Indie Focus: 'Where's our female Holden Caulfield?'

Aug. 2, 2015 12:05 AM PT

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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen, and welcome to your weekly field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This past week we had an Indie Focus Screening Series event with “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” followed by a Q&A with director and writer Marielle Heller and performers Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgard.

It was a sharp, lively conversation and you can listen here in the latest edition of our Indie Focus podcast.

And this week we've got two screenings! On Monday we’ll show the millennial satire “Fort Tilden,” grand prize winner at the 2014 South by Southwest film festival. After the movie we’ll have a Q&A with writer-directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers and stars Bridey Elliott and Clare McNulty.

On Thursday we’ll be showing “Mistress America,” starring Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke, followed by a Q&A with director and co-writer Noah Baumbach. For any number of reasons, this event is especially exciting.

Check here for more info: events.latimes.com/indiefocus/

Next Fest

Just when you think there’s no new way to show a movie, along comes Sundance Next Fest, one of the freshest local movie events in recent years. The event not only brings a handful of movies from January’s Sundance Film Festival to audiences in L.A., but organizers also curate the films with musicians for a double bill or select special guests for conversations with the filmmakers.

Things kick off tonight with “Cop Car” at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Then the event moves next weekend to the Theatre at the Ace Hotel, to pair “Mistress America” with Sky Ferreira, “Entertainment” with Sharon Van Etten and “Turbo Kid” with Neon Indian and Toro Y Moi. The films “Finders Keepers” and “Cronies” will feature special guests.

I’ll be publishing something more about Next Fest in the print edition later this week. But for now, we’re in the middle of a ticket giveaway (our first!). We’re giving away 6 pairs of tickets!

'The Diary of a Teenage Girl'

Among the most exciting films at Sundance in January was “The Diary of a Teenage Girl," opening in theaters Aug. 7.

Besides our screening series Q&A and podcast, I also wrote a Sunday Calendar story on the movie. Director and writer Marielle Heller declares the movie as something of a call to arms for more stories focused on girls and women.

Marielle Heller, left, directed Alexander Skarsgard as 35-year-old Monroe and Bel Powley as 15-year-old Minnie in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)

"Holden Caulfield is a really complex character, so where's our female Holden Caulfield?" Heller said. "It just felt really important, the chance to represent teenage girls in a way that actually felt real."

During Sundance the “Diary” crew, including Kristen Wiig, stopped by the L.A. Times studio for an on-camera talk with our own Amy Kaufman.

'The End of the Tour'

Since it was first announced that Jason Segel would be playing author David Foster Wallace in an adaptation of David Lipsky’s book of his time interviewing the acclaimed author of “Infinite Jest,” there has been an air of intense expectation around “The End of the Tour.” With the film now in theaters, everyone can get a look at it for themselves. Directed by James Ponsoldt, the film costars Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky.

Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky, left, and Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace in "The End of the Tour." (Jakob Ihre)

Our own Steve Zeitchik has been covering the movie throughout its production and recently wrote a story that dug deep into the objections from the estate and literary guardians of the late Wallace.

And I’ll have my own piece on Segel and the movie running in the next few days.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote a powerful review of the film, which he declared “at once an exercise in post-postmodern literary mythmaking and an unsparing demolition of the contemporary mythology of the writer. It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.”

Dorothy Arzner

With female filmmakers in Hollywood having become such an electrified conversation of late – we’ve talked about it here more than once (see “Diary” above) – it’s a great moment to look back at the work of Dorothy Arzner, a true pioneer. The UCLA Film & Television Archive has begun a major retrospective of her work that will run through Sept. 18.

Our own Kenneth Turan wrote about Arzner, the first woman admitted to the Directors Guild of America.

Perhaps to emphasize how, as the saying goes, the more things change the more they stay the same, in 1930 Arzner spoke words that could have come from a female filmmaker of today.

"Try as a man may, he will never be able to get the woman's viewpoint in telling certain stories," Arzner said then. "Many stories demand treatment at the hands of a woman, not only from the script side but also in the direction, and here a woman should be allowed to direct in all cases."

Email me if you have questions, comments or suggestions, and follow me on Twitter @IndieFocus.