Tag archives: movies
UCSB Arts & Lectures’ free outdoor fall film festival series of screenings at the West Wind Drive-In comes to a close with two Christmas classics, with a modern parable followed by a Jimmy Stewart tearjerker. In 2003’s Elf, Will Ferrell stars as an elf named Buddy who discovers that he’s actually a human whom Santa […]
UCSB’s popular Arts & Lectures series has obviously been scrambling during the pandemic lockdown to present its normal program of international acts and artists. I took the opportunity at the weekend to watch 21-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and his pianist sister, Isata, play a virtual concert from their home in Nottingham, England, and couldn’t fail […]
Epically known as the one director who can harvest the funniest talent for his movies, Ivan Reitman continues his film making legend during lockdown with eight screenplays in the works, a sequel to Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting, and the next installment of the Ghostbuster series, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, to be released in theaters in June […]
A scenic Montecito ranch owned by the late Oscar-nominated actor Stuart Whitman is up for grabs for $62 million, one of our rarefied enclave’s most expensive properties. Stuart, well-known for cowboy roles in films with John Wayne, owned the 13-acre estate in the Santa Ynez Mountains until his death in March at the age of […]
Who knowingly purchases the former residence of a notorious serial killer? Meet Tom and Barbara, proud new owners of the most infamous house in Sacramento. The middle-aged couple purchased the residence where Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house where she murdered elderly and mentally disabled guests before cashing their Social Security checks in the 1980s. […]
The NatureTrack Film Festival began in 2018 as a way to raise funds and draw attention to the then-seven-year-old nonprofit NatureTrack Foundation, which brings schoolchildren out into nature for docent-led treks along trails in the Santa Ynez Valley. With nature now even more important during the pandemic as outdoor activity is far less conducive to […]
Normally a designation as a red zone would mean no parking or even stopping. But when it comes to pandemic procedures, the designation is more like rolling out a red carpet, as two weeks of reduced cases means more businesses can reopen. Accordingly, Metropolitan Theatres plans to welcome back moviegoers at two of the Santa […]
Described as part love letter and part political exposé, Public Trust: The Fight for America’s Public Lands investigates how we arrived at this precarious moment when America’s public lands – some 640 million acres – are in danger. Held in trust by the federal government for all citizens of the United States, these places are […]
Michael DeVorzon grew up in Montecito, with a great family lineage in music, and carved his own way in film and TV. Still working actively during the lockdown, he is polished in defining the narrative of the hard work it takes to stay in the game, do it like a pro, and always with kindness. […]
Transporting us from science to sci-fi films is astrophysicist Andy Howell, PhD. He is a staff scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), where a global network of 23 telescopes operate 24/7. His team co-discovered the first “kiloanova” in 2017, two neutron stars that rotate around each other and release gravitational waves, merging to create a […]
Despite a lack of socializing and being forced to sit on a car seat rather than a blanket or lawn chair, fans have still taken to UCSB Arts & Lectures’ 2020 free Summer Cinema series Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory, which has proven to be almost as popular as previous years held at the […]
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, Community Environmental Council and other local environmental nonprofits come together to sponsor the local premiere of 2040, an Australian documentary directed by and starring Damon Gameau that looks at the effects of climate change over the next 20 years and what technologies that exist today can reverse the effects. Structured as […]
Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia join moderator Wendy Eley Jackson for a Zoom discussion of And She Could Be Next, their new groundbreaking two-part documentary series chronicling the defiant movement of women of color who are transforming politics from the ground up. The series follows candidates and organizers across the country, asking whether US democracy […]
A baseball-themed double-header screens next in the UCSB Arts & Lectures free Summer Cinema series dubbed “Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory – Movies Under the Stars in Your Cars,” on Wednesday, July 29, at the West Wind Drive-In. At 8:30 pm, you can slide on down in your car’s front seat or folding chair […]
In other SBIFF-related news, psychological thriller The Night has received a license for theatrical release in Iran, serving as a historic benchmark for the country’s filmmaking community as it is the first U.S.-produced film to receive such permission since the revolution more than 40 years ago. Why that matters in our little berg is that […]
The Riviera Theatre is once again closed due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19, and online screenings of new arts films have also come to a close, or at least hasn’t ramped up again as the new closures aren’t in effect nationwide. So turning even more local, SBIFF has segued into a new online […]
Critics have been falling all over themselves to praise Palm Springs, the new ambitious yet taut genre-scrambling sci-fi/existential/rom-com starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti that made its debut on Hulu on July 10. As the film buffs have suggested, the movie that employs an infinite time loop as its central conceit is much more than […]
This story begins with a confession: I didn’t know how to be a villain – and never got over it. When I was eleven years old, my Hebrew school was bringing out a magazine, and needed contributions. I somehow volunteered to write on a topic someone had suggested – “How to Be a Villain.” No […]
The Sunken Gardens at the Santa Barbara Courthouse is off limits for events as the coronavirus pandemic continues, as UCSB Arts & Lectures summer film series’ grass-fed version of beach blanket bingo would surely lead to a bounce in new cases of COVID-19. Instead, pivoting has produced a more practical solution for the free annual […]
COVID-19 has certainly crushed a lot of dreams since forcing a shutdown back in March. But it’s also had a silver lining or two: After having closed its doors, supposedly forever, just a little more than a year ago, the Westwind Drive-In movie theater reopened a couple of weeks back, and immediately became a desired […]
