This year at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, Crazy Wisdom made its debut. The film is about the life and times of Buddhism’s bad boy Chogyam Trungpa. This feature film takes us through the teacher’s life from when he eloped with a 16-year-old to the time he brought his teachings upon American hippies. Check out our review of Crazy Wisdon: The Life and Times of Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche below…
Everyone loves a bad boy, especially when the man in question is famously known as ‘the bad boy of Buddhism.’ As naughty as Buddha may look with his charming smile and big exposed belly, I am referring to another man – Chogyam Trungpa. This past weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the bad boy came to the screen.
The 26th Annual Santa Barbara Film Festival has come to a close, and with the sadness of it ending comes the joy of announcing the winners! Though SBIFF is not as big as say Sundance, or SXSW it touts some of the biggest and most respected names in the business, with this years honorary being none other than Nicole Kidman herself, as well as premiering a number of talented film-makers that would will soon be blowing up at upcoming festivals. The festival is constantly breaking new ground and giving chances to many up and coming film-makers and independent films with impressive grants.
Check out their list of award winners below… Continue Reading
Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know Harrison Ford is? I don’t think there are many people who could argue that Ford hasn’t had the dream career — some people may even call 43 feature films, 12 of which have each grossed over $100 million, and Academy Award nomination for Best Actor an “excellent” career, and so why not drink some booze and give him a statue for all his work?! Kirk Douglas seems to be happy about his trophy going to him…
I started the day early in order to catch an 8am screening of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (d.Bestor Cram), though it wasn’t quite worth it. A fairly adequate documentary, though rather randomly conceived, it takes as its focus the fantastic gig Cash played at the California prison in early 1968, released as a terrific and much-loved live LP.
Details of how the concert came about, along with others Cash played at San Quentin and elsewhere, are covered in no great detail, filled out with sketchy material on how the concert was something of a post-drug dependency comeback, the story of Cash’s sponsorship of Folsom inmate and songwriter (“Greystone Chapel”) Glen Sherley and the latter’s post-incarceration decline and suicide. There’s also plenty of time given engagingly, but not really relevantly, to the story of another inmate present at the gig, along with some old audio of Cash musing on his childhood, and innocuous talking heads from band members and children (some of which I am sure I’ve seen before).
One of the most troubling outgrowths of the wave of Europe-wide civil unrest at the tail-end of the 1960s was the emergance in Germany of the Red Army Faction, the notorious Baader-Meinhof Gang. Urban terrorists (with PLO support) they committed a string of bank robberies, bombings and kidnappings across the country in protest against US imperialism in Vietnam, capitalist pigs in general and other international bugbears of hardline socialism. They were also young and sexy, with great clothes and an alarming amount of popular support in a deeply disaffected nation whose younger generations still bristled with incoherent self-loathing for the sins of their fathers.
It’s stopped raining! But now it’s windy. At least the sun is out and the mountains look gorgeous. That’s important for the fifteen minutes’ stroll up and down State Street between screenings. I watched my first Kazakhstani film yesterday, Racketeer. The influence of Scorsese is now all-pervasive, it would seem, though of course he lifted plenty from the Warner’s gangster pics and so forth. It’s apparent here in the first third or so (of 80 minutes) as childhood to a respectable position in the local mob is recounted in montage, vignettes and voiceover by our hero Sayan.
He’s a very nifty boxer who rises naturally to 2IC, a square-jawed handsome young fellow, much more so than the rest of the Kazakh mugs, except of course the young boss, his mentor, played with quiet charisma and an imposing frame. It’s set in some godawful hinterland town where “Ruslan & Co.” runs the casino and commits general extortion and occasional murder, and a deal with a new factory goes south when the Russian mafia gets involved. It’s a thin tale, and not a new one, but there’s a lovely echo of early Fassbinder in the white-backdropped gangster activities of the opening segment, a sudden seriousness when an old friend gets out of jail, and a marvellously unsentimental ending. Shot with competence on some grotty video format, it’s probably quite fitting that it looks cheap and ugly.
Only one year younger than Sundance, the SBIFF is a very civilised affair, living up to its title with films from all over the world, unspooling in the theatres up and down State Street, and with only a faint whiff of Hollywood taking a short vacation to pat itself on the back.
I was not too fussed to miss the Opening Night Gala, which was Nothing But The Truth, a political thriller inspired by real events (Judith Miller/Valerie Plame). Directed by Rod Lurie it stars Kate Beckinsale, Angela Bassett, Alan Alda and Matt Dillon, and despite the festival’s reputation for somewhat lacklustre gala pictures, it seems to have gone down pretty well.
