A visual feast at the Fest

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.

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.

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.