Nathaniel BellFriday, March 2
Titmouse, an Emmy Award–winning animation studio, has made an annual tradition of challenging staffers to produce at least five seconds of original animation during their paid company holiday. This has resulted in Titmouse 5-Second Animation Night, an evening celebrating these unsupervised, uncensored creative efforts. Titmouse founder Chris Prynoski will introduce the program, which also includes a selection of rare shorts from the company archives. The results should be weird, inspired and liberated. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Fri., March 2, 7:30 p.m.; $12. (323) 466-3456, americancinemathequecalendar.com.
UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater will screen Spike Lee's Girl 6 as part of the collaborative series Working Girls: America's Career Women on Screen. The first Spike Lee joint written by someone other than Lee — playwright Suzan-Lori Parks — the film concerns a struggling actress (Theresa Randle) who becomes a phone sex worker to help make ends meet. The tone is often comic, the visual style eclectic and the insights bountiful. It will be followed by The Best of Everything, Jean Negulesco's 1959 melodrama (based on a story by Rona Jaffe) about the travails of the female staff of a big-time NYC publisher. Author Siouxsie Q. James will introduce the screening. Women in Film members receive free admission at the box office. UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood; Fri., March 2, 7:30 p.m.; $10. (310) 206-8013, cinema.ucla.edu.
Michael Curtiz directed the Western The Proud Rebel.; Credit: MGM
Saturday, March 3
The Proud Rebel, a late-period Michael Curtiz Western shot in ripe Technicolor, is a sensitive family drama that deserves re-evaluation. Alan Ladd plays a former Confederate officer whose son lost his speech after witnessing his mother's death. Curtiz's touch is warm but not too sentimental. Four Daughters, Curtiz's 1938 soap opera about a small-town family's romantic misadventures, earned the director his first official Oscar nomination. The evening, part of UCLA's sweeping series Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, will be preceded by a book signing by Alan K. Rode, author of a new Curtiz biography. UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood; Wed., March 3, 7:30 p.m.; $10. (310) 206-8013, cinema.ucla.edu.
Tuesday, March 6
These Glamour Girls screens as part of LACMA's monthlong tribute to Marsha Hunt, center.; Credit: TCM
Marsha Hunt, a classic Hollywood leading lady frequently cast in kind, sympathetic roles, is LACMA's star of the month. In These Glamour Girls, she plays a dime-a-dance girl invited by an inebriated frat boy (Lew Ayres) to spend the weekend at his upper-crust college. Hunt, who turned 100 in October, shines in this featherweight, pre-WWII romantic comedy, a decade or so before her political activism resulted in her being placed on the McCarthy-era blacklist. LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Mid-Wilshire; Tue., March 6, 1 p.m.; $4. (323) 857-6000, lacma.org.
Die Hard is simply too fun to watch only at Christmastime, and Laemmle's Anniversary Classics series knows it. John McTiernan's relentlessly violent action flick gave Bruce Willis his most iconic early role as a New York cop stranded in a high-rise as terrorists take over the building. Featuring the best pyrotechnics money could buy in 1988, the film is routine yet enjoyable — a classic of Reagan-era braggadocio. Yippee ki-yay, indeed. Actors Bonnie Bedelia and Reginald VelJohnson and screenwriter Steven E. de Souza are scheduled to appear for a Q&A after the screening. Laemmle Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre, 8556 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, Tue., March 6, 7:30 p.m.; $15. (310) 478-3836, laemmle.com. —Nathaniel Bell
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