You all know SFist Wendy's a living goddess too, right?? It only takes 32 perfections to become a goddess in Nepal -- sounds simple, right? Hardly. But Sajani, the eight year-old goddess who stole our heart in the movie Living Goddess at DocFest last weekend, fit the bill. Sajani is one of three such goddesses in Nepal, Buddhists girls believed to be inhabited by Hindu goddesses. Sajani was chosen at the ripe age of two......

SFist Wendy goes off the grid, and then comes back to the land of electricity to tell us all about it! We welcomed the return of DocFest, your local indie documentary festival, last night with Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa. It wasn’t clear we were actually going to make it in to the theater until about two minutes before it began. There was a long line for the film, which was showing in......

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......

Cue Sex In The City theme music here, as SFist Wendy struts on down to the Castro! We headed to the Castro on Sunday evening for the SFJFF's Gorgeous! (exclamation included in the title), sort of a Desperate Housewives meets Sex and the City, featuring four women, some single, some married, some divorced, but all Jewish and all uniquely Parisienne. Instead of NYC, the film’s set primarily in a beauty salon in Paris owned......

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......

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,......

SFist Wendy and her buddy AG talk about vampire movies, comedy and horror, and the eternal question of your perfect vampiress. Well, it was no Blade or Lost Boys, but we did get a few laughs out of The Thirst this week at the Another Hole in the Head Indiefest film festival. The Thirst thrust shy hippie college student, Will, directly into the battlefront of a neverending war between the vampires and their sentry slayers.......

That's it for the SFIFF this year! As SFist Wendy wraps up SFist's coverage with part 2 of her marathon week, congratulations to the San Francisco Film Society for two weeks of great cinema and we're already looking forward to the 51st! And on to Mezzanine Thursday night for the SFIFF closing night party -- with a surprise performer . . . . but before the final sendoff, we headed over to the Castro......

Part 1 of 2 of SFist Wendy's hard-partying midweek SFIFF musical adventures! At the SFIFF, we waited out the line on Wednesday to “go green” with local bands Halou (video above) and Tarentel at the Mighty, at the Greenworld event. Having seen Halou before, we knew it’d be worth the wait. We weren’t really sure what to expect from the green scene that night, and shuttled into the club along with a really interesting......

SFist Wendy's favorite SFIFF film fest movie yet! It doesn’t get any better than this. Really. We headed to the Clay Sunday night, very relaxed and content as it was, having spent one of the most beautiful days ever up at Stinson Beach (never mind all the flies, anyone know what the story was with those flies!?), and now happily anticipating the latest SFIFF romance Once, featuring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of the......

SFist Wendy goes French! This weekend we took in a couple of French dramas at the SFIFF, but because at least one of them is slated for distribution in the near future, we’ve been asked not to give too many details. Not surprisingly, both films shared a fair amount of angst, lust, passion, and sexual tension -- they are French, after all. The backdrop for much of 7 Years is a rural French prison,......

SFist Wendy grabs a beer, a snowboard, and some scares! We’ll start off this review by saying we love Stella Artois…or more specifically the free Stellas we had at the mini-beer garden before the midnight horror movie screening of Cold Prey at the SFIFF. When we went up to get a beer, the bartender tells us to just grab one. “They’re free?” we ask. “Yup, they’re free,” he replies. That’s why we love Stella Artois.......

SFist Wendy takes a trip to the other San Diego (not the one with the fish tacos!). The Road to San Diego, at the SFIFF, is the story of Tati, from Pozo Azul, a small town in the Northeast Argentinian Misiones province (between Paraguay and Brazil), who embarks on a spiritual quest to deliver a timber statue of his hero and idol, the notorious soccer player, Diego Maradona, to Maradona himself. Tati, who is......

It's SFist Wendy and Liana, chatting about Tuesday night's movie! We were pumped to be headed to the SFIFF again this year with our friend, Liana, who’s from Brazil. We’ve seen several Brazilian films together at the festival over the years, and this year we had a number of good options, but decided on 12 Labours, a film by Ricardo Elias. 12 Labours is the story of Heracles, a young Brazilian boy, recently released......

Last night we again settled ourselves into the comfy reclining chairs at the newly renovated Kabuki theater for the SFIFF, and adored the amorous, light-hearted “claymation” Spanish short Capelito - the travails of a spurned mushroom-shaped suitor, who can’t win to lose when it comes to wooing his mushroom-shaped princess. The film that followed Capelito, though, turned out to be one of the most disturbing, provocative films we’ve seen at this year’s festival thus far.......

SFist Wendy covers both South and North Africa with the SFIFF! Who needs Coachella when there’s Oppikoppi, a rock music festival held in South Africa every year? Really, we would have loved to have been at Coachella this weekend, but if you couldn’t be there, the SF International Film Festival was a great place to be instead. Last night, at Bunny Chow, John Barker’s debut feature film, we roadtripped to Oppikoppi along with a......

Sorry for the delay in reading your alt-weeklies this week; there was a comical mixup in our attempts to implement the weekly switchoff between us and SFist Sarah L. We'll try again in a few weeks, and we also briefly considered just not doing something this week, and then we thought, Oh no -- what about the YTD count? Everyone in December will say "that only adds up to 51!". So here we are! Last......

pssst! SFist Wendy...! SFist Wendy....! Time to wake up! Recipe for a nice nap: A beer and a whopping bbq turkey sandwich from Tommy’s Joynt followed by last night’s SFIAAFF film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, actually titled Syndromes and a Century. We’d looked forward to a little excitement after our long day, but there was none to be had until we’d left the theater last night. We struggled through the first half of the film, which......

SFist Wendy makes it a weekend of romance at the SF Asian-Am Film Fest! This was a good weekend, thanks in large part to the Asian-American film festival. We spent part of the past two days at the Castro checking out a couple of remarkably different films: Lou Ye’s Summer Palace, and former SFIAAFF director Paul Mayeda Berges’ Mistress of Spices, a Bollywoodesque adaptation of Chitra Divakaruni’s novel, featuring the ever-stunning Aishwarya Rai, aka......

Lose Your Child or Lose Your Mind. We’re sure there are a lot of great films at Indiefest, but we screened one of the best on Wednesday night at the Roxie - The Substance of Things Hoped For. Daphne Lessing, played by Vanessa Lengies, faces a daunting choice after she’s diagnosed with a rare form of schizophrenia, and an unplanned pregnancy that implicitly resulted from one of her ever-increasing “episodes.” The film follows Daphne in......

SFist Wendy, contributing Last week we attended the premiere of Lunafest, a festival of films “by, for, about women” at the Herbst Theater. Lunafest proceeds went to the Breast Cancer Fund. The nine shorts were a treat, and we can’t do them all justice here, so check out the Lunafest site and keep them in mind when opportunity presents itself again. Among those that have stuck with us over the past few days are Lori......

We were treated to performances on Monday night at the Palace of Fine Arts by Zach Rogue, Dave Eggers, Mark Kozelek, Sarah Vowell and Patton Oswalt (also the host), and Aimee Mann, during Bookeaters, a benefit for 826 Writing Centers nationwide. There really aren’t that many better ways to spend an evening. The show posed the question: which is better, words or music? We aren’t any closer to answering that for you after Monday’s stellar......

We tore ourselves away from the beach long enough this weekend to treat ourselves to Russian Dolls, the sequel to L’Auberge Espagnole. The latter translates into “potluck” or “Euro pudding” and literally involved a potluck of 20somethings from all over the EU, living and hanging out together in Barcelona. The 20somethings have progressed (or regressed depending on your take) into nearly 30somethings for Russian Dolls, and are now somewhat spread out among Paris, London, and......

Whoever said that horror films don’t make great first dates? We headed back to the Roxie, one of our fave SF theaters this weekend for horrorfest, aka Another Hole in the Head, with our friend and date in tow. We were headed to Broken, and we’d been forewarned that it wasn’t for the squeamish. Nothing a couple drinks can’t handle, we thought. It turns out the drinks, while appreciated, were complete unnecessary. We think......

There's no question that getting fired, canned, axed, rif'ed, or booted SUCKS. We were back at one of our favorite SF theaters, the Roxie, for the SF debut of Annabelle Gurwitch's Fired! at Docfest on Friday night. It turns out that there were so many eager sympathizers, a second show had to be added. We stood in line near Gurwitch, and Robert Reich, former Clinton Labor Secretary, who has a cameo in the film and......

Whatever you do, don't go see Pizza The Movie hungry. Boy were we glad we'd had that burrito (but we must admit, that didn't prevent us from stopping off for a slice after the film). Even if you don’t love pizza, which is hard to fathom, this one's a must-see. The engaged crowd in the Roxie's baby theater, aka "the Little Roxie" made viewing the film feel like a giant pizza party itself (minus the......

We are accustomed to the typical media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which generally emphasizes the violence and hatred. "Encounter Point," co-directed by Ronit Avni and Julie Bacha, also a co-director of "Control Room," introduced us to some of the everyday heroism that takes place behind the scenes. The documentary focuses on eight individuals and their families, and follows them in their daily activities, highlighting their responses to the losses they’ve encountered in their......

Arriving at Baycat, the Bayview Hunters Point Center for Arts & Technology, about forty minutes prior to the San Francisco premier of "Favela Rising," we hadn’t banked on the sellout crowd. Fortunately, we were offered standing room, which turned out to be the best "seats" in the house. (Once the film rolled, several others joined us on the tables we stood on throughout the show to better view the subtitles.) The cozy environment was......

"Papa, are you a terrorist?" We spent several very fun, yet dark weeks in Hamburg, Germany (when you don’t get up before noon in December there, you don’t see much light) with a friend who grew up there years ago. Watching the dim, gray aerial views and port scenes of what we found to be an ultimately beautiful city in the Hitchcockian style, Seeds of Doubt brought us back to those days. However, what followed was an unmistakable reminder that things have changed in Hamburg, as they have many places, in a post-9/11 world. We didn’t really know what to expect going into the film, whose German title Folgeschaden, we’ve been told translates into "damaging after-effects." The film showcases a young couple, presumably in their thirties, who’ve seemingly already acknowledged and encountered the issues inherent in sharing their lives with someone of a different ethnicity and religion. When Tariq is suspected of being a "sleeper" in a Hamburg terrorism cell, it becomes apparent that the couple only touched the surface of the difficulties their relationship will face in the days to come. It is clear that Maya and Tariq have discussed issues relating to their young son and his religious upbringing, but not much more. SFist Wendy, contributing...

We woke up again today with a strange kink in our neck, which we immediately recognized as the curse of our height challenge. Ahhhh . . . . It must be those darned subtitles we were straining to read (so much for several years of French class, eh). So, we are going to share our epiphany for those festgoers who struggle with the same height challenge. Sit on an aisle on the right side of theatre. No, not the right side of the middle section -- the aisle seat in the right section. Voila. Or so we hope. Don't expect "Cops" or "The First 48" if you see “Le Petit Lieutenant.” That’s not because the film doesn't feel realistic. In fact, it feels very realistic. That must be in part because many of the cops in the film by Xavier Beauvois are real cops, in their everyday setting. We learned at the post-film Q&A with cinematographer, Caroline Champetier, who showed up in a long black leather jacket in the spirit of a "cop" film, that Beauvois actually lived among Paris cops for two years, who served as inspiration for the script. Several of them actually had roles in the film. The film differs from the law enforcement reality shows that we would never admit to watching because it focuses on the officers themselves – as people -- showcasing the developing relationship between veteran cops, and the rookie, aka “Le Petit Lieutenant.” However, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of crime scenes, including a trip to the morgue – and the film is not for the squeamish. Tonight's your last chance to see "Le Petit Lieutenant." It shows at the Kabuki at 9:15 p.m. P.S. We also learned that Beauvois plays one of the veteran cops in the film. One clue: Look for the lizard. ...