Today is the last day of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which I have had an absolute blast covering for the past nine days. It was a great breather after the build-up to the Oscar nominations (which exhausts us all), but I’m back in Los Angeles and ready to round out the season properly.
I didn’t catch as many films as I’d have liked, even though Santa Barbara isn’t your typical dusk-till-dawn film-watching festival. I didn’t even see the majority of the films that won prizes (collected for you from the press release after the jump), but most of what I’ve seen, I’ve commented on. There were a few I never got around to discussing, however, like the Jeremy Irons-narrated “Eye of the Leopard,” which was hardly the derivative nature doc I expected. It was, in fact, an exhilarating experience, crafted with all the knowledge of what makes fine drama. It’s also cool to hear Scar narrating a documentary about leopards.
Staying in the nature vein, the PBS documentary “Lobo: The Wolf That Changed America” wasn’t exactly a good film, but it really piqued my interest to read more about Ernest Thompson Seaton and the lessons he learned hunting wolves a century ago in New Mexico.
I briefly mentioned “The Informers” last night. It’s a mind-bender that might be terrible, but like I said, I couldn’t stop watching. And I want to see it again. And “$9.99” is a stunning accomplishment in stop-motion animation that I expect we’ll hear about throughout the year.