13ThingsLA: September 25

The Life of Meaning for your art calendar

Kate Winslet leads a brilliant cast in LEE (Roadside Attractions)

This week we’re unveiling our new look for Fall, along with a rare film review—but it’s of Kate Winslet being a goddamn queen in the Lee Miller biopic, so we felt like that counted as art. More exhibition reviews of PST: Art offerings, of course—at Museum of Jurassic Technology, on a Malibu cliffside, at UC Riverside, and on the Internet. Plus recommendations bumping up against architecture, design, climate, and politics at Subliminal Projects, Rusha & Co., LACMA, and the Department of Cultural Affairs Performing Arts Division. And of course, further PST: Art projects keep opening up—this week at Caltech, Vincent Price Art Museum, Track 16 Gallery, the REDCAT stage, and Craft Contemporary. PS: Mickalene Thomas closes at the Broad this weekend, so don’t sleep on that, and NB there’s free admission on Thursday & Saturday. PPS: Wanna hear me talking about art? Tune in to Alta Live on Wednesday; Dot Red’s IG Live on Thursday; and come out in person to Mark Steven Greenfield’s show at CalState LA on Saturday—we always have too much fun, and the show is a real stunner. 

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Feature

Kate Winslet in LEE (Roadside Attractions)

(REVIEW) LEE opens wide September 26. Told in a conventional story structure (mostly flashbacks launched within a gently plausible premise), this biopic is, ultimately, anything but conventional or gentle. It’s not the whole life story of famed photographer, model, journalist, war correspondent, feminist with or without the moniker, bon vivant, friend and lover of cultural icons and activists—a biography so replete with extremes, achievements, courage, and talent that if it were fiction, no one would find it believable. Instead, it focuses on the specific years before, during, and after WW2 in Europe, when Miller was already into her second act as a photographer, but was about to step into the chasm of wartime Europe and its aftermath in a way that remains among the most important work on the subject ever made. Part of me is glad they didn’t bother mocking up a glamor montage, although I can’t help but feel the juxtaposition would have set the rest of her life into even more stark relief. But the choice was to leave even more room to really enter deeper dimensions of Miller’s true character transformation with the slow burn, sudden explosion of awareness, stepping into her own power, demands for gender parity, emotional evolution, trauma response, and all the obvious geopolitical parallels to the present day which her story so richly deserves. No spoilers, but the famous bathtub scene is pure cinematic and screenwriting perfection. And listen, besides Winslet in an Oscar-bound performance as Miller, the perfect casting also features a luminous Marion Cotillard, the best Skarsgård in the role of dreamy, brilliant artist and historian (and love of Miller’s life) Roland Penrose, and a dramatic performance by Andy Samberg that is a true revelation in itself. More information & showtimes: leemovie.com. —SND

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