We picked up on this over at All Shook Down today. It seems that a San Francisco convenience store cashier (or practical-knee slapper actor) received neither credit nor pay for his appearance in Will Smith's Oscar-baiting tear jerker The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). In this Daily Show segment ripoff, he goes into detail about being chewed up by the big, bad Hollywood machine. Also, anyone forced to appear in a scene with Mr. Smith's......

SFist Wendy's back at the theater! Even though there's no film fests in town, we stopped by the movie theater and checked out American Fusion, which opened this past weekend at the Sundance Kabuki. This film totally reminded us of a Jimmy Kimmel Patton Oswald joke we heard a few years ago that references the breaks one gets upon growing older. Well, the wickedly funny Taiwanese grandmother, played by Lan Yeung, was not 100 (which......

When going to the concert at Davies Symphony Hall last Thursday, we expected a feast for the ears. But visiting conductor Alan Gilbert made it quite a visual show as well: an unassuming man with the bulging pouch of a computer programmer, he looked a bit younger than his almost 40 years, and became quite possessed with the music, his hands fluttering like little birds in Dutilleux's Mystères de l'Instant. In Schumann's Manfred overture, his demeanor was by itself worth the admission price. Manfred, based on Byron's semi-autobiographical poem, is a tormented young man, and Gilbert was not only channeling that torment, he looked like he was rehearsing for the next sequel in the Karate Kid series. We are not here to solve chicken and egg problems: did Gilbert look this way because the orchestra sounded that way, or the other way around? In any case, the sound threads conductor and orchestra wove together were by all means appropriate. Dutilleux's 1989 opus, ten short pieces fused with no interruption as a single one, was played delicately by a small string orchestra plus percussions and cimbalom. The piece-shifting textures and tonal centers seemed to depict the difficulty of catching the instant, never settling long in the same mood: dramatic glissandos resolving in light pizzicatos, soloists passing the baton seamlessly to one another, here Alexander Barantschik at the violins, now Michael Grebanier at the cello. We thought of the sound of birds which Dutilleux claimed inspired him for the piece (they also inspired the other modern French composer Olivier Messiaen in a few works). We also thought of rain drops: ten short pieces, ten musical haikus, briefly evoking nature and going away. The cimbalom (we believe manned by Jay Stebley) stepped in and out, bringing a curious metallic, almost synthetic and oddly appealing sound to the piece. Picture from Alan Gilbert's press portfolio. He did not wear glasses Thursday though....

Best known for his role as Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, Pat Morita passed away yesterday at his home in Las Vegas. A look at his bio, however, makes it clear that Morita was much more than the guy who said "wax on, wax off." Born in Isleton, and a graduate of Fairfield's Armijo High School, Morita spent the first 30 years of his life (excepting the period during World War Two he......