Films This Week
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With: Reviews MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, HUGO,
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Film, Times & Events: Week of Dec. 1st
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In the Family Way
Clooney heads great cast in wry, touching 'Descendants'
s we know here in Santa Cruz, no one is "immune to life"—not even in Paradise. This is well understood by Matt King, a Hawaiian-born lawyer and father on the island of Oahu facing a particularly thorny patch of life in The Descendants, Alexander Payne's incisive, entertaining, tender and life-sized family drama. Shot on location in the luscious Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai, it's a tale of a family in crisis, a culture in flux, and the issue of legacy between the generations, told with wry humor and honest emotion.
Adapted by scriptwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from the novel by Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants revolves around the King family.
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Film, Times & Events: Week of Nov. 24th
Films This Week
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HAPPY THANKSGIVING
With: Reviews Twilight, The Decendants,
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‘Twi’ and ‘Twi’ Again
A deeper look into the ‘Twilight’ melodrama
Twi-hards are ecstatic. (The rest of us, not so much.) But now that the Twilight movie franchise is back with Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), her dreamboat of an immortal, vamp Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), and the boy-werewolf she tossed away, Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), it’s best to simply accept fate and embrace the timeline we’ve been given. (This isn’t Fringe, for crying out loud.) In Breaking Dawn, the first of Twilight’s two-part final opus, Melissa Rosenberg’s screenplay effectively delivers what tweens and teens seem to be craving: a shirtless Taylor Lautner (and that’s in the first five minutes!); plenty of teenage angst (oh, that Bella!) and a craving for more (the final moments of the film have generated buzz.) But even if you haven’t read the Stephenie Meyer novels, director Catherine Hardwicke creates an acceptable outing here that simply mirrors the times we live in. It’s not about the characters.
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Don't Block the Rock
Worlds can't collide soon enough in apocalyptic 'Melancholia'
Get ready to duck! Lars von Trier is lobbing a gigantic ball of metaphor straight at ya in Melancholia, his highly lauded, deeply lugubrious allegorical drama about the end of the world. And it can't happen a moment too soon for the listless, unexplored, largely unlikeable characters who populate this bloated two-plus hour meditation on despair, the de-evolution of the human species, and one big, random act of natural retribution.
Nobody has ever accused Von Trier of predictability. In previous films, the persistently idiosyncratic Danish filmmaker has experimented mightily with form and content and how (or if) they interact—a melodramatic tragedy staged as a club-footed musical in “Dancer In the Dark;” a morality play about greed and revenge, Dogville, filmed on a bare soundstage, with tape marking off the imaginary interior and exterior spaces.
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Immortals
Nobody was more excited than I to hear that Tarsem Singh was directing a new movie based on Greek mythology. (He directed one of my favorite movies of the last decade, the rapturously gorgeous The Fall.) And nobody could be more appalled than I am at the result, Immortals, a grueling endurance test of blood, gore, murder, warmongering, torture, and more blood. Hey, I like a good, cheesy sword 'n' sandal epic as well as anybody, but in order to woo the Xbox generation, the idea here seems to be to depict every encounter of metal and flesh in unflinching detail. For a visual stylist like Tarsem, that means plotting the trajectory of every geyser and globule of splattering blood, and every severed fragment of anatomy as it fits into the grand composition
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Film, Times & Events: Week of Nov. 17th
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With: Reviews IMMORTALS, MELANCHOLIA,
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Mad Love
Almodóvar unleashes harrowing, dazzling 'Skin I Live In'
Where are moments when Pedro Almodóvar's new movie, The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) will make you squirm. It has sex and violence—often at the same time—and some very strange relationships, perverse even by Almodóvar standards. In terms of storyline, it's a weird mix of Pygmalion and Frankenstein, with echoes of vintage mad-scientist horror movies from the '30s to the '50s. (You could even make a case for this film paying a sort of bizarre homage to my favorite grade-Z '50s horror movie, The Head That Wouldn't Die).
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This is one movie from action director Roland Emmerich in which nothing blows up—except the crackpot theory that Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the canon of plays and sonnets historically attributed to William Shakespeare. This hothouse melodrama of Tudor intrigue, sex, and politics, scripted by John Orloff, is based on the controversial "Oxfordian" theories. It's all sheer humbuggery, but still an entertaining spectacle: the costumes are exquisite, there are breathtaking overhead shots Elizabethan London, and it's populated by a bunch of attractive young actors on their way up. Oxford (Rhys Ifans) has written in secret, ever since being fostered into the Puritan household of Queen Elizabeth's counselor, William Cecil, where poetry was forbidden. However, the dashing young Oxford (Jamie Campbell Bower) charmed the lusty, poetry-loving young queen (Joely Richardson).
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Anonymous
This is one movie from action director Roland Emmerich in which nothing blows up—except the crackpot theory that Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the canon of plays and sonnets historically attributed to William Shakespeare. This hothouse melodrama of Tudor intrigue, sex, and politics, scripted by John Orloff, is based on the controversial "Oxfordian" theories. It's all sheer humbuggery, but still an entertaining spectacle: the costumes are exquisite, there are breathtaking overhead shots Elizabethan London, and it's populated by a bunch of attractive young actors on their way up. Oxford (Rhys Ifans) has written in secret, ever since being fostered into the Puritan household of Queen Elizabeth's counselor, William Cecil, where poetry was forbidden. However, the dashing young Oxford (Jamie Campbell Bower) charmed the lusty, poetry-loving young queen (Joely Richardson).
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Film, Times & Events: Week of Nov. 10th
Films This Week
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- North Pacific String Band
- Is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?
- Peace in the Middle East
- The Price of Safety
- Town Hall with Assemblymember Mark Stone
- Santa Cruz Calendar
- Muscle-Bound
- Inconvenient Truthers
- Santa Cruz Movie Times
- CYNDI
- Dancing Creek Winery
- From The Editor
- Field to Vase
- Stranger than Fiction
- Mark Twang
- Good Morning Maui
CYNDI
On the eve of Cyndi Lauper’s Mountain Winery gig, we dissect the woman, the icon, the creative beast. Plus: Her thoughts on the music industry, equal rights and those sparkling ‘Kinky Boots’ Few performers possess the kind of fierce, she-bopping tenacity Cyndi Lauper has become famous for. Equal parts free spirit, civil rights activist and Grammy-winner, Lauper is one of the few creative artists able to successfully marry her cutting-edge verve with a heart-of-gold panache. It certainly has helped fuel the remarkable career resurgence she has been experiencing lately.
Field to Vase
Open house provides opportunity for residents to meet their local flower growers Valentine’s Day is a high point of the year for those in the cut flower business. So when, one year in the late ’90s, the bouquet-riddled holiday failed to deliver for Kitayama Brothers Farms, the family behind the decades-old rose-growing business knew something was wrong. “It was the writing on the wall,” recalls Stuart Kitayama, operations manager for the Watsonville-based company. “Those of us who had been hoping things would just get better finally said ‘it’s time to change.’”
The Price of Safety
The city's proposed budget addresses public safety needs The City of Santa Cruz’s pocketbook has come a long way since 2009, when an $8 million shortfall loomed. According to City Manager Martin Bernal, the proposed general fund budget for 2013-2014 is healthier than it has been since the beginning of The Great Recession in 2008. Armed with this returning stability, the proposal puts one of the community's top concerns—public safety—front and center.
North Pacific String Band
Jeff Wilson, who plays banjo for North Pacific String Band, loves being part of original music experiences. “What I like about the music we play is that it’s fairly unique and kind of hard to put your finger on,” Wilson says. “We’re not just trying to do bluegrass or country or folk. It’s a mixture of those things and we try to add in a lot of musicality to all of that.” Originality and musicality aren’t ideas which are limited to the band’s exploits either.
Peace in the Middle East
New dance-concert explores Palestinian-Israeli conflict Inspired by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, local choreographer Karl Schaffer’s “Mosaic” is a dance-concert featuring Jewish Diaspora and Arab music from the women’s choral group Zambra, singer Fattah Abbou and a troupe of local dancers. In between rehearsals for the show, which runs June 21-22 at Motion Pacific, Schaffer shared the story behind its creation.
Muscle-Bound
Valiant cast battles loud, ugly action for the soul of 'Man of Steel' Early in Man of Steel, fourth-grader Clark, the boy who will be Superman, is cowering in a broom closet at school, eyes screwed shut, hands clapped over his ears. He can't control his super powers: his X-ray vision shows him the skulls and skeletons under everyone's flesh; unfiltered noise—dogs, traffic, heartbeats—assault him from all sides. Rushing to school, his mom kneels outside the door and asks what's wrong.
The Plug Bug & Corbin Dunn
Mechanic, programmer, acrobat, builder, tinkerer. Corbin Dunn's 1969 Volkswagen Beetle is a fully electric vehicle. It has an electric motor powered by 48 stacked squares of Lithium-ion battery cells under the hood in place of the 50 horsepower gas engine that it was built with. He calls it, affectionately, “the Plug Bug.” Dunn, who was born in Hawaii, raised in Corralitos, and now lives in a large, old A-frame house near the summit in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is a 35-year-old programmer for Apple in Cupertino, where he helped develop the iPhone and works on the framework for the Macintosh operating system. But his aptitude for intricate technical work is not limited to computers. Dunn is a tinkerer.
Making the Grade
The quest to identify sources of high levels of bacteria at Cowell Beach continues With straight As on Heal the Bay’s annual “beach report card” for 10 out of 13 Santa Cruz County beaches—Main Beach, Seabright, and even Cowell Beach at the Stairs, to name a few—it would seem that Santa Cruz boasts a high coastal GPA. But in recent years, one Santa Cruz beach just can’t seem to pass: Cowell Beach west of the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf.
Flag Day, Father’s Day and Chiron
Another week of complex planetary energies falling to Earth. Mars interacts with Pluto (inconjunct), Uranus (sextile) and Chiron (square, challenge, ouch!). We won’t know how to comprise, we’ll want to be friends but our hurts will challenge that desire.
To Arm or Disarm?
While gun sales soar nationally, a group of musicians fundraise for a local gun buy-back In the wake of high-profile incidents of gun violence—from the Sandy Hook school shooting last December to the fatal shooting of two Santa Cruz police officers three months ago—the debate over gun ownership in America centers on one question as it rages on: Do guns make us safer or do they make our lives more dangerous?
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Good Morning Maui
Goodness, righteousness, virtuousness and fairness are some of the four-score English words that attempt to describe the Hawaiian essence of pono, whose use in the state motto translates to “The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.”
The Power of Conversation
Local author Cecile Andrews emphasizes importance of community engagement in newest book Cecile Andrews, author of the new book “Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good,” probably wouldn’t get along too well with Larry David’s character from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, known for hiding his face and avoiding communication with anyone he runs into on the street. Andrews is a longstanding part-time Santa Cruz (part-time Seattle) resident who says something that’s struck her about this town over the years is people's willingness to participate in a practice she’s dubbed the “Stop and Chat”—which is exactly what it sounds like.
Is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?
He's a patriot. Anyone who stands up for the rights that we stand for as a country, that is real democracy. That would be in my book—somebody who is a patriot. Leah WeissSanta Cruz | Therapist
Best of Santa Cruz County
The 2013 Santa Cruz County Readers' Poll and Critics’ Picks It’s our biggest issue of the year, and in it, your votes—more than 6,500 of them—determined the winners of The Best of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll. New to the long list of local restaurants, shops and other notables that captured your interest: Best Beer Selection, Best Locally Owned Business, Best Customer Service and Best Marijuana Dispensary. In the meantime, many readers were ever so chatty online about potential new categories. Some of the suggestions that stood out: Best Teen Program and Best Web Design/Designer. But what about: Dog Park, Church, Hotel, Local Farm, Therapist (I second that!) or Sports Bar—not to be confused with Bra. Our favorite suggestion: Best Act of Kindness—one reader noted Café Gratitude and the free meals it offered to the Santa Cruz Police Department in the aftermath of recent crimes. Perhaps some of these can be woven into next year’s ballot, so stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the following pages and take note of our Critics’ Picks, too, beginning on page 91. A big thanks for voting—and for reading—and an even bigger congratulations to all of the winners. Enjoy. -Greg Archer, EditorBest of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll INDEX | Shops | Food & Drink | Arts & Entertainment | Health & Fitness | Professionals | The Rest |
Dancing Creek Winery
At the Pinot Paradise event back in March, I tasted some very good Pinots from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Dancing Creek Winery’s 2009 Pinot ($27) was one of them. This plummy dark brew, made from grapes grown in Corralitos, has delicious flavors of pomegranate, prosciutto, dried cherries, and mint julep.
A Very Fine House
Adjacent to the front door, the long, clean wooden bar is surrounded by pumpkin-colored stools. At the entrance to the dining rooms, there is a new low-slung cafe door hung in the wood-covered arch. Where there once was a stage, stocky wooden tables are neatly arranged perpendicularly on a new tile floor, each set with square white plates and burnt orange cloth napkins.
Exposed
David Cay Johnston’s new book explains how big companies rob us blind In his late teens David Cay Johnston started to ask questions. “Why do we have these guys in uniforms with guns driving around in cars all day?” “Why is the Santa Cruz County Courthouse being built in such an unusual shape?” He wrote an article, while still living in his hometown of Santa Cruz, proving that the off-kilter courthouse building, which officials had promised would save money, actually cost more than a conventional building.
What’s your secret to avoiding the summer swarms?