On January 15 and 16, the LACMA Film Program will hold a spotlight on French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who is receiving a Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Three films will be screened: “Mississippi Mermaid,” “Pierrot le fou,” and “Stavisky.” This month’s “Weekend Series” is entitled “The Apocalyptic Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky” and the museum will also be holding a preview screening of the Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s “Vincere,” among many other films.

Four Jim Sheridan films are coming up at the Aero Theatre, followed by recent hits such as “Paranormal Activity,” “Broken Embraces,” “The Maid,” and “Crazy Heart,” and then a very nice John Ford retrospective.

The controversial “Antichrist” has been paired with 1968′s “Hour of the Wolf” at the New Beverly Cinema, followed by the famed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre.” Director Stuart Gordon has personally selected some great films and late January is a double bill of “Double Indemnity” and “The Blue Dahlia.” Be sure to visit their calendar for other great selections and and like usual a wide array of interesting guests.

Meanwhile, Cinefamily seems to be on a sort of hiatus and regular programming will return next month.

“The Wizard of Oz” had its 70th anniversary earlier this year and many theaters played the film nationwide to celebrate. Apparently the event was successful enough to throw an encore, which will play for one night only on November 17, at 6:30 P.M.

Now through February 7, LACMA is holding an exhibition on comic books from India. “Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India’s Comics” places modern-day comic retellings of Indian myths alongside the museum’s historical collection of Indian paintings and “examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre.”

LACMA Film Program

Weekends will be Audrey Hepburn nights, featuring “Charade,” “Wait Until Dark,” “War and Peace,” and “My Fair Lady.” A sneak preview of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” will be held November 10, at 7:30 P.M. Visit their full schedule for times and other films in the program.

Aero Theatre

Tomorrow night is a 25th-anniversary screening of David Lynch’s “Dune,” followed the next night by a disaster triple feature: “Earthquake,” “The Towering Inferno,” and “The Poseidon Adventure.” Also this month are “Carrie,” “Citizen Kane,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” and many more classics.

New Beverly Cinema

The New Beverly holds really fun midnight features. (Unfortunately for me, I can no longer stay up that late.) Among them are “Near Dark,” “Teenage Mother,” “Re-Animator,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Idiocracy,” and “Reservoir Dogs.” For squares like me, there are still plenty of classics, cult classics, and other odd novelties of a bygone era to enjoy earlier in the day.

Cinefamily

The non-profit Cinefamily restored the Silent Movie Theatre in L.A. recently and though I haven’t visited yet, I’m dying to see not only the location but how they run the place. They have a fascinating schedule and I highly suggest you check them out (and let me know how it is).

Under the deal, Disney gets all of Marvel’s 5,000+ characters, including Iron Man, Spider-Man, the X-Men, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and Thor. What Disney won’t get are some of the film and theme park rights, at least not right away. Marvel’s deals with several studios will remain, including “Spider-Man” at Sony, “X-Men” at Fox, and the five remaining pictures with Paramount, which includes “Iron Man 2,” “Thor,” “The First Avenger: Captain America,” “The Avengers,” and possibly “Ant-Man.” Universal Studios also has its Marvel-based attractions in theme parks across the world. Once the deals expire Disney controls everything, but this won’t be for up to a decade or more. Paramount will really be feeling the hurt as it already lost DreamWorks to Disney earlier this year.

Disney will benefit tremendously; DVD sales, ABC advertising, and consumer spending at theme parks have all been sagging lately, contributing to the 26 percent drop in Disney’s profits in the third quarter. Expect to see Marvel characters popping up in Disney theme parks and consumer products and be used to make further inroads into the young boys demographic. Disney’s Princesses and “Hannah Montana” have been extremely popular with girls, but it’s been hard for the company to attract the opposite sex. Marvel would make a good addition to their new Disney XD channel. There are also rumblings about something brewing between Marvel and Pixar. CHUD reports that Pixar’s “John Lasseter and Marvel honchos recently met and got so excited the suits had to tell them to calm down, the deal wasn’t done yet.”

Marvel itself will be relatively unaffected. Marvel Studios won’t be moving from its Manhattan Beach headquarters and, as Bob Iger, president and CEO of Disney, said, “if it’s not broke” then Disney won’t interfere on the movie production side of things. This will also help sell comics, which is always a good thing for a comic book company. In summary, Marvel gets more money to play with and Disney gets more merchandise to sell.

Iger said in a statement: “This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories.”

SOURCES

CHUD, Variety, New York Times, Disney press release

LACMA’s film program will be “going on hiatus” indefinitely in the next couple of months, so I highly suggest you attend one of their few remaining screenings to let them know you want revival programs to stick around.

The Hollywood Forever Cemetery will be screening “An American Werewolf in London” on August 29, “Being There” on September 5, and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on September 6.

Also, be sure to catch the 70th anniversary screening of “The Wizard of Oz” in hi-def on September 23, at 7 P.M., in over 400 theaters nationwide.

Disney’s D23 Expo (September 10–13)

Next month, across the street from Disneyland Resort at the Anaheim Convention Center, Disney will be putting on their very first convention geared toward all things Disneyana. The full schedule is now online and it has a lot of interesting things going on. Screenings alone, the expo will be featuring the U.S. premiere of the “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2″ 3D double feature, a restored print of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in 3D, “the boys: the sherman brothers’ story,” “Walt and El Grupo,”  “The Shaggy Dog,” “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” and many more.

They’ll also be previewing a bundle of their upcoming films during several panels all weekend, including looks at “The Princess and the Frog,” “Toy Story 3,” “Tron: Legacy,” “Beauty and the Beast” in 3D, “Rapunzel,” “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and more, along with a look at their upcoming TV holiday special, “Prep and Landing,” which I thought looked like a lot of fun at the San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year. There will also be plenty of Imagineering panels and theme park panels, including one looking at “The Making of World of Color,” California Adventure’s new “water-and-fire spectacular” slated to debut next year.

One-day tickets cost $37 for adults, $27 for children, and four-day tickets are $111 for adults, $81 for children. D23 members get discounted admission rates.

Long Beach Comic Con (October 2–4)

Meanwhile, good ol’ Long Beach is trying to get in on the comic book convention circuit and I say “the more the merrier!” The first annual Long Beach Comic Con, set to be held at the city’s convention center, already has almost 100 special guests set to arrive, including Stan Lee leading the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Marvel will be offering limited edition comics exclusively for show attendees who pre-order tickets and Lionsgate Films will be one of the many exhibitors on the show floor.

One-day passes go for $25, three-day for $45. Children 12 and under are admitted free of charge.