Hollywood Highlights | Marianne Visits The Santa Barbara International Film Festival & Malibu's Most Wanted Premiere
Written by: Marianne Moro

The film festival circuit has grown so much in recent years that every city has a fest. (The Simpsons even had one in Springfield!) One of the best of the smaller fests is the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which recently celebrated its eighteenth year. Held in the quiet oceanside city halfway between L.A. and San Francisco, this year's fest featured a cornucopia of fine films in all categories. Screenings included one of the first showings of Jonas Akerlund's drugs in L.A. saga Spun, and The Secret Lives of Dentists with Denis Leary and Hope Davis. Foreign films included Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, Hold My Heart, a Norwegian film about a divorced man who has to resort to desperate act to see his young daughter again and director Fernando Leon's critically acclaimed Mondays In The Sun.

On a more commercial front, I recently attended the premiere of the new Warner Brothers pic Malibu's Most Wanted. The film showcases the Jamie Kennedy character "B Rad" made famous on his TV show, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment.  To hype the movie a local L.A. radio station sponsored the finals of a nationwide rap talent search and the winner from Boston, a young lass named "Diamond Bliss." The big hubbub at the premiere was that co-star Ryan O Neal (who played B-Rad's staid politician father) was in attendance with old flame Farrah Fawcett. Ryan, having beaten his recent health problems with flying colors, rushed past the red carpet maze of photographers with always svelte Farrah in tow, looking dashing as always in a slinky black dress. The movie deals with Bill Gluckman's (O'Neal) attempt to deprograms his son Brad'/B-Rad's rappin' tendencies after his overzealous campaign antics run afoul of Dad's demographics.  Bill hires two cultivated but decidedly unfrightening actors (played with a comic edge by Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs) to take him to the hood and scare the "white" back into him. With the assistance of the sassy Regina Hall ("Scary Movie" "The Other Brother"), the kidnapping slowly unravels with a series of ill-fated adventures, including a rap-off in a Compton club, and a bungled and hilarious robbery attempt in a Korean liquor store. The film also boasts Snoop Dogg in a voice cameo as a talking "rat" The premise - a white rapper from Malibu set loose in the hood- might induce groans in some, but Malibu's Most Wanted is good-naturedly silly, with likable performances from all the principals, particularly Kennedy, Diggs, and Anderson.