Josh Tate

The festival kicks off this morning with a director's coffee talk at the Landmark. Scheduled panelists include moderator James Mangold, Paul Haggis and the next Bond director Marc Forster. Tickets are $11. The big event today (and it's free!) starts at noon and runs until 6:00 p.m. at the Landmark Regent Theater. It's Live Earth Day: A Celebration of Earth and includes 50 short films commissioned by SOS-Live Earth. Some of the filmmakers who've...

It's Saturday so expect lots of LA Film Festival action in Westwood. At 9:30 a.m. you can attend a free Hi Def Video Expo at Bel Air Camera. Other free events are the Made in L.A. screening at noon at the Mann Festival Theater, The Game of SKATE Tournament at 1:00 p.m. at the Festival Promenade on Broxton, The Bands on Broxton at 4:30 p.m. (also at the Promenade), A Conversation with Festival Artist-in-Residence...

Horror movies seem to come and go in cycles. Just as the wave of Japanese re-makes tapered off, so-called "torture" porn began its ascent. Given that, it's refreshing to watch a horror film like The Wizard of Gore that doesn't fit neatly into any category. It certainly has its share of gore (wonderfully specific and gruesome, by the way), but the bloodletting never overshadows the psychological war that is at the heart of the...

A man sitting to my left exited the theater at about the one hour mark, never to return. Were I not obligated to give the film a fair and complete review, I might have joined him. Rare is the movie that prompts that reaction in me (think Johnny Be Good) but The Year After was so interminably dull that I actually considered it. The film follows 17 year-old Manu (Anaïs Demoustier) in the year...

It's the first real day of the LA Film Festival so naturally a lot of films have sold out. But take heart--there are plenty of things to see. As of this morning, stand-by tickets are still available for Interview. Directed by Steve Buscemi and starring Buscemi and Sienna Miller, Interview tells the story of a journalist interviewing a celebrity that he doesn't particularly like (imagine that?). An adaptation of Theo Van Gogh's 2003 film...

The LA Film Festival returns to Westwood tonight with the world premiere of Kasi Lemmons' Talk to Me (not Talk To Me) at the Mann Village Theater. The film stars Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor and tells the story of Ralph Green, an ex-drug addict and convicted felon who became one of Washington D.C.'s most prominent disc jockeys and community activisits in the 60s and 70s. A sure to be congested after-party follows the...

Hollywood, to corrupt Rabelais, abhors an iconoclast. This simple fact makes the long career of Crispin Glover all the more remarkable. Amazingly, it's been almost twenty years since Glover's infamous Rubin and Ed appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Despite that apparent fiasco, Glover has continued to work regularly, often in big-budget studio fare like The Doors, The People vs. Larry Flynt and both Charlie's Angels movies. The money earned from those films...

Reno 911!: Miami may have only been a marginal hit (and a critical dud), but I had a great time with it (being drunk at the time). It really took the freedom of an R rating to liberate the show from its PG-13 Comedy Central roots. For those of you who missed it at the theater, be sure to pick up the "unrated" edition for even more hot, naked action. Speaking of hot, naked...

Let's face it--with a few notable exceptions (Arclight, Grove, Bridge, Landmark), movie theaters in Los Angeles sort of suck. The seats are often stiff and cramped; the over-priced food is no great shakes; and every feature is front-loaded with a solid ten to fifteen minutes of commercials. And this is coming from someone who loves going to the movies! I wallow through this crap two or three times a week! There has to be...

I wasn't sure what to expect as I cruised up Fairfax on the way to the Silent Movie Theater. Having never watched Dawson's Creek, I was only slightly familiar with Chantal Kreviazuk's music and, naturally, had never seen her live. What's more--why was Perez Hilton hosting the whole shebang in the first place? And why was it at a movie theater? And, perhaps most importantly, would there be free booze? Thankfully, all of my...