*FILM: The 5th Annual San Francisco Irish Film Festival kicks things off with Garage by director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran. This is followed by a reception with the Consul General of Ireland, Emer Deane. According to LS, "other highlights include Speed Dating, a romantic comedy about a lovelorn amnesiac; the award winning Irish-language feature film Kings, and finally The Undertaking, a documentary about Irish American undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch, who is......

*MUSIC: Hotel Utah launches a brand spanking new party, YEAR. The night is being labeled as an "innovative branded concept," hosted by KUSF radio personality and creative director for the Mill Valley Film Festival, Dennis "The Menace" Scheyer. Each month at YEAR, one year will be celebrated -- ranging from 1956 to 2006 -- and the playlist for that month's event will be the top hits from that year. Which year will be the......

Ooooh!!! You know we love the Asian-American Film Festival! We love the feature films by the young ambitious Asian-American directors, we love Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, we love the KQED-ready documentaries about identity and history, we love the beautifully shot foreign films, and we loooooooooove Music Video Asia! MAN, do we love Music Video Asia. (Plus -- a sing-along Colma The Musical!) The film festival starts in two weeks and runs......

*FILM: She Done Him Wrong (1933) screens at the Castro Tonight. What's is about? Well, according to CinemaSource, "Lady Lou works as a singer at the Gay Nineties saloon of Gus Jordan, who plays her with diamonds to keep her by his side. She runs afoul of stalwart Salvation Army captain Cummings, who warns her that she''s on the road to perdition. Though Lou herself steers clear of criminal activities, Gus Jordan runs a......

SFist interviews Jeff Ross, founder of Indie Fest...

Let's Get Lost (1988): Bruce Weber followed around jazz trumpeter and heroin addict Chet Baker on a year-long excursion, "from the West Coast, to the East Coast, to Europe--including a stop at the Cannes Film Festival--with interviews with Chet, colleagues and friends, including dueling insights from his third wife, a former British show girl, and three children in Oklahoma, and from old flame Ruth Young, a sardonically throaty torch singer." Screens tonight at 7......

Paul Auster: Sure, metafictionist Auster wrote the screenplays to Smoke, Blue in the Face, and The Brooklyn Follies, but he also penned the phenomenal collection of PoMo detective-fiction tales, The New York Trilogy, his best work to date. Auster appears live with San Francisco International Film Festival Director Graham Leggat after a screening of his latest film, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. Witness him in action at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community......

-- The 2007 'Stache Bash: The regular world now knows what bears have known for a long time: mustaches are kinda cool. This even will show you just how cool they, in fact, are. Burlesque troupe Kitty Kitty Bang Bang and DJ Ross Hogg's hip hop, dancehall, roots reggae, and dub sounds intertwine with a night of 'stache championing. Tonight's bash will feature a mustache pageant, a beer foam retention test, a mustache haiku......

Tonight, for one night only, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be featuring two sneak previews of Dirty Country, a highly entertaining documentary about the underground world of raunchy music, directed by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, founders and hosts of the Found Footage Festival, which sold out four shows at the Red Vic last month. Dirty Country, which won the Audience Award at this year's South By Southwest, is part of Yerba......

-- Audiofly: Euroduo (England's Anthony Middleton and Italy's Luca Saporito) throw down here in the states. Expect lots of basslines, techno-ness, and Italian-pop. Music starts at 9 p.m. Mighty,119 Utah (at 15th Street); $10-12. -- Annual Hank Williams Birthday Karaoke Sing-Off: Scenesters and country fans alike come to wish this dead guy a happy birthday by crooning one or two of his songs. (Does this mean that Carrie Underwood will receive crazy hipster cred......

-- Madcat Women's International Film Festival -- Frame by Frame: Experimental film festival's night focusing on animation, claymation, and digital shorts all directed by women. Starts at 8:30 p.m. at El Rio, 3158 Mission; $7-$20. -- "Fashion Rewind: Play It. Make It. Wear It.": Art Institute of California-San Francisco students create original fashions with the two themes in mind: recycled materials and music icons. So...we have no idea what to expect. But you will......

You know how you can always tell the tourists in town because they're the ones wearing shorts? Well, that's not the kind of shorts we're talking about here -- we're talking about the SF Shorts Film Festival starting tonight at the Victoria Theater (just one block up from today's Blocker!) and at the Red Vic. It's a grab bag of short films from here until Saturday -- the screenings are loosely categorized by theme ("But......

SFist Mihi warns you that this preview clip above may be dull. Sidewalk, the documentary we saw at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley on Sunday for the SF Jewish Film Festival, was billed as a "wry and hilarious" examination by filmmaker Duki Dror as he follows kids on their daily journeys to and from school. "Dror has the same wondrous gift of bittersweet nostalgia that cartoonists Charles M. Schulz and Lynda Barry have," said......

SFist Wendy skips Harry Potter for the SF Jewish Film Fest! Who woulda thought. . . . we weren’t the only ones not completely immersed in isolation with the final Harry Potter book this weekend... although we did see a couple books neatly tucked under the seats at the Castro Theater on Saturday at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. If you weren’t there, well, then you missed out on a couple of good romantic......

Yay! SFist Mihi's back on the scene, covering the opening night festivities for the SF Jewish Film Fest! The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) is the first and only Jewish film festival in the world. At least that's what the President of the SFJFF said at the Castro Theatre last night when he introduced the opening night movie, Sweet Mud. This is the kind of thing that makes us so proud to live here.......

Frameline -- purveyors of the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival and many hosted-bar opening- and closing-night parties that we’ve crashed (but we hear the films are great, too!) -- needs your help. This year they will receive funding from the profits of the Up Your Alley Fair -- happening on Sunday, July 29 -- if they bring in a certain number of volunteers. Described as a “smaller version of the Folsom Street Fair,”......

-- Joan Osbourne: She's famous (or just known for) her one-hit confection "One of Us," but her first effort was an overall amazing album. At least as far as the Liz Phairian ouvre goes, we think. She performs with Victoria George at 8 p.m. at Slim's, 333 11th St. (at Folsom); $26. -- Natural Born Hooker: The all-caps happy counterPULSE Theatre brings us the in's and the out's of one man's ten-year journey as......

How can it be? So many great film festivals all over town! This week, you've got the Jewish Film Festival coming up at the Castro, and this Saturday, the Slant Film Festival at the 4 Star (Clement and 23rd). What's the Slant Film Festival? Asian-American short films! The Texas-based festival is curated by the co-founder of the thoughtful Asian-American zine Hyphen, and is coming to SF for the first time this year. Movies screening include......

Isn't it awesome to live in this city? It's a beautiful summer, all our political news is extremely entertaining, and we have tons of amazing film festivals all the freaking time! So many, in fact, that you've got not one but TWO to pick from this weekend! At the Castro this weekend, the organists are warming up -- it's time for the Silent Movie Festival. This year's lineup features a series of Hal Roach comedies,......

--Audacia Ray, the editor of the sex worker zine $pread and a Fleshbot [nsfw] contributor, talks at Modern Times about the commodification of sex on the Internet. 7:30 p.m., 888 Valencia (x 20th) --Kearny Street Workshop, Intersection for the Arts, and Galeria de la Raza are throwing a reading and book release party for their 2007 Intergenerational Writers Lab collection, at Capp180 (180 Capp Street 3rd Fl., x 16th and Mission). $5-15 sliding, 7 p.m.......

Buy yourself some peanuts and cracker jack: Baseball All-Star Game mania continues apace in San Francisco! The All Star Fan Forum runs until 8 p.m. tonight. You can just hang out, or you could attend a session on teaching kids how to play catch (7 p.m.), and learn how to score a baseball game (4 and 6). If you're so filled with baseball fever you're skipping work, you can also meet the women players who......

Yay, more film festivals! We love it. Next up: the SF Jewish Film Festival, which runs from July 19 to July 26 (with some additional screenings around the area through August 6). You've got a wide array of movies to choose from, including movies about Jewish boxers and documentaries from Israel -- but also, the always-fun film festival staples of romantic movies set in Paris and plaintive movies about family drama. What seems especially notable:......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

Everyone knows the Saturday of Pride Weekend is the Dyke March! Put on your motorcycle helmet and take off your top. The theme this year (for the 15th anniversary) is "Healthcare for All," so there's going to be a mammogram truck on site, as well as the usual diverse array of religions, performers, and peoples. The rally and stage show starts at 3 at Dolores Park; the women go marching at 7. Other events:......

Part 1 of SFist Mihi's journey into female sexuality on a lovely Friday night. Part 2 is immediately below this post. After seeing two women-centered movies at the Frameline LGBT Film Festival on Friday night, we've determined that you can tell the difference between a lesbian movie made for a mainstream audience and a lesbian movie made for lesbians by the so-called "butch" in the film. Spider Lilies (Ci Qing), a Taiwanese import, played at......

SFist Sara gives you the lowdown on what to expect from the Frameline GLBT film fest, which starts up TODAY! Starting today, The Frameline LGBT Film Festival will be rolling out its rainbow carpet at the Castro and the lineup of guests is glittery. Besides appearances by RuPaul (for Starrbooty), Alan Cumming (for his directorial debut Suffering Man’s Charity) and Alexis Arquette (for Alexis Arquette: She’s our Brother), the fest is again offering a super......

We headed back to the Roxie this week for a little sci-fi at the Indiefest Another Hole in the Head festival, courtesy of director Richard Schenkman and writer Jerome Bixby, who’s known also for the Twilight Zone and Star Trek. We can’t say much without spoiling this one for you, but we can tell you that it was not what we’d expected. Man from Earth is a sort of coming out for Jonathan Oldman,......

Lotta stuff going on today, a lot of which we've mentioned before: Another Hole In The Head continues and the Black Film Festival gets started! Also, it's the Berkeley Edge Fest. Here's some other stuff too. --Ha ha ha ha ha ha!! It's Critical Ass! There's a naked bike ride to protest overuse of fossil fuels. Noon, starting at Justin Herman Plaza. Don't forget the sunscreen. --Well, this is an unfortunate segue: SF Recycling is......

The 3rd annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival kicks off tonight, at the Brava Theatre. Over 40 movies in three days. Check the schedule, grab some popcorn and enjoy the show(s)! 2781 24th St (at York), SF. Get your daily art fix in high style -- check out a rare selection from Picasso's body of work at the W hotel on view from 12-7pm, with a wine tasting from 6-7pm. RSVP for the......

La Vie En Rose (the Embarcadero) is a full course, all four food groups, soup and cocktails, dinner of a film. (It screened at the SFIFF, and we loved it then too!) And if you haven’t had your fill by the end of Olivier Dahan’s homage to the great Parisian icon Edith Piaf (breathtakingly portrayed by Marion Cotillard), you can always watch it again. The strongest cross-section of decadence and nutrition is the ATA’s Sunday......