Michael Nordine

Credit: James Gordon Everett

Westwood's Crest Theatre Rises Again

Michael Nordine
If the above photo doesn't tip you off, the Crest Theatre in Westwood is gorgeous. So much so, in fact, that upon touring it last Tuesday I was both shocked and embarrassed to have never been there before. Opened in 1940 as a stage venue called the Westwood Theatre, it......

Michael Mann's Long-Lost Film The Keep Rises Again

Michael Nordine
Almost certainly Michael Mann’s strangest film, 1983’s The Keep is also the only one by the director of Miami Vice and Heat to never be released on DVD. As such, its two screenings at Cinefamily this Saturday, Aug. 24 (at midnight), and Sunday, Aug. 25 (10:15 p.m.) — on what......
The ultra-rare VHS tape Tales from the Quadead Zone

Why VHS Wasn't So Bad After All

Michael Nordine
As demonstrated by two documentaries screening in L.A. this week, obsolescence need not imply irrelevance. Monday night at Cinefamily, Josh Johnson's Rewind This! provided a people's history of VHS; tomorrow night at the Nerdist Showroom and then again at the Egyptian on Friday, Dan Kinem and Levi Peretic's Adjust Your......

A Tarkovsky Series at American Cinematheque

Michael Nordine
Andrei Tarkovsky made only seven feature films before his untimely death at the age of 54, but all of them are rightly considered masterworks. Over the next week, the American Cinematheque is playing five in its aptly titled "Ocean of Dreams" retrospective: the abstractly autobiographical The Mirror, which combines fragments......
It Felt Like Love

Will Anyone Buy My Amazing Festival Movie?

Michael Nordine
As tends to be the case, several of the best films made in the last year have yet to screen outside of the festival circuit. For some this is because their scheduled release date simply hasn't arrived; others are still waiting to be picked up by a distributor in the......

L.A. Film Festival 2013: The Basics

Michael Nordine
What is the Los Angeles Film Festival? The most prominent "traditional" film festival in L.A., which is to say that LAFF deals mainly in world premieres of low-budget indies, from both the United States and abroad, which tend to go relatively unnoticed at the glitzier AFI Fest. Now in its......

It's the Non-Famous Movies That Make TCM Fest Worth Attending

Michael Nordine
The joys of TCM Fest are twofold: seeing perennial favorites on a big screen for the first time and discovering unearthed gems for the first time anywhere. The former category is as stacked as ever this year — highlights include John Huston's The African Queen, William Wyler's Ben-Hur and a......
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Best L.A. Novel Ever: Ask the Dust vs. Less Than Zero, Round 2

Michael Nordine

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L.A. Weekly is determining the best L.A. novel ever by holding a tournament featuring 32 of our favorites in head-to-head matchups, until there's only one novel standing. For further reading check out:

*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament Brackets

*Best L.A. Novel Ever: More Matchups

Writing about Charles Bukowski's Post Office in the first round of this tournament, I noted that pitting it against John Fante's Ask the Dust was somewhat unfair when taking into account that Bukowski's novel was heavily influenced by Fante's. (Bukowski even penned a foreword to Ask the Dust, writing at one point that "Fante was my god.") The same would appear to be true of Less Than Zero: though there isn't as direct a correlation, Bret Easton Ellis did go on to use the opening paragraph of Fante's seminal novel as the epigraph to his short story collection The Informers some ten years later. It thus comes as little surprise that his debut has a good deal in common with Fante's bittersweet masterwork.

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