Here's the thing about several films screening at the 10th annual Newport Beach Film Festival,
which opens Thursday, April 23, and continues through April 30: many
entries have been shown at earlier festivals in New York, Los Angeles
and elsewhere. Since the Weekly is part of a chain with papers in those
towns and others, we can check out how critics there felt about some of
the repeat pictures. So, to joining our "10 for the Tenth"--reviews of some of the best festival
features, documentaries a
While the Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, was hailed as a muckraking expose on the food industry in the same mold as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I thought it failed as a film.
Here now is Food Inc., made by Robert Kenner, produced by the people behind Inconvenient Truth, repackaged from the book's ideas, and presented in documentary form. From the trailer, it looks just as engaging and persuasive as the climate change doc.
Instead of Al Gore, it features two-heavy hitters on the
The big question on the mind of anyone amid the crowds at Edwards Island Cinema at Fashion Island in Newport Beach Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday nights was: My God, don't these people work? And a second: Don't they know we're teetering on Depression? Finally: Buddy, can you spare a ticket?
The masses were expected at the Newport Beach Film Festival over the weekend, but Monday night's healthy crowd became Tuesday night's packed house which became Wednesday night's mob scene. Bet your hou
Food Inc. puts forth a lot of information, some of which I already knew:
- Corn and its derivates inhabit just about everything we buy from the supermarket.
- Factory farming leads to crowded feed lots where cows stand in their own feces and to lightless henhouses where chickens bred to grow up fast and fat squat in their own squallor.
But most of the information was new to me (feeding cows corn makes them more vulnerable to spreading E. Coli). And all of it was even more terrifying than
