Sean Penn isn't the only person who was captivated by the Chris McCandless story (first made popular in the Jon Krakauer book, "Into The Wild," and now a major motion picture directed by Penn, promoted on Oprah, and playing at a theatre near you.) In the early '90's Chris McCandless abandoned all his worldly goods, took on the name Alexander Supertramp and embarked upon a Thoreau-esque adventure trekking around North America, ultimately perishing in an......

SFist Mihi runs with the canines! There's nothing like a celebrity appearance at a film festival, and Sunday night at the Roxie Theatre, the crowd went wild when it was announced that two of the wiener dogs who star in "Wiener Takes All: A Dogumentary" were in attendence. The Doc Fest crowd started oohing and ahhing and craning their necks as if Paris freaking Hilton herself had dropped by. Apparently, competitive wiener dog racing is......

Sorry we're a little late putting up SFist Mihi's last SFJFF review! Judith Schaefer's movie, So Long Are You Young, screened at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley on Tuesday and when the lights went back up, the crowd of mostly senior citizens were on their feet wildly applauding the filmmaker. The gray-haired lady sitting in front of us was shouting, "your movie is a gift! It's a poem!" Shaefer's documentary is itself the story of......

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......

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.......

SFist Mihi checks out the mainstream same-sex flick blurbed by SFist Sara! We were forced to sit in the low-oxygen, nose-bleed section of the Castro Theatre last night because the place was packed to the rafters for Frameline's screening of Nina's Heavenly Delights. The plot in short: prodigal, runaway-bride daughter, Nina, returns to Glasgow for her father's funeral and not only saves the family's Indian restaurant but manages to come out of the closet......

SFist Mihi reviews the movie described as Spellbound meets big hairy gay men! We were surprised when we saw the documentary Bears at the Castro on Saturday at the Frameline film fest. A pageant for big hairy gay men is basically like any conventional beauty contest, only with more harnesses and buttless chaps. Unless you commit an egregious error like blurting out, "I love Nazis" during the all important Q&A, we all know that pageants......

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......

Part 2 of SFist Mihi's Friday night journey After the soft focus melancholy of Spider Lilies, we trotted over to The Victoria on 16th Street for some hard core lesbian porn at the Frameline film fest. We though we were all bad-ass but we learned a sad sad lesson about ourselves on Friday night. We are soft. Soft like a weak little doughboy. We tried to be all "whatev," but basically we ran screaming from......

We went to our last SFIFF movie last night at the PFA in Berkeley and the house was packed for the 9:10 pm screening. It was a mixed crowd, but once again the gray panther contingent in their nubby-cloth, vegan, shoes made a strong showing. Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky follows 21-year-old Hermila who moves from Sao Paulo, Brazil back to her rinky-dink hometown to wait for her baby daddy. Naturally, the......

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......

As we were just telling SFist Mihi, everything is better with an emu in it! It's easy to make a heroic character lovable and the bad guy despicable, but it's much more of an accomplishment to turn a fallible, sweaty, chubby guy with real flaws, including a seriously questionable moral compass, into a sympathetic character. Congorama, a charmer of a movie directed by Philippe Falardeau manages to do just that. Congorama is a lovely tale......

SFist Mihi goes Cantopop! The North American debut of Heavenly Kings for the SF Int'l Film Festival premiered at the Castro Theatre Friday night and it must have been a sweet moment for Berkeley-born, Bay Area-raised, local boy Daniel Wu who directed and stars in the movie. After graduating from the University of Oregon, Daniel stumbled into modeling and acting gigs while backpacking through Asia and became a bona fide heart-throb in China. Heavenly......

Ever since we read SFist Mihi's review of Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief (we'll abbreviate that GHS:TOLT) from last year's DocFest, we've totally wanted to see this documentary, about brilliantly-coiffed Japanese men who are paid to socialize with women in local bars, in a reverse of the infamous "hostess bars" of Japanese fame. Lucky for us it came back to town as part of the SF Int'l Asian-Am film fest! As......

SFist Mihi leaps through the SFIAAFF for some warm-hearted, life-changing anime! This is why we go to film festivals. Once in a while you get to see a movie that you probably would have missed if it weren't for film festivals, but has made your life just a little bit better. A movie that transforms you. A movie that makes your heart swell and your soul sing. A movie that makes you weep silent streams......

SFist Mihi kicked it Rotoscope-animated style at the SFIAAFF Friday night. We love a good Cinderella story and apparently so do a bunch of people on dates. Year of the Fish, a modern interpretation of a 9th century Chinese folk tale played at the Van Ness AMC 1000 on Friday night and the place was lousy with well-groomed couples holding-hands and making kissy faces at each other. Unfortunately, there's something about placing this Chinese......

SFist Mihi reports in from the SFIAAFF this weekend! The world premiere of Shanghai Kiss played on Saturday night at the Castro Theatre and the house was packed. One of the themes running through the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival last year was about how there weren't enough Asian-American men in movies. Clearly things have not improved since out of the three movies we saw over the weekend, two of them featured the......

Nothing makes us feel more like a big pervy loser than standing in line for a porn movie. On a Friday night. Alone. In the rain. Wearing a trench coat no less. Viva--a campy stylized soft porn movie played at the Roxie Theatre for the San Francisco Independent Film Festival last week and our plus-one was running late. The theatre seemed freakishly well-lit and we craned our neck around and made a big production of......

What's a hottie with a body, a good personality and an ivy league education have to do to find a husband these days? Well, if you're an Iranian-American Jew (or really any Americanized member of an immigrant group), the answer is plenty. Love Iranian-American Style (Ed note: we'd link to the film itself, but the SFJFF site won't let us. We hate that!) played at the 26th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on Saturday......

We thought nothing could put us off our grub. After we saw Super Size Me we left the theatre absolutely dying for a double cheeseburger. Well, Another Hole in the Head finally did it. We've officially given up food. Eating disorder here we come! Feed is a crime movie that delves into the underbelly of "feeders" and "gainers." It was like the most perverse episode of "CSI" ever with its love of obscure fetishes and......

Our mistake was thinking any movie shown during the Hole in the Head Horror Festival would be at least a little scary. Watching a monster that looks like a slightly more sinister version of the Cal mascot, Oskie the Bear pawing a naked lady is kinda horrific but scary? Not so much. The Beast is good old-fashioned B grade camp and the audience for the almost-midnight showing of this soft-porn "monster" movie came with the......

There's a subculture of women in Japan who go bonkers for dudes with the Ziggy Stardust look. Or at least that's what we concluded after we saw the West Coast premiere of The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (GHSTOLT) at the Women's Building on Saturday. Those dudes have some freaking crazy hairdos! Imagine a mullet mated with a peacock and gave birth to a Las Vegas showgirl head-dress. Really we......

Thursday night the Castro Theatre looked like a giant faculty meeting of humanities professors from some crunchy liberal arts university. But what can you expect from the West Coast premiere of a Robert Altman movie based on an old timey public radio show that originates in Minnesota of all places, don't cha know? A Prairie Home Companion closed the San Francisco International Film Festival Thursday night to a sell-out crowd. Despite the fact that......

Sure, Art School Confidential doesn't hit Bay Area theatres until May 12, but our pals at Larsen (drink!) know that SFist readers are always one step ahead of everyone else, and have given us a crapload of passes to an advance screening of the movie even SFist MiHi couldn't get in to see at the SFIFF. That's right: SFist MiHi, denied entrance to Art School Confidential! Given that we always want what we can't......

Sunday was the kind of day that makes San Francisco seem like the best city ever. The sun was shining, neighbors in our building delivered our Sunday paper straight to our door instead of stealing it, children laughed in the street, flowers bloomed and small birdies and woodland creatures helped us get dressed in the morning while we hummed a happy tune. Watching Tom Ammiano opinining for the television cameras while we waiting in......

We've gotten two emails, so we're starting a new column: "I Saw Gavin Newsom." Reader ALCSupporter writes in:

Guess who I saw last night at the Asian Law Caucus dinner? Gavin Newsom. He showed up, made fun of the items in the silent auction, didn't bid on anything, and then made a prompt beeline to the only non-Asian female in the room and started touching her.

It was Saturday night at Tosca - got there around 11 pm and the Gav was there in a very fancy tux, surrounded by a lot of other tux wearers and a ravishing, though all-too-plastic for my taste and kind of spaced-out-looking, Sofia Milos. At one point it looked like that Gav was heading back to go to the bathroom so I got up myself to go cruise him...but alas he just stood in the hallway and whispered into the ear of one of his companions. Was it secrets of Scientology? I know not. Nor do I know where they'd come from, but everyone seemed happy and deliciously enthused by their own company. The Gav schmoozed with Matt Dillon, who was fresh from being stalked by SFist MiHi. The Gav and Matty Dillon were exactly the same height!

Before the screening of the documentary, They Chose China, Director Shuibo Wang stood in front of the audience and declared that San Francisco was his favorite city in North America. That already predisposed the largely gray-haired audience to feel kindly towards the director but then he further ingratiated himself by saying, "I have never experienced a festival like this. It is very very warm. This is a very sweet experience." Wang, whose previous documentary......

Despite our initial resolve to move at a dignified pace through this film festival, we got overly excited on our first day out and may have shot our wad way too early. We planned to see only one movie—the Chinese chick flick, Perpetual Motion on Saturday night but an SFIFF insider in the press room told us we simply must stay for The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. It's porn! It's funny! It's political!......

There was a lot of gentle sobbing, some out and out bawling and lots of grown men surreptitiously wiping their eyes at the Kabuki Theatre on Tuesday night. At one point we were distracted from our own sniveling by the sound of low-level keening coming from the row behind us and the realization the whole theatre was erupting in choked-back sobs and loud sniffles. Abduction is a documentary about the 1977 kidnapping of 13-year-old......

Filmmaker Georgia Lee dropped out of Harvard Business School to make movies. That must rank right up there with biting your fingernails and dating a felon as one of the all time best ways to torture your mother. Fear not Mrs. Lee, Georgia seems like she's doing okay. A short film she directed while at NYU film school was spotted by Martin Scorsese who took her under his wing during the shooting of Gangs of......