-- Magic Bullets: Along with Bonde do Role and JuiceBoxxx, this local outfit (heavy on the bass lines, rhythmic keyboards, and melancholic vocals) performs tonight at 9 p.m. at The Independent, 628 Divisadero; $13. -- Queen Christina (1933): Young Swedish queen ends up kissing another dame as well as a dashing John Gilbert. Greta Garbo stars in this classic starting at 9 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way. -- Downy......

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. More problems with the construction at Hunters' Point (this time: asbestos). Chris Daly is on it. A construction worker falls off the Golden Gate Bridge and his employer avoids liability because they used the wrong legal name on the OSHA citations it received. Send all legal paperwork to FSist, everyone! More taxi permit shadiness. Man vs. Wild -- who cares if he stayed in a hotel, he drank water......

We went to the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley last night for the SFIFF to see On Fire -- a French movie about jailbait 15-year-old Livia and her dangerous longing for the hot-fireman-old-enough-to-be-her-father, Jean. A few minutes before the movie started there was a strange buzzing coming from the front of the theatre and we noticed an older man fiddling with his hearing aid. That's when we took count and realized that out of the......

SFist interviews David and Edie Ichioka, makers of the documetnary "Murch" about film editor Walter Murch, now showing at the San Franicsco International Film festival ...

The SF Int'l Film Festival isn't just about great national and international movies -- they've got music events, gala events, talks about the state of cinema, an online presence through SF360.com, and -- what we stopped by to see this afternoon -- a series of panels about the state of cinema today. Today's panel was about the state of the film scene in San Francisco, and included basically every single movie-related constituency group in......

Your mainstream release pick: The Namesake. The saga of a family that journeys from homeland India to wintry New York, Mira Nair’s newest film is based on the titular bestseller by Jhumpa Lahiri and features Kal Penn (Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle), Jacinta Barrett and Indian singer/actress Tabu. It’s a beautiful and sensitive look at identity in the context of a cross-cultural family. Nair’s known for bringing insight to her subject matter and this movie appears to be no different...

Last night we featured the cross bay rivalry of Taste events, and tonight, we've got two art auctions. When we see things like this, we wonder whether the organizers of said events check each others' calendars, as we have learned through painful experience that we can't be everywhere at once. Perhaps an evite is called for in these circumstances. First, in the East Bay, The Oakland Art Gallery's DRAWN, a fundraiser sale and art......

East Bay SFist Sarah L doesn't care about the stupid Bay Bridge being closed down this weekend! As we mentioned here before, the Bay Bridge eastbound will be closed Labor Day weekend. For those of us who live East of the Edenic S.F., here are some cultural offerings on this side of the Bay. Saturday, September 2 - Old Time Relijun and Trumans Water play the Stork Club in Oakland. Old Time Relijun "blend primitive......

Faithful readers, you've probably noticed that this SFist watches the same types of movies over and over again: Is it a documentary about something weird and/or in San Francisco? Gosh, who could SFist possibly get to watch that? So we figured we'd mix it up a little bit and go watch something a little less provincial for a change -- which is how we ended up at the 9:00 p.m. screening of the Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela at the SFIFF. First of all, the audience for a historical and personal documentary about South Africans in exile from 1960-1990 as apartheid was being dismantled is very different from the usual scruffians we see at our wacky movies about, say, the history of the Mission hipster told through burritos used as puppets -- there were a lot of earnest expressions on faces, internationalist people carrying Global Exchange backpacks, and in the audience, we ran into a friend from New York who's devoted her life to public interest law. Boy, we're usually pretty shallow in our movie picks, aren't we? Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris told the audience that the documentary itself is a eulogy to his stepfather, who fled South Africa with a group of 11 friends and helped found the African National Congress, and an attempt to tell his story and to resolve posthumously the sometimes-strained nature of their relationship. His stepfather's story is pretty amazing (he fled, mostly by foot, from South Africa to Tanzania, and then emigrated to the Bronx). We started out dubious about the premise, and even more dubious about the dramatic "reenactments," but as the movie progressed, it all of a sudden didn't really matter. It's a great story. We wish there'd been a little more information about modern African history (the movie presumes a fair amount of knowledge) and we also got the sense that Harris was pulling some punches about the conflicts between him and his stepfather, but that's all pretty minor stuff. 12 Disciples plays again tonight at 6:30 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and it'll also be airing on PBS in September. ...

Saturday: We're heading over to the Pacific Film Archive for the Women of Color Film Festival. We're especially interested in the documentary feature Who Killed Vincent Chin?, A documentary about a Chinese American man mistaken for Japanese and beaten to death by unemployed white auto workers, who were convicted with the lightest possible sentences. See the complete schedule here. Sunday: It's the Oscars, bitches! You want to know how seriously we take the Academy......

We've got quite a diversity of recommendations this week - from the politically conscious, to the "sick and twisted", to the, well, sick and twisted and Russian. Check it out! First on our list is the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which runs February 19- 26 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and March 10, 16, 23, 30 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. This year the festival......

The loud crass holidays impeding your Oprah-like search for your spirit? Perhaps some time spent without the distraction of dialogue would help you clear your mental palate. Until the gentlemen come along and steal the voice of every damn Macy's shopper, perhaps a silent film or two this weekend would do the trick? Today at 2:30 p.m., Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive is screening Earth, straight from the 1930's Soviet Union. Gabriel Thibaudeau will accompany......

Starting tonight and running until September 27 in SF venues including El Rio, Artist's Television Access, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with two additional programs at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, Oct 6 and 13 MadCat is where it's at this week and next. MadCat is the self-described "highly acclaimed international festival that exhibits independent and experimental films and videos directed by women from around the globe. The Festival emphasizes work that is inventive......

Look, SFist is covering the Pacific Film Archive's Trouble In Paradise: Pre-Code Hollywood series because we think you should know about it and because (disclosure) it means we can walk past a "Sold Out" sign and a crowd of disappointed Berkeleyan film buffs at showtime, claim our free tickets and watch the movie. But our only real complaint about the series so far is that each film is only screening once, so if you......

Of I'm No Angel (1933), which screened Sunday at the Pacific Film Archive, film critics like to write that if star Mae West had spoken only one line in her career--"Beulah, peel me a grape"--she would still have been one of her era's brightest screen stars. That's always seemed hyperbolic, but the film itself makes a pretty convincing case. West (at right), more imposing than coquettish as Tira the Lion Tamer, wields physical presence......