Category Archives: Movies

Happening in L.A., Movies

Five Animated Movies to See in Theaters on May 4

Son of the White Mare 1981 psychedelic animated movie from Hungarian director Marcell Jankovics
Son of the White Mare (1981) screens at Philosophical Research Society on Sunday, May 4, 2025

Since my Premium magazine feature on L.A.-area repertory cinema is out now, I wanted to highlight a few movie theaters for this week’s recommendations. And since I love animation, that will be the focus of this week’s picks. All of the screenings are happening on Sunday and there is some geographic diversity, so hopefully, you can fit one of these into your schedule. They’re (nearly) all movies that I have seen previously and 10/10 recommend. 

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Art, Books, Movies

New Stories on Repertory Cinema, Violeta Parra and More Out Now

Premium Magazine art house repertory cinema story by Liz Ohanesian

Just wanted to give you a quick update about some stories that I’ve recently written for other magazines and newspapers. 

Now is a good time to watch a movie. At least it is if you’re in the greater Los Angeles area, where repertory and arthouse cinemas are experiencing a revival. I wrote about the resurgence of in-person movie screenings, focusing mainly on Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz and The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana for Premium, which is the magazine Southern California News Group newspaper subscribers. Click here for a gift link to read the story.

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Movies

Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie Is the Road Trip Movie/Documentary You Need to See

Cheech & Chong last movie promotional poster

It’s pretty difficult to find coverage of Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie that’s not riddled with old weed puns. I guess that’s to be expected. Still, the wink-wink-nudge-nudge stoner references in headlines are a little trite when recreational marijuana is legal in nearly half the country and firmly embedded in the pop culture of all 50 states. As for the latter, much of that is because of Cheech and Chong. Without Up in Smoke, there would be no Half Baked or  Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle or Evil Bong. Cheech & Chong essentially invented the stoner comedy, but that’s only part of the story.

Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie is a documentary framed as a road trip movie. The premise is that the influential comedy duo, who released a string of hit records and then movies, between the 1970s and 1980s, are on a road trip in the desert. As they head to a place called The Joint, they recount their life stories through interviews, archival footage and a few interjections from others who were there. Directed by David L. Bushell, who previously produced movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dallas Buyers Club, the movie uses a few different devices to blur fact and fiction. This is all done to drive home one universal truth: No two people see the same situation the same way. 

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Movies

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus Is More Than a Music Documentary

Cover of Goodbye Horses The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus documentary soundtrack album
Cover of the soundtrack for Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus out on Sacred Bones

If you’ve ever requested “Goodbye Horses” at your local ‘80s or goth club, you need to seek out the new Q Lazzarus documentary. TBH, you need to see this movie even if you’re tired of hearing the song from Silence of the Lambs at every spooky night in town. You need to see it even if you think you don’t know what I’m talking about because- trust me- you will once year hear the first few seconds of the melody. Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, directed by Eva Aridjis Fuentes, is a must-see music documentary, in part because it’s much more than one song that became an unexpected club hit. This film is no nostalgia ride. In it, Diane Luckey, aka Q, shares her struggles and what ultimately led her to vanish from music in the mid-1990s.

Last month, I reviewed the Goodbye Horses soundtrack for Bandcamp. The 21-song collection is the first ever full-length Q Lazzarus release and, while listening to it, I was stunned by how she built up a large and eclectic body of work over a 10 year period, yet struggled to find anyone to release it. So, I went to a screening of Goodbye Horses at Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz on Friday night to find out what happened. While I had read about bits-and-pieces of Luckey’s life and knew that she died while the documentary was in the works, I wasn’t expecting the revelations that come in the film.

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Movies

Dinner in America and the “Watermelon” Earworm

Dinner in America screenshot Emily Skeggs and Patty
Patty (Emily Skeggs) singing “Watermelon” in Dinner in America

I had “Watermelon,” the song that Patty sings in Dinner in America, stuck in my head for nearly a week, so I decided to watch the movie again. Of course, the earworm burrowed deeper into my brain.

“Fuck the rest of them

Fuck ‘em all

Fuck ‘em all but us”

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Movies

The Juniper Tree: Ingmar Bergman meets Brothers Grimm in this 1990 Movie Starring Björk

Screenshot from The Juniper Tree (1990) starring Björk
The Juniper Tree (1990)

The Juniper Tree is one of those movies that’s been kicking around on my “To Watch” list for ages, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I finally saw it on Kanopy. The film, made in Iceland by American director Nietzchka Keene, was released in 1990 and is probably best known as “Björk’s first movie.” Several years ago, The Juniper Tree was restored and re-released. Since then, it’s been making the rounds on the repertory cinema circuit. In fact, if you’re in L.A. and want to see it in a theater, you can catch it at Philosophical Research Society on Saturday, February 22. 

While Björk is clearly the movie’s selling point now, she’s not the only reason you should check out The Juniper Tree. It’s a stunning movie that makes good use of the landscape to tell a modern-medieval fairy tale with a Seventh Seal feel. 

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Movies

Valley Girl Is the Best ’80s Teen Movie

Julie (Deborah Foreman) and Randy (Nicolas Cage) in Valley Girl.
Julie (Deborah Foreman) and Randy (Nicolas Cage) in Valley Girl.

Television and film is loaded with heart-to-hearts between kids and parents where young people learn that you shouldn’t judge someone by how they look or what they have, but by who they are. The conversation in Valley Girl, though, hits a little differently than the rest. Julie, the lead Val in the 1983 film, is torn between the Hollywood punk she likes and the preppy dumbass that her friends want her to date. Julie’s dad adds that it’s not just what’s inside a person that counts, but “what they stand for.” Then he reminds her that not everyone will be okay with her choice because, “There are lots of people out there who just ain’t happy unless you live and think the way they do.”

The answer should be simple, but it isn’t. It never is. 

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Movies

Pump Up the Volume Is the ’90s Teen Movie That’s Relevant Right Now

Pump up the Volume Christian Slater

There is no needle drop quite like the one that kickstarts Pump Up the Volume. We are less than five minutes into the movie. Credits are still popping up on screen in neon, graffiti script, but we’ve already seen that the kids are not alright in this completely ordinary town. The camera leads us into a bland suburban home, into a room stocked with cassettes and audio equipment. Someone— we’ve heard his voice, but have yet to see his face— literally drops the needle on a Leonard Cohen record.

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed,” he sings. 

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Movies

Finally, There’s a Horror Movie for the Vinyl Nerds

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light horror film 2024

Finally, there’s a movie that truly understands the vinyl nerd, one that gets the crazy, stupid and possibly dangerous lengths we might travel to procure an ultra-rare, likely-cursed album released by a hippie cult a half-century ago. Of course, this movie, Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, is a horror flick served with a good dose of comedy. Where else did you think a hunt for Discogs gold would take you? 

Directed by Christopher Bickel, the South Carolina-based, “anti-Hollywood” filmmaker whose previous efforts include Bad Girls and The Theta Girl, Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is no-budget cinema at its finest. It looks good, has a great soundtrack with original music and, most importantly, is a clever, well-written film. Released last year, Pater Noster has been streaming on Night Flight, which is where I caught it. There’s also a Blu-Ray release on the horizon.  

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Adventures in L.A., Movies

I Saw Y2K and You Should Too

Y2K Kyle Mooney Movie Promo poster
Y2K Kyle Mooney Movie Promo poster

We were looking for a movie to see because it was Tuesday, when tickets at Alamo Drafthouse are close to half-price. The problem was that little looked particularly worthwhile. I have absolutely no interest in ever seeing Wicked, Nightbitch looks like something I might eventually watch if it turns up on streaming and, IDK if I was really in the mood to be terrified by Hugh Grant in Heretic. 

But, this Y2K, the new movie directed by Kyle Mooney, sounds pretty funny, especially since we’re old enough to remember the build-up to that New Year’s Eve. In real life, people spent a full year playing “1999” ad nauseam and hawking survival kits, but, then nothing happened. The sky was not all purple. People weren’t running everywhere. We didn’t even get a computer crash. The world remained somewhat normal, or so we thought. And another two decades would pass before I could listen to “1999” again. 

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