A Hotel in Need of Renovation

Opened in 1927, Yuma's Hotel Del Sol was a focal point of activity until the early 1970's. It eventually closed in 1989 and except for brief use in 1993 as a filming location for the remake of The Getaway starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, has been sitting vacant ever since.

Celebrating an Auschwitz Birthday

The second feature-length documentary made by Quebec filmmaker Carl Leblanc seems destined to make a big impact in the United States. Running 85 minutes, The Heart of Auschwitz traces the journey made by Leblanc to track down a dozen and half women who risked their lives in the German concentration camp by signing a December 12th, 1944 heart-shaped birthday card for a prisoner named Fania.

Hollywood's Forgotten Asian Star

It seems somehow fitting that the world premiere of Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words took place not at a Los Angeles event but rather many thousands of miles away in South Korea as part of the 2010 Pusan International Film Festival. Though the focus of Yunah Hong's 57-minute Digi Beta documentary is the original Chinese American screen star of Hollywood, who changed her name from Wong Liu-tsong during the silent era and made a loud impact, her career eventually wound up taking some unsavory and perhaps even racist turns. The L.A. native passed away quietly in Santa Monica in 1961.

An Unusual Brotherly Bond

In the recently completed independent comedy-drama The Pact, a pair of brothers recovering from bad break-ups (Aaron Toronto, Neil Brookshire) vow to swear off women for a year. What happens from there bears only a passing resemblance to what happened in real life when Toronto and his brother Matt, who directed the film, forged a similar agreement in the 1990's.

A Beast That's All Wet?

Ogopogo, the real-life mythical creature at the heart of the independent Canadian comedy The Beast of Bottomless Lake, has supposedly been sighted and filmed over the span of many decades in its natural habitat of Lake Okanagan, B.C. But having watched some of the vaunted evidence, writer-producer Kennedy Goodkey makes it sound more like a case of Ogonono.