Film Festival festival directors and producers, from left to right: Gary Anthony Williams, Kelly Frazier, Jeannie Roshar and Ryan Higman

This past weekend at the Downtown Independent was the fifth annual Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Film Festival, featuring ten film blocks of shorts. Topics (and interpretation of "short") varied in the films showcased at the film festival. One moment it's the German porn industry, the next, a guy in bed eating Chicken McNuggets. And I sat through over fifteen hours of it just so I can tell you which comedy shorts you should watch.

Here are our top ten picks from the festival:

10. Post-It
Starring David Neher (the bit player Todd in Community) as Ernie and a yellow Post-It, this short follows the growing friendship between this lonely cubicle worker and his reliable pal who can always be counted on to remind him of what he has to do. Things turn for the worse when Ernie starts to set reminders on his iPhone, leading Post-It to go into a jealous rage. But when Ernie is mugged and forced to withdraw money from the ATM, his yellow-squared friend comes to help.

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Nadia Takla

Cast and crew of Model Minority, from left to right: Takayo Fischer (Grandma Reiko), Lily Mariye (writer/director), Nichole Bloom (Kayla Tanaka) and Chris Tashima (Ken Tanaka).

How many Asians in film can you name? Sure, there are some of the obvious ones, like Ang Lee or Jackie Chan. But most people probably can't list more than ten.

To try and help spread the word of Asians in the film industry, Asians on Film had their first film festival this past weekend at J.E.T. Studios, celebrating those who did not follow the approved career paths that many of our traditional Asian parents set out before us. Instead of becoming doctors, businessmen or lawyers, these festival attendees opted for the arts.

The man at the helm of the event? Co-editor of the AsiansOnFilm.com blog, Scott Ericksson, who is noticeably not Asian. But this falls in line with what the night was about: appreciating the works of up and coming filmmakers...who just happen to be Asian.

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ICEF Rugby team in a still from Red, White, Black & Blue

South L.A. rugby program ICEF Rugby took its first international trip to compete in Hong Kong in 2006, and film and T.V. crews have been scouting its two high school teams ever since. First there was the Academy award-winning documentary filmmaker who shot a movie reel he intended to turn into a feature. Then there was the reality television producer who saw potential for episodic teenage drama. And finally, there was the Hollywood director looking to make a fictional blockbuster based on the charter school's outstanding sports program.

None of these projects panned out -- either the budgets were too high or the directors didn't meet eye to eye with the charter school system -- but one thing became clear to ICEF rugby coach Stuart Krohn: his globe-trotting high school rugby teams were an inspiring inner-city sports story that needed to be told. When he finally found the right film crew -- albeit on the other side of the world, with New Zealand-based Cloud South Films -- he took on the dual role of coach and producer for the new documentary Red, White, Black & Blue, which chronicles the teams' rugby competition in New Zealand and subsequent return to Los Angeles.

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erpb

Upstream Color

Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color -- a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body -- was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let's say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady consideration of coupledom and the cosmos, Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, the third (but one hopes not the last) in Linklater's series of scintillating gabfests co-scripted with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

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Zachary Pincus-Roth

Ushio Shinohara's painting, created by boxing with the canvas

See also:
*More Sundance 2013 coverage
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Bare-chested, in shorts and goggles, an 81-year-old Japanese man stood in front of us. It looked like we were about to watch him go swimming. But it was zero degrees outside, and we were in an art gallery during the Sundance Film Festival last Saturday. It turns out films aren't the only things to see in Park City: we were about to watch a round of paint-boxing.

Ushio Shinohara, the shirtless octogenarian, one of the subjects of Sundance documentary Cutie and the Boxer, created the art of paint-boxing in 1960. "At that time, he didn't have anything, so it was just a piece of paper on a wall," the interpreter at the gallery translates from Shinohara's Japanese.

In an interview later, Shinohara elaborates in what he calls his "not very good" English, "Boxing gloves very expensive in 1960, I can't buy. Canvas, I can't buy." His secret? "Garbage." Shinohara recounts how he and his peers were inspired by their contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, a master of found-object work. "He's a king of junk for Japanese young artists. Every young artist get free [supplies]."

Back in the intro, he remarks through the translator, "Since boxing is not very popular in New York right now [boxing gloves are] down from $55 to $20." The audience of festivalgoers laughs at his current good fortune, though perhaps some of that is nervous laughter. The crowd is huddled together on steps inside the gallery, many trying to get as close as possible and others hanging back just a bit, iPhones held up like periscopes, as they protect themselves from the splattering paint we've been warned about (though we're assured it washes out of clothes). Shinohara attaches sponges to his bargain boxing gloves, dips them in tubs of paint, then punches recklessly at the canvas, sending paint-droplets, black and hot pink, flying in our direction.

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David Kruta

Stacie Passon's Concussion is a happy surprise.

Sometimes, one film in a festival lineup can help to reveal another in sharper relief. To wit, one of the loveliest entries in Sundance 2013's U.S. Dramatic Competition, James Ponsoldt's deeply felt coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now, looked even better after the premiere of The Way Way Back, a deeply insincere coming-of-age comedy from writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash--a movie that has so far generated the festival's biggest sale (to Fox Searchlight, for close to $10 million).

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Rachel Morrison

Michael B. Jordan (The Wire), who's fully up to the challenge, in Fruitvale.

You could hear a pin drop during the first Sundance screening of writer-director Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale, an enormously powerful and moving debut feature based on the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Oakland transit police in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2009. Coogler opens the film--one of the standouts of this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition--with pixilated camera-phone video of the real incident, then flashes back 24 hours to take us through the last day of Grant's abbreviated life. The result is a richly observed portrait of working-class African-American life and of one man's flawed but sincere efforts to make things better for himself and his young family. Taken together with another Dramatic Competition highlight, Andrew Donsunmu's previously discussed Mother of George, Fruitvale also offers further evidence of the American indie black cinema renaissance that has emerged at Sundance over the last few years

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