Movies

Love it or hate it, La La Land seems to be the film juggernaut that won't go away, and now it's being credited with bringing more tourists to Los Angeles, eager to get their own moment of singing, dancing and romance. Two recent surveys on the topic seem to confirm that this La La effect is real. One, conducted by the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, found that among people across the country who had seen the movie, an overwhelming 86 percent said they were either “more likely” or “much more likely” to visit L.A. Another, conducted by movie ticket seller Fandango, found in a sample of 1,000 Millennials who had seen La La Land, 64 percent said the movie itself make them want to visit, the L.A. Times reports. Businesses that cater to tourists are trying to capture some of that Hollywood excitement with special tours and guides. Starline Tours has a specific La La Land bus tour to take fans around to filming locations and Discover Los Angeles has set up a website dedicated to guiding any visitor who wants to recreate scenes out of the movie on where to go. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for the La La bump, too. The Jar, a real-life restaurant where Emma Stone’s character dines in the film, reports that they’ve seen groups regularly coming in asking to sit at the specific table where the scene was shot. “It literally happens three or four times a week,” manager Rose Sanchez told the Times, “La La Land has had quite an impact for us.”    Want more? Sign up here

“I have never done this thing before and I have no idea what people will think,” says Steven Ellison—widely known by his ‌primary stage name, Flying Lotus—‌when asked about his recent filmmaking work. 

Shortly after the release—and controversy—of his film The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, Martin Scorsese travelled to Japan. As he rode a train through the country, he read Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, which follows two priests searching for their missing mentor in Japan in 1639, when Christianity was brutally repressed. The priests are captured by the shogunate and forced to choose between renouncing their faith or watching the executions of their fellow Catholics.  The novel resonated deeply with Scorsese, who spent almost 30 years obsessed with adapting it into a film. He has finally realized his long-delayed opus, with actors Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as the priests—and has even taken the film to the Vatican to screen for the Pope. Time Out spoke with the filmmaker just after that special screening.     When you were a young altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York, did you ever imagine that you would meet the Pope? Those were fantasies I never thought could happen. The Church in New York in the 1950s was a refuge for me. You needed to survive with the rough-and-tumble kids, and you needed to be respected. Some of those kids got involved in difficult things, really bad things. A couple got killed. [St. Patrick’s priest] Father Principe was our mentor in the streets. He had a different take on who we could be.   There is a theme in this film of guilt and internal conflict that harks back to your early films. Do you see a thread from Jake La