‘It’s a felony?’: Video shows busted shoplifting suspects discuss new Calif. laws in back of PD cruiser
Seal Beach PD released the video as part of their “Don’t Steal in Seal” campaign, which highlights arrests to educate the public on the consequences of committing crimes
Video shows busted shoplifting suspects discuss new Calif. laws in back of PD cruiserPauseUnmute
SEAL BEACH, Calif. — A video posted by the Seal Beach Police Department showing two shoplifting suspects discussing California’s new laws while handcuffed in the back of a cruiser has gone viral.
The video, posted on Dec. 22, starts with surveillance video showing the trio of suspects entering an Ulta Beauty store on Dec. 4 where police said they took off with nearly $650 worth of stolen merchandise. Less than an hour later, the suspects entered a Kohl’s store where they allegedly stole more than $1,180 worth of merchandise, according to KCAL.
The video then cuts to body camera video of Seal Beach police officers pursuing the suspects on foot through a parking lot before they are arrested, according to KCAL. The next video shows two of the three suspects sitting handcuffed in the back of the patrol car.
“It’s a felony?” one suspect asks.
“B—h new laws,” the other suspect responds. “Stealing is a felony. And this is Orange County b—h they don’t play.”
Seal Beach police explained Proposition 36, which creates harsher penalties for organized theft.
“Proposition 36, which voters approved in November 2024, creates stricter penalties for organized theft and expands law enforcement capabilities to combat repeat offenders,” the Seal Beach police statement said. “Specifically, it permits felony charges for petty theft with prior convictions, allows aggregating the value of stolen goods from multiple thefts to meet the $950 felony threshold, and introduces enhancements for theft crimes involving two or more offenders acting in concert.”
The police department said the video was released as part of their “Don’t Steal in Seal” campaign, which highlights arrests to educate the public on the consequences of committing crimes in the city.
“The campaign has received widespread praise for this innovative approach and effectiveness in engaging the community,” the department release said.
The suspects were booked on charges of grand theft, conspiracy to commit a crime and resisting arrest, KCAL reports.
PMA Films: New films about Caravaggio and motherhood, plus a few special events and the Muppets
PMA Films programmer Chris Gray dives into our upcoming screenings for December 3-14
Screening Times & Tickets:
- Wednesday, December 3 at 1 p.m.
- Thursday, December 4 at 3:30 p.m.
- Friday, December 5 at 2 p.m.
- Sunday, December 7 at 12 p.m.
- Wednesday, December 10 at 12 p.m.
- Thursday, December 11 at 2:30 p.m.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Intense and unflinching, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is just the second feature film from Mary Bronstein, but it’s one of the most formidable pieces of direction you’ll see this year, and it’s matched by a titanic performance by Rose Byrne, a brilliant comic actor who has long deserved such a showcase. Byrne is Linda, a therapist barely holding it together while her young daughter is in the midst of extensive medical treatment, her husband is away, and her home is falling apart. “What if Uncut Gems were about motherhood?” is the tenor here, as Byrne and Bronstein probe some dark thoughts and fears with unyielding honesty. It’s a stressful but tremendously alive film, with great supporting turns by actors as disparate as Conan O’Brien (as Linda’s therapist) and A$AP Rocky as an unlikely sympathetic ear.
Screening Times & Tickets:
- Wednesday, December 3 at 3:30 p.m.
- Thursday, December 4 at 1 p.m.
- Saturday, December 6 at 12 p.m.
- Wednesday, December 10 at 2:30 p.m.
- Thursday, December 11 at 12 p.m.
- Sunday, December 14 at 12 p.m.
- Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m.
Exhibition on Screen: Caravaggio
The popular “Exhibition on Screen” series returns with one of their most ambitious works, a study of the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. Blending scholarship, interviews with experts, and dramatic recreation, the film unravels the story of one of history’s most brilliant, complex and controversial figures.
Screening Times & Tickets:
AIDS Diva: The Legend of Connie Norman (2021) (Free screening with filmmaker Dante Alencastre and Frannie Peabody Center)
We’re happy to partner with Frannie Peabody Center, EQME, MaineTransNet, and Equality Community Center on a World AIDS Day screening of the 2021 documentary AIDS Diva: The Legend of Connie Norman, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Dante Alencastre. The film chronicles the life and work of Norman, a major figure in the ACT UP movement in Los Angeles, well known for her newspaper column and pioneering LGBTQ cable television talk show.
Screening Times & Tickets:
“Fall of ‘75”: Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)
We are in the home stretch of our year-long celebration of the films of 1975, and we conclude with a couple of the great cinematic discoveries of my year. First up is Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light, an astonishing melodrama that deftly fuses more than a couple of styles. Shot with a mix of verité realism and modernist flourishes, the film stars Bembol Roco as Julio, a fisherman who arrives in the city in search of his girlfriend, who was recruited to the city with a promise of money. For Julio, just scraping by is enough of a challenge, as life becomes contingent upon the welfare of friends or strangers with ulterior motives. It’s a tough but stunning movie, every bit the stylistic equal to some of the more iconic films we’ve been showing throughout the year.
Screening Times & Tickets:
- Sunday, December 7 at 3 p.m. (sold out)
Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong (with filmmaker discussion)
We’re thrilled to partner with Points North on the Portland premiere of this documentary about the employees of our local Water District, whose work keeps us safe in myriad ways. Directed by Kaitlyn Schwalje and Alex Wolf Lewis (who will be in attendance for a post-film discussion), Unless Something Goes Terribly Wrong is, at its heart, a movie about one of my favorite cinematic subjects: work. It’s a film about the many horrifying things that could happen if we did not have professionals working like mad to keep our water clean, but it’s also quite simply a delightful workplace comedy and bromance, very attuned to the rhythms and emotions that stem from spending a third of your life with people who are not necessarily your friends or family. (We’ll be lucky to have many Portland Water District employees in attendance!) This screening is sold out, but limited tickets are available for a repeat December 7 screening with the filmmakers. Some holiday screenings of the film have been added to the calendar as well.
Screening Times & Tickets:
Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk
Sepideh Farsi’s new documentary Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk consists of a series of interviews between the dissident Iranian filmmaker and Fatma Hassona, a photojournalist and poet in Gaza. It’s a film about the toll of the war in Gaza, but it’s also rather uniquely a film about creating a relationship over long distances, as Farsi interviews Hassona while traveling the world touring another film of hers.
Screening Times & Tickets:
Finding Home (Free screening and panel discussion with Project Home)
We’re pleased to welcome Project Home (formerly Quality Housing Coalition) for the premiere of a new short documentary, Finding Home, which shines a necessary light on eviction prevention and housing navigation through the lens of two former foster youths. Following the film, State Senator Chip Curry, housing advocates, and individuals with lived experience will participate in a panel discussion about the systemic issues facing young people transitioning out of foster care.
Screening Times & Tickets:
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
Our annual holiday screening of my beloved The Muppet Christmas Carol is nigh, and this year we’ve got a bevy of activities surrounding the screening. While you’re here, grab a free sugar cookie decorating kit from the PMA Café to take home, and stick around for a Family Puppet-Making Workshop with Mayo Street Arts educator Josie Holt (more info on that is here). We’ll also have free gift wrapping available and plenty more happening in the PMA Store and environs.
Screening Times & Tickets:
“Fall of ‘75”: India Song (1975)
The last film in our 1975 series (probably my other great first-time watch of the year) is a fascinating mirror of the film that opened our retrospective, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman… Marguerite Duras’s India Song also stars Delphine Seyrig and is defined by its deliberate pace and a sort of plumbing of an impenetrable psyche. Where Akerman’s film is direct, Duras’s is oblique and prismatic: Most of the dialogue comes from voices off screen, and Seyrig is frequently situated in a ballroom that becomes an endlessly dynamic hall of mirrors. (The mirrors, brilliantly deployed, create some frankly incredibly tableaux.) Seyrig plays the wife of a French ambassador in Lahore, and she’s most frequently paired with Michael Ironside, as a vice consul with a strong interest in her. Duras (who was a novelist, among other things, as well as the writer of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour) creates a humid atmosphere, nestling a melodrama in a formalist conceit that is initially off-putting, until it suddenly becomes utterly mesmerizing. The result feels something like a cross between Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and a Begman film, though in Duras’s hands it is very much its own singular object.
PAST SCREENINGS
Urchin
If Harris Dickinson is not yet a familiar name to you, it will be. So far, the extremely talented young actor has been the best part of films such as Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, Beach Rats, and The Iron Claw, and he has been cast as John Lennon in Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-part biopic of The Beatles. In the thick of his rise to fame, he somehow found time to write and direct his debut film Urchin, which was met with overwhelming acclaim at Cannes this year. Dickinson’s film stars a galvanizing Frank Dillane as Mike, who we first meet unhoused and addicted to drugs on the streets of London. After an incident that gets him in trouble with the law, we observe Mike fitfully attempt to put his life back together. With Dillane as the unwavering center of his film, Dickinson is clearly making a work indebted to Mike Leigh’s Naked, though this is a much more empathetic and less abrasive piece of portraiture. It’s a strong and fully considered debut, realistic and tender.
It Was Just an Accident
The work and life of Iranian master Jafar Panahi have consistently been at odds with the interests of Iran’s government. His films have been almost routinely banned in his home country – despite winning top prizes at the world’s major film festivals – and Panahi himself has been detained in prison multiple times and put under house arrest. Every feature he has shot since 2011 has been made illegally, as he remains under a 20-year ban from filmmaking. Despite this, he has continued to produce work that has been escaped out of the country and released to international audiences. Panahi’s first films after this ban were made in his home and addressed his circumstances; since then, he has grown bolder, creating films out in the world, just outside of the eyes of authorities.
It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is tipped as a likely Best Picture contender at the Oscars, feels like the culmination of this phase of Panahi’s career. It betrays no impression that it was made in stealth, and it’s certainly the most riveting and mainstream feature he’s made. A moral thriller Panahi says was inspired by stories he heard from fellow inmates, the film follows a man who believes he has encountered one of the officers that tortured him in prison. Lacking a certainty that may permit him to enact some revenge, he recruits other dissidents to help identify this man. What ensues is simultaneously, tense, comic, and of the utmost seriousness. Like his peer, the late Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi often combines neorealism and a certain meta quality, drawing your attention to the act and morality of filmmaking. In It Was Just an Accident, these qualities remain, but they’re beautifully threaded into a taut, impeccable yarn.
Peter Hujar’s Day
Filmmaker Ira Sachs has quietly built a remarkably impressive and varied career, first catching my attention with 2012’s queer addiction drama Keep the Lights On through more middlebrow indie hits like Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016) and the recent and ravishing Passages, which we screened in 2023. Sachs’s films are defined by their unique perspectives on familiar stories, few more so than his excellent new Peter Hujar’s Day. Based on a rediscovered 1974 interview by Linda Rosenkrantz (credited as a writer here), the film transpires over a single day, where Rosenkrantz (superbly played by Rebecca Hall) asks fledgling photographer Hujar (Ben Whishaw, terrific) what he did the previous day. Their discussion opens a unique window onto the lifestyle of a working artist in 1970s New York City, as Hujar navigates gigs with more famous artists and haggles with the New York Times. It’s a revealing, exquisitely shot film, and we’re lucky to have our Curator of Photography, Anjuli Lebowitz, join us to provide some context on Hujar’s life and work before Friday’s 2 pm screening.
“Beatles on Film”: The Point (1971) (Introduction by Dan Sonenberg)
For many years now, Thanksgiving weekend in our neck of the woods has meant a multi-night showcase of remarkable Beatles tribute concerts by Spencer Albee and The Walrus. In conjunction with Beatles Night and Chris Brown, we’re delighted to present a couple of films from the Beatles universe this holiday weekend, with special guest introductions. We’ll begin off the beaten path with 1971’s The Point, an animated film drawn from the album by the great Harry Nilsson, narrated by Ringo Starr. (The film originally aired on television with narration by Dustin Hoffman, but Starr replaced him for subsequent releases.) This gem is set in the Land of Point, where everyone has sharp features except for circle-headed Oblio, who is exiled to the Pointless Forest. Dan Sonenberg, Professor and Director of Composition Studies at the University of Southern Maine, will introduce the film.
“Beatles on Film”: A Hard Day’s Night (1964) (Introduction by Pat Callaghan)
Dare I admit that I have never seen this classic, which effectively reinvented the movie musical and paved the way for many enduring film trends? Oops. Happy to make amends for that on November 29, where we’re grateful to have local legend and news icon Pat Callaghan introduce Richard Lester’s 1964 film, which captures the Fab Four at the early peak of their fame in a burst of feverish, irreverent energy.
“Fall of ‘75”: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Also on view over the holiday weekend is another anti-establishment classic, as part of our “Fall of ’75” series. Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of three films to have swept the five major categories at the Academy Awards, and it’s in many ways representative of the New Hollywood filmmaking of the time, mixing a rakish spirit with emphatic social messaging. I’m not sure if this is still one of the first movies from the ‘70s most young people see, but it remains an ideal gateway into the era. This was Forman’s second film made in America, and its legend is legion: The casting section of the movie’s Wikipedia is quite a read, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler was famously fired from the project despite having already shot the vast majority of it.
“Fall of ‘75”: Nashville (1975)
Finishing off this fortnight is simply one of the great American films, directed by a man who’s made more than a couple of them. Set over a long weekend in a city teeming with strivers of all different sorts, Nashville is the epitome of an Altman film: it’s rich with overlapping dialogue and a massive ensemble cast, simultaneously cohesive and unruly, difficult to pin down totally, and it leaves you in an awestruck daze. Rooted in the country music industry but filled with outsiders and fading talents, Nashville functions best as a political allegory, as a set of entrenched powers face new voices vying for attention and popularity. It’s no accident that the film builds to a rally for an insurgent political campaign, nor that its themes are just as relevant as they’ve always been. It’s a film that, in its particulars, no one seems to agree on. Is the music good? Is it intended to be? Does Altman approach his characters with cynicism or curiosity? I feel like my answers to these questions have changed a bit every time I’ve seen Nashville, and to me that’s a sign of an enduring piece of art.
“Fall of ‘75”: Three Days of the Condor (1975)
It has been a tremendous pleasure to be obligated to do image searches of the late Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor. The peacoat, the wire-frame glasses, that hair. The actor simply never looked better than he did in Sydney Pollack’s iconic paranoid thriller. Redford stars as Joe Tuner, a CIA analyst who (delightfully) works at a research center posing as the “American Literary Historical Society.” When he returns from a lunch break and encounters quite a mess, he is sucked into an elaborate international scheme, though he does have time to develop a rather odd relationship with Faye Dunaway’s Kathy Hale. (The sexual politics of this film are unfortunate enough that they were debated in a famous scene in Steven Soderbergh’s great Out of Sight.) Despite all this, Dunaway and Redford are excellent in Pollack’s compulsively watchable film, which is said to have inspired the KGB to expand the scope of their clandestine operations.
The Mastermind
I can barely move around here without crashing into a gorgeous, perceptive piece of writing about The Mastermind, the latest (and perhaps greatest?) film from American treasure Kelly Reichardt. We are so delighted to be the exclusive Portland home for this terrific film. Reichardt’s oeuvre has broadened in recent years, from a new strand of American neorealism (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) into period pieces (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow) and something like a conventional comedy (Showing Up), but some things remain constant in the Reichardtverse: Life means work and work means money, but almost always not enough. The Mastermind is about a man who thinks he’s smart and talented enough to find a way out of this cycle, and it’s Reichardt’s most ingenious riff on her perennial concerns.
In a 1970 Massachusetts realized with stunning attention to detail (the movie was somehow filmed in Ohio), James Mooney (Josh O’Connor, in lovely, hangdog, La Chimera mode) lives a modest life he can’t afford. An art school dropout with a wife (Alana Haim) and two sons, Mooney decides that security at his local museum is lax enough that he can get away with stealing some art and selling it illicitly. Like most great American stories, this heist, and Mooney’s life, is a confidence game. The question is whether Mooney believes in himself, or if anyone else does either. A film full of process, replete with a propulsive jazz score, The Mastermind is fixated on detail but still leaves space to tell a broader story about a man increasingly unmoored from his family, his generation, and ultimately himself.
“Fall of ‘75”: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Our jaunt through the cinema of 1975 in cinema continues with Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, recently named the best of the 1970s by Indiewire. Just to be clear here: This is a notorious film, banned upon its release in many countries (it remains banned in some nations) for its depictions of depraved sexual and fetishistic content. Proceed with caution! Despite being 50 years old, it’s still quite a lot to take. All that said, Salò is also one of the most methodical and unsparing critiques of fascism and human cruelty ever put to film, and it’s frankly dizzying to consider how Pasolini’s abduction and murder (which is still unsolved) transpired before this film was even released.
Final Frontier (with filmmaker Heidi Burkey and Denis Boudreau)
This will be a really special event. I’m greatly looking forward to taking the stage with artist Denis Boudreau and filmmaker Heidi Burkey to discuss Final Frontier, a wonderful short documentary that recently screened at the Camden International Film Festival. Boudreau, an artist who also manages a family farm, has continued to work despite losing his vision. Burkey’s film evocatively illustrates his process, as well as his personal inspirations. What’s more: After our discussion, we’ll head over to our friends for a reception at Flatiron Coffee Bar (594 Congress St.), where Denis will be displaying his work for the month of November.
