Film festivals come in various shapes, sizes, formats and orientations. The currently ongoing 22nd installment of the Santa Barbara Film Festival is a bit off-beat in certain aspects. Lasting eleven days and presenting some 200 films it is certainly not small -- more like "medium to large." In terms of importance, however, while it is not considered to be quite in the same class as the North-American majors, Sundance, Telluride, Chicago, New York, Toronto and Montreal, it can nevertheless ce...

Santa Barbara is a very upscale seaside paradise a scant 90 miles up the coast from Los Angeles, distinguished more for its socio-economic exclusivity, high rents, distinctive Spanish architecture and sprawling beachfront university than for the modest international film festival to which it has been home since 1985. Slowly building year by year and able to draw easily on Hollywood based talent because of its relative proximity to Tinseltown, the Santa Barbara fest has now come into its own and ...

MIRREN AND WHITTAKER SHINE AT S.A.G. AWARDS by Alex Deleon, Santa Barbara This is the jolly season of awards in Southern California -- seems like there's a different one every week somewhere in L.A. or vicinity. Following the Golden Globes (Foreign Press Awards) a couple of weeks back we now have the Screen Actors Guild (S.A.G.) awards which are similar and yet a bit different. Both sets of awards go to both film and television personalities, but the Globes recognize all kinds of categories (w...

The rain in Spain is mostly on the plain, but here in California it seems to be mostly in Santa Barbara, throwing a bit of a chilling damper on the opening festivities of the 22nd Santa Barbara International Film Festival -- SBIFF. Dame Helen Mirren, the regal 61 year old actress of "The Queen", wowed a sea of admirers and undoubtedly won many new ones (Yours Truly among them), on Friday night at the palatial Admiral Theater on upper State Street, and throngs of Will Smith fans braved the gu...