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Scott Marks

Scott Marks is a Reader contributor. See staff page for published articles.

San Diego Film Festival to Host Gus Van Sant Retrospective

I'll save you the guessing game. While we have a handful of outstanding festivals in town, I tend to avoid them by nature. Art shouldn't compete for silver loving cups. If a film is THAT good, chances are it will get a commercial playdate. Such was the case of Michael Knowles' exceptional "The Trouble With Bliss" a film that took home the Best Narrative Feature award at the 2011 SDFF and opened at the Gaslamp in April. Truth be told, the overall selection of films at SDFF was fairly pedestrian. (What was the ratio of American to foreign language films?) After the first year, I stopped going. I would check out each year's lineup, but honest to god there was nothing that compelled me to leave the house. On a professional note, I did reach out to promote the festival on several occasions. I still appreciate the Richard Dreyfuss interview the festival set up for me while at SDNN, but SDFF's promotional machine wasn't always firing on all pistons. I don't ever remember receiving a screener, let alone a screening invitation for one of your movies. Calls for interviews or press information went unanswered. It was as if they didn't want to promote the films being shown. How can I be busy trying to be a critic when you don't give me the opportunity to write about your stuff? There is no way that you or anyone will ever convince me that the old regime didn't work harder at party planning and catering than they did film selection. I am not the only critic in town to call SDFF out on this. David Elliott wrote about it in the pages of "The Reader" and two months ago the U-T's Nina Hall asked me for a quote to back her up. I was delighted to hear that Kevin Leap took control of the festival. From the look of things, he's not one to put the party before the pictures.
— June 14, 2012 2:53 p.m.

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