Missing Puppies Returned
Two dogs – thought stolen from the DAWG animal shelter – have been returned, their disappearance explained as a misunderstanding by their would-be owner.
Year: 2007
Cinematic Self-Love
Film-about-film themes and in-jokes somehow just go down easier when you’re mentally lost in the thicket of a film festival.
Indie Chanteuse Sings at UCSB
She’s one of the best voices singing today, and you probably haven’t heard her. Now’s your chance to her top-notch vocals set against a kicky, indie rock backdrop.
An Anonymous Paradise
Forgotten Coast, which premieres tonight at the 2007 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, tells the story of a surfing odyssey in which the pursuit of perfect waves become more important than actually finding them.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Levi Michaels finds himself neither clapping his hands or saying yeah to the sophomore effort of the indie band whose earlier recordings won the hearts of indie kids all over the globe.
Barney’s On the Beat
Writers’ Roundtable: When Helen (The Queen) Mirren was asked at the Arlington the other night how she went about choosing a role, she replied: First she read the script. Then she checked out the director. Writers have long been the low man and woman on Hollywood’s totem pole, but at a Saturday screenwriters’ panel, six of them got cheers and rousing applause when they walked onto the Lobero stage.
Broken Premises
Smokin’ Aces
Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, and Alicia Keyes star in a film written and directed by Joe Carnahan.
Joe Carnahan’s 2002 film Narc seemed promising. The genre film was filled with luxuriantly grim details, though a host of my film studies pals insisted that it was cliched. If Smokin’ Aces can be taken as the further measure of Carnahan’s moviemaking prowess, I’m sorry to admit we were all correct.
GOSPEL WORKSHOP
The Steven Roberts Gospel Music Workshop will be held at Goleta Presbyterian Church on Thursday, February 1 and Friday, February 2 at 7 p.m., and at the Unity Church on Saturday, February 3 at 10 a.m. A concert by Mama Pat’s Inner Light Community Gospel Choir will follow at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday evening. Call 729-2767.
Chicago Days
Blown Away by the Windy City
“You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe wrote. But after half a century, I thought I’d try it anyway and make a hit-and-run visit to my hometown of Chicago. No, not to my Old Neighborhood, which is 100 blocks south of downtown, but to the Loop and Near North, as the area north of the backward-flowing Chicago River is known. (Backward? Years ago, city fathers reversed the river to keep pollution from flowing into Lake Michigan, then and now the main source of Chicago’s drinking water.)
What Lurks Behind the Lines
Army of Shadows
Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Simone Signoret star in a film written by Jean-Pierre Melville, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, and directed by Melville.
Clint Eastwood’s twin journeys into WWII lore-Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima-weren’t the only war films of notable taste and artistry from last year’s cinematic crop. Though Army of Shadows, by increasingly respected French new wave director Jean-Pierre Melville, came out in 1969, it has been rediscovered in its current re-release and showered with critical kudos, making many 2006 Top 10 lists and called Best Foreign Film of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle.
