Orange County Blog

The Los Angeles Times broke the story of Orange County Museum of Art director Dennis Szakacs selling 18 California plein air paintings from OCMA's permanent collection at a deep discount to a private collector.

The Times has also stuck to the controversy like rice paper, filing follow-ups revealing a reader's tip led the fishwrap to the dickheaded move and allowing the paper's noted critic Christopher Knight to pile on.

But the Los Angeles County Museum on Fire blog is the only information/disinformation outlet to make the connection between OCMA and the Iranian government.

The good news: Tehran Bureau, the independent Iranian news site, is back online this morning after being censored much of yesterday. The bad news: When you click on the the "Collection Online" link of the Orange County Museum of Art site, it returns you to the logo animation--and then the home page.

LACMF also makes this smart observation: One of the sold paintings, William Wendt's Spring in the Canyon, was considered such a key work that it appears in the Collection Online button (right) on OCMA's website. Scan the post's reader comments for more details on what you can and cannot access through the OCMA site.

Szakacs, incidentally, has defended the sale. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be so proud.

If your TV is on the fritz, you didn't pay your cable/satellite bill or you're just one of those Communists who does not watch the tube, you may not have heard there is a new Star Trek movie opening today and, according to one Weekly Trekker at least, it's a solid effort.

But some die-hards do have something to complain about, and they can do that complaining in the Warrior Tongue, Klingon. For as Slate's Arika Okrent points out, "There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language."

Time was you could mock those costumed geeks standing in line at the Anaheim Convention Center, practicing their second langugage, all loud and proud. Okay, so that time has not yet expired and probably never will. But do know that being able to converse with that fellow and others who look like these cats to the left is so admired there is a Klingon Language Institute, based on the work of its inventor, linguist Marc Okrand, and a quarterly journal, HolQeD.

"The Klingon language is something truly unique," boasts the KLI. "While there have been other artificial languages, and other languages crafted for fictional beings, Klingon is one of the rare times when a trained linguist has been called upon to create a language for aliens. Add to this more than a quarter-century of the Star Trek phenomenon, a mythos that has permeated popular culture and spread around the globe."

Even to California, where the KLI membership directory includes doctors, dentists and professors, some of whom have email addresses that end in "usc.edu," "ucla.ed" and "berkeley.edu."

From there, Trekkers, Trekkies, Klingons, Seven of Nines and even, one supposes, Wookies can link to the website of Nick Nicholas, a business analyst and linguist residing in Melbourne, Australia, and a research associate of UC Irvine's Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (Greek literature) project.

If this appeals to you, go here to join the KLI--and have your Visa or Mastercard ready.

The fourth biennial Vietnamese International Film Festival (VIFF) opens on April 2 in Orange County and will showcase more than 60 short and feature films, panel discussions and an special award to actor Dustin Nguyen (pictured), who co-starred with Cate Blanchett in Little Fish.

Event organizer Ysa Le said yesterday that films from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, USA and, of course, Vietnam will be shown at various local spots including UC Irvine, Edwards Regal University 6 in Irvine and, for the first time, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.

At a press conference yesterday at the Bowers, Huy T. Tran, veteran co-chair of VIFF's screening committee, said he wants the public to know, "Boy, do we have a treat for you. I've been with VIFF since the beginning. These are the most outstanding films we've ever had."

The eight-day festival opens with Footy Legends by acclaimed, up-and-coming Australian director Khoa Do, who will attend and field questions. Later, other screenings will include Sad Fish by Le-Van Kiet, All About Dad by Mark Tran, Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam** by Tammy Nguyen Lee, Saigon Heat by Andy Vu and Danny Do, Vietnam Overtures by Stephane Gauger and In the Dark by Nadine Truong and The Hot Kiss by Nguyen Quang Dung.

For more information--including show times, locations and more in-depth film descriptions--visit: www.vietfilmfest.com or call 1-714-893-6145.

**World premiere.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly

This past Tuesday night at the Edwards South Coast Village in Santa Ana, and an Orange County Film Society-sponsored advance screening of the new Gus Van Zant-directed, Sean Penn-starring Harvey Milk biopic, simply titled Milk.

Go ahead and Google the name if you must -- it's not like Harvey's story is getting taught in public schools -- but some background info is in order here. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person to win an elected office in the United States, a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in 1978. Months after his election, he and then SF mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by Dan White, a troubled fellow supervisor who got elected on a family values platform.

Yeah, I'll just say it -- if White were still around today (he suicided in 1985; don't rest in peace), he would've voted Yes on Prop 8.

But back to the movie. I wondered going into this how Van Zant was going to present the then-raging controversy that surrounded Proposition 6, a statewide ballot initiative in 1978 that was chiefly sponsored by then-Fullerton state senator John Briggs. Lest you think the recently-passed Proposition 8 is extreme, Briggs' Prop 6 would have banned gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. Not only that, but it also called for the firing of all straight teachers who dared voice any support for their gay colleagues. Briggs' amendment was defeated---but not by much.

(See, this is why I've always thought it's a batshit-crazy idea to let the public make laws through the initiative process.)

OK, OK, back to the the movie for sure this time. So the theater is packed, and Denis O'Hare, the actor playing Briggs, is playing the part of Stereotypically Orange County Republican Conservative Christian Right-Wing Asshole to the hilt. There's a scene in which Penn (as Harvey) and his staff are hearing about Prop 6 for the first time, and they're about to decide what to do about it. What followed got the biggest laugh of the evening. Here's the exchange, lifted from the Milk script, which you can download yourself right here.

=====
ANNE KRONENBERG: Not great. State Senator John Briggs is Anita Bryant's go-to guy in California for sure. He's filed his petition for a statewide referendum to fire all gay teachers and anyone who supports them.

[A pall falls over the room. This is worse than expected.]

HARVEY MILK: How many signatures will he need to qualify for the ballot?

CLEVE JONES: Whatever. He can get them in two Sundays at church in Orange County.
=====

Cleve Jones, a longtime friend of Harvey's, is played by Emile Hirsch, but when Hirsch delivers the line in the film, he says "Orange Fucking County."

Later, there's a scene in which Briggs and Harvey are debating Prop 6, and the word FULLERTON flashes on the bottom the screen. I never knew there were Briggs/Harvey debates over Prop 6, much less one that happened here, on Briggs' home turf. (Wonder where the actual debate took place; I'm guessing Cal State Fullerton.)

The whole movie? Pretty great -- one I'll buy for sure, instead of just ripping a copy from my Netflix queue. Look for a full review in this Wednesday's Weekly (that's right -- we're out a day early on account of Thanksgiving), same day the film opens.

You like script-driven movies? Intelligent dialogue? Stuff that moves your brain as well as your emotions? As an antidote to the IQ-insult of Indiana Bones and Crap Happens in Vegas, three movies that won't be on the big screen much longer:

Redbelt: It’s David Mamet, enough said. Not the best Mamet (Spanish Prisoner; Glengarry Glen Ross et al) but it’s still Mamet. Conflicted good guy, evil world, some outstanding jujitsu. And (far too briefly) the best thing to ever come out of London's RADA, the always delectable Mrs. Mamet, Rebecca Pidgeon.

The Visitor: A quiet classic. Richard Jenkins, the guy you’ve seen a thousand times without knowing it, in the role actors wait a lifetime for. And there are drums – African drums. Your brain, heart and feet will be bouncing.

The Counterfeiters: Master forger and thug (hatchet-faced Karl Marcovics) heads a team of prisoners forced to make phony British and American currency in Sachsenhausen death camp. Living a life of (relative) luxury amid daily horror, there’s an ethical dilemma – how much cooperation with evil is justified in the name of survival? What would you have done? Based on the Nazis’ Operation Bernhard.

Go. You'll thank me. (You're welcome.)

Director Craig Mazin has delivered a groundbreaking, whip-smart comic-book spoof that deftly deconstructs the genre without relying on surface-level parody...it’s called The Specials, and it came out nearly eight years ago. Superhero Movie, which is only Mazin’s second directorial effort, is everything his first film was not: predictable, flat, name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

Drake & Josh’s Drake Bell stars as Rick Riker, a hapless Tobey Maguire wannabe who’s bitten by a genetically enhanced insect and becomes the Dragonfly; what ensues is a silly Spider-Man spoof that’s ironically less witty than Sam Raimi’s source material. Note to screenwriters: it’s clear you think that jokes ending in the words “Myspace,” “YouTube,” or “Wikipedia” are automatically funny, but it just ain’t so. The best that can be said for Mazin is that he’s still a step up from the demonic duo of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie), and Superhero Movie does deliver a small handful of laughs, mostly thanks to the presence of Jeffrey Tambor as a whacked-out doctor. But our standards for parody need to be higher than this.

No film pick this weekend. Nothing even remotely fun-looking is opening. But I did see SHUTTER, which opens today. It's not very scary.

Compare and contrast: Toshio, that malicious, pale little boy from The Grudge, will follow you home with his pissed-off mother in tow and maybe rip your jaw off. Ringu’s watery witch Sadako will reach out from your TV set and paralyze you with her stare of doom. Megumi (Megumi Okina), the roving angry spirit at the center of Shutter, will shoot you icy looks from afar and ruin your wedding photos. Oh, and give you a shoulder cramp. Scared yet? Jane Shaw (Rachael Taylor, the blonde-bombshell hacker from Transformers) sure is—so terrified that she occasionally forgets she’s supposed to have an American accent. And yet, if the ghost never actually hurts her, why should we care?

A newlywed in Japan alongside jet-setting photographer hubby Ben (Joshua Jackson), Jane first encounters Megumi on a lonely country road, and in several visions and blurred photos thereafter . . . but nothing really happens until about an hour into the movie, by which point it isn’t long before the inevitable series of fake-out endings and obvious “twists” kick in. Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film—by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast—this plays more like a video copy of The Ring which has so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.

No doubt your history teacher failed to tell you of the long-lost Yagahl tribe, which apparently thrived on snowy mountainsides 6,000 years before Mike Huckabee believes the earth even existed, and consisted of one Jamaican (Mona Hammond), one Maori (Cliff Curtis), and a whole lot of white people sporting dreadlocked wigs and dirt on their faces in order to appear more ethnic. The aspiring hero of this tribe was D'Leh (Steven Strait) – pronounced “delay,” which is pretty funny considering how needlessly slow the story sometimes becomes – who risked everything for the love of the only woman in the world with blue eyes (Camilla Belle). Her name was Evolet, and we're told that means “the promise of life” in whatever made-up language these people are supposed to be speaking.

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend” begins an invisible narrator, voiced by Omar Sharif with no apparent connection to the story at hand (not much time, though – takes about 5 seconds to figure out that “truth” isn't an issue here). As in 300, this is supposed to signal that what we're seeing is a sort of campfire tale, and exaggeration that doesn't require literal historical accuracy. Unlike in 300, the purpose of the telling never figures into the actual film. But if you didn't already know that woolly mammoths didn't build the pyramids, it's nice that they gave you an extra reason to be skeptical.

It is frequently said, by critics, of the romantic comedies that Hollywood churns out that “if you’ve ever seen a movie before, you know exactly what’s going to happen.” In the case of PENELOPE, one doesn’t even need to have seen celluloid projected upon screen.

As the opening phrase “Once upon a time” suggests, anyone who has ever heard a fairy tale knows what direction the story will take, though there is admittedly no evil step-parent in this case, and the only wicked witch is but a minor player who long ago placed a curse upon the Wilhern family that the next girl child born to them would have the face of a pig, until such time as one of her own kind could love her for who she is.

The Wilhern family live in a big country estate that is also somehow smack-dab in the middle of a city whose central core looks like New York, with outskirts cribbed from both London and the movie MOULIN ROUGE. Motor-scooters exist in this world, as do spy cameras and two way mirrors; yet reporters bang away on manual typewriters, and there is clearly no Internet, for if there were, pig-nosed Penelope (Christina Ricci) would have zero problem finding a man – there are undoubtedly porcine fetishists out there.

And they will surely beat off to this movie for ever and ever (finally, for them, something besides the Muppet Movies).

In the movie THE SIGNAL, my film pick for this past weekend, a mysterious subliminal pulse is sent out via various forms of media, turning the people who receive it crazy, and usually homicidal.

The movie is a work of fiction. But at the AMC in Fullerton, it came true, during a screening of THE SIGNAL:

Shortly before 7:30 p.m., officers were sent to the theater at 1000 S. Lemon St. after someone reported finding a bag with what appeared to be illegal substances, said Fullerton police Lt. Tom Basham.

While the officers were at the theater, people started running out of the theater showing "The Signal," including two men with blood on them, Basham said.

Just before people started running out in a panic, two men sitting in separate areas of the theater were randomly stabbed by an unknown man, Basham said.

"He started stabbing at the theater seat and then he stabbed the victim," Basham said. "As he fled, he stabbed another victim sitting near the exit."

Basham said the victims did not know each other or the suspect.

No doubt this is great fodder for those who'd like to ban horror movies, or think that people will invariably copy what they see. So thanks a bunch, dumbass criminals, for ruining it for the rest of us.

Unless the Signal IS real...

(hat tip: AICN)