Clint Eastwood And President Movie

Film festival lights up revived San Juan theater

A movie theater in San Juan Capistrano that had been shut down for 10 years is now the site of Orange County's newest film festival.

Regency San Juan Capistrano Theatre (and Rick's Café) is the home of the inaugural West Coast Film Festival, which kicked off Sunday and continues through Thursday.

The festival features several Warner Bros. classics, including “Casablanca” and “Ben Hur”; tributes to Gene Autry, Mary Pickford and Clint Eastwood; and local filmmakers presenting their award-winning independent projects.

The refurbished movie house, which features three theaters equipped with stadium seating, a restaurant and wine bar and a VIP theater upstairs, reopened in May 2010. But its doors were closed and its contents gutted between 2000 and 2010. Formerly an Edwards theater, the venue shut down during Edwards' 2000 bankruptcy.

“It had been on my radar after Edwards had closed it, and the landlord had taken it back,” said Lyndon Golin, president of Regency Theatres. “I had my eye on it for years. After nine years, an opportunity arose, and with the city's support, we reopened it. We came up with the concept of the premium movie theater with in-seat dining, a restaurant, bar and patio.”

So far, the experiment has worked, and the theater has been a popular gathering place for the tight-knit San Juan Capistrano community and beyond. The interior boasts Moroccan touches and harks back to the 1940s. It's modeled after the sets in “Casablanca.”

“Rick's Café – that's from Casablanca,” said Lorenzo Porricelli, regional supervisor for Regency Theatres. His office is in the San Juan Capistrano venue. “That's Bogart's restaurant's name. We've got a picture of him in front of the restaurant upstairs. We have theme nights, like Italian night, which are very popular. From opening day, things have been going well.”

NEW FILM FEST, OLD MOVIES

For San Juan residents Robert Kline and Stephanie Heredia, the West Coast Film Festival is a dream come true.

Negromancer: "Gantz" Live-Action Movie Now on DVD and Blu-ray

NEW PEOPLE Entertainment, a film division of NEW PEOPLE, Inc. that focuses on the licensing and distribution of Japanese films and media, will delight sci-fi, action and anime/manga fans across North America with the release of GANTZ on DVD (SRP $24.92) and Blu-ray/DVD combo-pack(SRP $29.99) on August 30th. The film, which is unrated, features both English and Japanese dialogue options and a bonus disc with an exclusive director’s interview and film trailers. To celebrate the film’s release, a special screening of GANTZ is scheduled for Friday, August 26th at 7:00pm in San Francisco at NEW PEOPLE’s Cinema as part of the 2011 J-Pop Summit Festival. The film will be shown in Japanese with English subtitles. Get a great deal by purchasing a ticket bundle that also includes the brand-new DVD or Blu-ray plus a poster. Tickets and more information are available at http://www.newpeopleworld.com/films . GANTZ is based on a hit manga series created by Hiroya Oku and stars leading Japanese actors Kazunari Ninomiya (Letters from Iwo Jima) and Kenichi Matsuyama (Death Note, Detroit Metal City). The film tells the story of two childhood friends that are accidentally killed while trying to save another man’s life. Rather than find themselves in the hereafter, however, they awaken in a strange apartment in which they find a mysterious black orb they come to know as “GANTZ.” Along with similar abductees, they are provided with equipment and weaponry and manipulated into playing a kind of game in which they are sent back out to the greater world to do battle with alien beings, all while never quite knowing whether this game is an illusion or their new reality.

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And Then There Were None