Newport Beach Film Festival

ENTERTAINMENT, Film, Issue No. 6, TV | FILM

‘Cas and Dylan’ Film Review 2014

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An exercise in the futility that comes with trying to dissect what it is that makes life worth living, Priestley’s film is largely successful on the backs of the mesmerizing Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) and veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss. Cas & Dylan follows one terminally ill Dr. Cas Pepper (Dreyfuss) on his way home one day from work at the hospital, when he is approached by the charming Dylan Morgan (Maslany), a 22-year-old quick-witted, smooth-talking social misfit, and talked into giving her a road home.

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ENTERTAINMENT, Film, Issue No. 6, TV | FILM

‘Follow Friday the Film’ REVIEW

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Technology is a funny thing. In the 21st century, we’ve come to a point in society where we decry the notion of having to live without it; children get their first iPhone in kindergarten and first grade, debates are no longer over ‘phone versus no phone’ but ‘Android versus Apple’, and sightings of anything resembling a flip phone are met with an awe usually reserved for historical museums (and yes, I’m speaking from personal experience).

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Issue No. 5, TV | FILM

“The One I Love” Film Review

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If you could be with the ideal version of your partner would you be happier? Is embracing them for their flaws part of the accepted insanity that is love? The One I Love aims to answer that by reinventing a familiar premise with excellent performances and a quirky, clever script fusing relatable human drama with science fiction.

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Culture, Issue No. 5, TV | FILM

“Who Took Johnny” Film Review

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“Who Took Johnny”: What sounds like the beginning of a nail-biting Hollywood thriller is a sad and disturbing reality—one that American parents face each and every day and is the main focus of documentary Who Took Johnny, a dissection of the stranger-than-fiction disappearance of Iowa paperboy, Johnny Gosch, a boy who seemingly “vanished into thin air” and a case that still remains unsolved.

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Issue No. 5, TV | FILM

REFUGE Film Review

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REFUGE. Amy Behr (Krysten Ritter) becomes a mother out of unexpected circumstances. She tries to raise her two younger siblings who struggle with day-to-day life: her younger brother, Nat (Logan Huffman), writes to-do lists concerning mundane tasks, like attempting to converse with other people, after he has a brain tumor removed that mildly disables him . Amy’s teenage sister, Lucy (Madeleine Martin), has a hatred of high school and experiments with drugs and shoplifting as her grades slip.

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Cinematography, Culture, Film, Limited Edition, OCMA Film, TV | FILM

Coast Modern, Architecture For The Soul

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Is life composed of hard edges, or soft curves? In this elliptical documentary on the architectural wonderment of modernism and its steadfast metamorphosis over the last eighty-plus years, filmmakers Mike Bernard and Gavin Froome travel the Pacific Northwest in an effort to capture the essence of a spirituality we won’t find at the local synagogue or mosque, but in the very bones of our own homes. Coast Modern tries to establish not so much a style of living, but a way of life in its up-close-and-personal investigation of a series of homes and establishments belonging to the few who’ve decided to forgo the privacy and security of the enclosed enclaves most of us probably find ourselves in.

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Arts | Culture, Featured, From the Editor, Lifestyle

A Known Associate – AKA

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This week I’m getting spontaneous with a female of the species and verbally riffing with the lovely, talented and hard working Dawn Garcia. She is the visionary behind A TASTE OF DAWN Magazine and all-around champion of creative spirits in the world of food, film, music, entertainment, arts and fashion. Dawn’s purpose is to inspire the world to savor every moment. So let’s do just that and enjoy her responses to the randomness that is ‘Free Associate Fridays’.

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California, Culture, Film, Limited Edition, OCMA Film, TV | FILM

Tom Cawley’s “Something” is Anything but “Nothing”

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While higher-budgeted docs filled with even bigger names might elicit the awe of that Hollywood intangibility, Cawley’s down-to-earth subject matter, and even the subjects themselves, bring us into the story of our own lives. We don’t want to be the people on-screen, these celebrities of sight and sound and tactile surfaces, but rather we wish to paint the stars of our respective destinies with the footnotes of these men and women’s successes, failures, moments of elation, and of suffocating despair. They are, in a word, human.

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COLUMNS, Culture, Film, Lifestyle, Limited Edition, Los Angeles, OCMA Film, TV | FILM

Smiling Through the Apocalypse

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Smiling Through the Apocalypse, if you haven’t already Googled it yourself already, is a documentary that focuses on Esquire magazine during the sixties. Specifically, during the sixties under the helm of editor Harold T.P. Hayes. The story goes something like this: during one of the most turbulent decades unseen since the Civil War era, editor and provocateur Howard Hayes is remembered as having stepped up to take the falling star that was Esquire, and put it back in the sky. The film’s summary goes on to describe a man who not only led a team behind some of the most varied polemical writing styles and iconoclastic subtleties, but did so under the caveat that each and every day could easily lead to (and oftentimes did) disaster riddle in controversy.

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