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A visual feast at the Fest

San Diego Latino Film Festival trumps major movie release Beauty and the Beast

Emma Watson wants much more than this provincial life in Beauty and the Beast, but there's better stuff going on in the provinces.
Emma Watson wants much more than this provincial life in Beauty and the Beast, but there's better stuff going on in the provinces.
Movie

Man Who Saw Too Much ***

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Trisha Ziff directs this engrossing account of real-life nightcrawler Enrique Metinides. The tenacious photojournalist — he’s devoted his life to purposefully placing himself in the wrong place at the right time — has been taking official police photos since age nine. (As a child, it was not unusual for him to witness 30 to 40 corpses a day.) Having just turned 94, Mexico's answer to Arthur "Weegee" Fellig is the spitting image of Joe Pesci, the actor who played the legendary street photographer in the biopic <em>The Public Eye</em>. We begin, fittingly enough, at the corner newsstand, a once vital hub that, in the era of iPhone journalism, is as outmoded as a flashbulb. With but a single frame to work in, Metinides economically draws his camera back so as to tell the entire story in one picture, all the while finding narrative support in the faces of the flabbergasted onlookers.

Find showtimes

The great grinding gears of the pop culture PR machine would have you believe that Beauty and the Beast is the big movie news this week. But it’s not, and neither are the bleats of protest about fluoride in children’s ice cream, er, I mean gays in children’s movies.

Sponsored
Sponsored

No, the big movie news, at least here in San Diego, is the Latino Film Festival. So far, Scott’s taken in just a couple of the fest’s 160 entries, but he’s been impressed with both: shutterbug doc The Man Who Saw Too Much and modern noir Sin Muertos no hay Carnaval, which somehow gets rendered as Such Is Life in the Tropics when run through the Anglicizer. Weird. Anyway, here is where the art of cinema lives and breathes and moves, never mind Disney’s “tale as old as time for the second time.” Here, and in (paler) personal projects such as the misfit pic Donald Cried.

Movie

Sin Muertos No Hay Carnaval (Such Is Life in the Tropics) ****

thumbnail

Immediately following the accidental shooting of a young bird watcher mistaken for a deer, the phrase “Weeks earlier” appears onscreen to transition the story into flashback. It’s a rare moment of orthodoxy in a film that does its best to turn aside convention. Neither whodunit — there’s nothing mysterious about the source of the stray bullet, or the face of the young woman who can positively ID the gunman — nor set-’em-up-to-watch-’em-die, director and co-writer Sebastián Cordero (<em>Cronicas</em>) instead fashions a slatternly film noir thriller bound to put a crimp in the Ecuadorian tourist trade. It’s a sordid tale of power, profiteering, and treachery, all conspiring to bring an end to the lives of 250 squatters who have settled on a piece of land the shooter inherited from his father. Seeing it came as quite the pleasant shock, seeing how I tagged Cordero’s <em>Europa Report</em> the worst film of 2013. Right in both cases!

Find showtimes

Also big this week: old people looking at their problematic pasts and pointing the way to a brighter future. I thought it was reasonably well done in The Sense of an Ending; Scott was deeply disappointed with The Last Word.

Finally: this fellow was surprised at the violence and grossness in the James Gunn-penned workplace murder-fest The Belko Experiment. (Scott’s there now; we’ll get a review up asap.) Did he miss Super? Or the allusion to prison rape in Guardians of the Galaxy? I don’t get the surprise, is what I’m saying.

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Emma Watson wants much more than this provincial life in Beauty and the Beast, but there's better stuff going on in the provinces.
Emma Watson wants much more than this provincial life in Beauty and the Beast, but there's better stuff going on in the provinces.
Movie

Man Who Saw Too Much ***

thumbnail

Trisha Ziff directs this engrossing account of real-life nightcrawler Enrique Metinides. The tenacious photojournalist — he’s devoted his life to purposefully placing himself in the wrong place at the right time — has been taking official police photos since age nine. (As a child, it was not unusual for him to witness 30 to 40 corpses a day.) Having just turned 94, Mexico's answer to Arthur "Weegee" Fellig is the spitting image of Joe Pesci, the actor who played the legendary street photographer in the biopic <em>The Public Eye</em>. We begin, fittingly enough, at the corner newsstand, a once vital hub that, in the era of iPhone journalism, is as outmoded as a flashbulb. With but a single frame to work in, Metinides economically draws his camera back so as to tell the entire story in one picture, all the while finding narrative support in the faces of the flabbergasted onlookers.

Find showtimes

The great grinding gears of the pop culture PR machine would have you believe that Beauty and the Beast is the big movie news this week. But it’s not, and neither are the bleats of protest about fluoride in children’s ice cream, er, I mean gays in children’s movies.

Sponsored
Sponsored

No, the big movie news, at least here in San Diego, is the Latino Film Festival. So far, Scott’s taken in just a couple of the fest’s 160 entries, but he’s been impressed with both: shutterbug doc The Man Who Saw Too Much and modern noir Sin Muertos no hay Carnaval, which somehow gets rendered as Such Is Life in the Tropics when run through the Anglicizer. Weird. Anyway, here is where the art of cinema lives and breathes and moves, never mind Disney’s “tale as old as time for the second time.” Here, and in (paler) personal projects such as the misfit pic Donald Cried.

Movie

Sin Muertos No Hay Carnaval (Such Is Life in the Tropics) ****

thumbnail

Immediately following the accidental shooting of a young bird watcher mistaken for a deer, the phrase “Weeks earlier” appears onscreen to transition the story into flashback. It’s a rare moment of orthodoxy in a film that does its best to turn aside convention. Neither whodunit — there’s nothing mysterious about the source of the stray bullet, or the face of the young woman who can positively ID the gunman — nor set-’em-up-to-watch-’em-die, director and co-writer Sebastián Cordero (<em>Cronicas</em>) instead fashions a slatternly film noir thriller bound to put a crimp in the Ecuadorian tourist trade. It’s a sordid tale of power, profiteering, and treachery, all conspiring to bring an end to the lives of 250 squatters who have settled on a piece of land the shooter inherited from his father. Seeing it came as quite the pleasant shock, seeing how I tagged Cordero’s <em>Europa Report</em> the worst film of 2013. Right in both cases!

Find showtimes

Also big this week: old people looking at their problematic pasts and pointing the way to a brighter future. I thought it was reasonably well done in The Sense of an Ending; Scott was deeply disappointed with The Last Word.

Finally: this fellow was surprised at the violence and grossness in the James Gunn-penned workplace murder-fest The Belko Experiment. (Scott’s there now; we’ll get a review up asap.) Did he miss Super? Or the allusion to prison rape in Guardians of the Galaxy? I don’t get the surprise, is what I’m saying.

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