Feb 10, 2006 - Two For Thursday

Yesterday was a warm day in Santa Barbara. Folks were walking up and down State Street in shorts and capri pants and open toed shoes. It was just a typical summer day, except that it’s February. And for many visitors, here for the SBIFF, it must have been a challenge to pull something out of the old Pullman. Some people might bring a jacket in August, but no one brings flip-flops on a trip in February – even a trip to Santa Barbara!

Thursday was also Cevin Cathell’s birthday. In case you don’t know, Cevin is the program director of the festival - the one in charge of picking the films. She also introduces some of the films at the screenings – which is where we saw her yesterday at the Metro Four. The dedicated staff of Edhat.com decided to surprise Cevin by bursting into a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday, but alas, we were snaked. It seems that Cevin’s very own dedicated staff had already decided to enlist the audience to join in and sing. What can we say? We joined in.

So anyway, while we were there, we saw a couple of movies. As it turns out, one was Turkish and the other had Turkish in it. The first one, a Touch of Spice was a Greek film - the story of a Greek man remembering his childhood in Istanbul, before he and his family were deported and moved to Greece. He remembers his grandfather, a cook and philosopher from whom he gained a unique perspective of the world. The film was beautiful to look at, and the food made the dedicated staff really hungry. One member of the dedicated staff, who is fluent in Turkish, enjoyed hearing the language. However, we found it to be a little long, and a tad slow.

The second film, however, made the first film seem so much better. The second film, 2 Girls, is about (duh) two girls. It is the Turkish film. One of the girls is from a traditional family, in which she is treated like a servant. She has red, punk red, hair. The other girl is the spoiled, hyperactive daughter of a woman who uses her feminine wiles to get what she needs (if you know what we mean). This mother and daughter are extremely well dressed and seem to have a nice apartment, but even so, they are very poor and hardly ever have enough to eat. We understood the point of the film to be to contrast the two lifestyles, but in our humble and dedicated opinions, it was so convoluted that it missed its mark. The subtitles read like a bathroom wall, but according to our expert, the spoken words were much worse. Overall, the film was long, crude, and melodramatic – not the right movie for the dedicated staff, nor for the older people from Elderhostel who made up the majority of the audience.

If you saw a large throng of red shirts parading down the street, they were student volunteers who came up from Compton to help out.

We interviewed filmmaker, Jeremy Guy on the Ed Carpet. He is a graduate school film student at USC, finding his way in the movie world. Last year, while attending UCSB, he did a film on recycling, and he didn’t even know that his film was in the festival until last week.

We also made it to two parties today, one for local filmmakers, and the other saluting the Latin Cine Films.

The conversation with James Mangold and Cathy Konrad was cancelled yesterday. Nicole Freire was supposed to cover it and was left with nothing to do. She filled up her evening by watching Dancing with the Stars and writing 1,000 words about it.

Lastly, the salad days are gone for the SBIFF pressroom staff. Today, there was just a bag of Cheez-it snack mix.

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