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......

Here's todays sports news...

"Tales of Mere Existence" By Levni R. Yilmaz Esq VOTE LEV!!! TOME is in this competition that Delta Airlines is running to play short films between features on the plane. The 'Tales' episode "Conversation" is up against 4 other short films, The winner will be announced at Sundance (!?!) in a week or so. Please take a moment to cast a vote here.......

Francis Ford Coppola's new Youth Without Youth...

When Francis Ford Coppola isn't looking lovingly over his cineaste dynastic family, running a cafe, publishing fiction, or distilling making wine [sorry! we're not a vintner!], we understand that sometimes he makes movies too. Where does that guy find the time?? Anyways, for those of you who either admire multitasking or great American cinema, Francis Ford Coppola will be speaking this Saturday after the 7:20 screening of his new movie, Youth Without Youth at the......

Japantown's new Sundance Cinemas Kabuki will offer the more discerning moviegoer (i.e.. people who self-consciously laugh out loud during Shakespeare comedies) something, well, more. Curbed SF has the full rundown on the new movie house that's sure to make you feel even that more self-righteous than you already do while braving the choppy waters of independent film. Check it: Designed by Berkeley-based ELS architects, the renovation of the former AMC Kabuki 8 utilizes post-consumer......

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......

Someone from the same security company outside the Hitler satire movie we saw the day before was outside the Castro for last night's SF Jewish Film Fest movie too, which was Hothouse, a Sundance award-winning documentary about Palestinians incarcerated in Israel for terrorist crimes. It was a stark reminder of the human cost of the subject of the movie (and we are extremely grateful that we live in a place where one security guard is......

Passes! Passes! We got movie passes! Wanna see Eve and the Fire Horse, a movie about a high-spirited Asian-Canadian girl whose older sister is going through a Christian religious conversion, and whose family is learning to assimilate in Vancouver? (The "fire horse" part of the title refers to a superstition in Chinese astrology that children born in 1978 are particularly rambunctious.) We have no idea what's going on in that picture above, but it......

In large part due to the strength of a rave review in the Chronicle, the Victoria was packed to the gills for the Sunday afternoon screening of Red Without Blue, a documentary about a pair of (local) identical twins, one of whom is transgender, for the Frameline LGBT film festival. Mark and Alex grew up as extremely close brothers in Missoula, Montana. As they entered adolescence, both realized they were gay, and in struggling to......

SFist interviews Alexandra Lipsitz, Director of Air Guitar Nation...

After having watched Key of G and Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project on the very fancy SF Int'l Film Fest screener DVD machines this afternoon, we're thinking the theme of the afternoon was family obligations. (This is as good a reminder as any to get a Mother's Day present for next week, folks!) Key of G, a local film, is a portrait of a 22-year-old Mission resident named Gannet with a very rare form......

A movie about local filmmakers wrangling with local politicians? We are so there! The SF Int'l premiered the documentary Audience of One Thursday night in one of the big newly-renovated theaters in the Kabuki Sundance. Audience of One is about the Voice of Pentecost church, based in the Sunset on Ocean Avenue, and their charismatic pastor Richard Gazowsky, who saw his first movie at the age of 40 and then, in 1995, says he......

Everyone say hi to our newest correspondent, SFist Grace. Hi, SFist Grace! Sunday night, the SF International screened the world premiere of the film Fog City Mavericks at the Castro Theater. There were shades of Sundance as many of the films featured filmmakers and actors, including George Lucas and Robin Williams, casually red carpeted-their way to the theater, complete with flashbulbs and film cameras documenting the night. Mavericks, a new documentary by Gary Leva......

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......

Come late January, most national publications are usually too overwhelmed (and understaffed) to even consider covering any film fest outside of Sundance. Even SF publications are hard pressed to see past the flurry of Park City and look over their shoulders into The Mission. It’s a shame, because if they looked, they’d find a really meaty, crafty, saucy festival offering a smattering of hard to find films and some films even harder to miss. ...

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 48. Number of people pictured whom we recognize: 2 (Kamala Harris and Willie Brown, at separate events). Minority count: 3 (the two we recognized plus one more, or 6.25%). Getty v. Traina: 0-4. Gavin Newsom count: 0. Ironically, Swells appears to be the only Newsom-free zone in the entire Chronicle. When Dede Wilsey expects her latest project, the UCSF Mission Bay hospital, to be......

As the world holds it's breath, teetering precariously on the cusp of the Superbowl (well, at least in America), the wheels of the -ists keep on turning. Austinist was in a musical frame of mind as they listened to the new Shins album, updated the SXSW band listings and got called "punk rock" for their efforts by MTV. And an ice storm swept through the area. Bostonist said goodbye to John Kerry's plans for......

Total number of people pictured in this week's Swells society column: 67. Number of people pictured whose names we recognize: 8 (Trainas, Gettys, and figures in local politics only, including on-the-way-out Steve Kawa). Minority count: 4 (6%). Hats, capes, tiaras: 0, 0, 0 (but Gavin's hair looks a little funny). Getty v. Traina: 6-12. It's Dede Wilsey's Christmas party, that's why!!! Dede had laryngitis but wore Chanel and had the best hors d'oeuvres in town......

-Protestors march through the street's of San Francisco to throw out the Bush Regime. At last check, Bush Regime not thrown out. ...

SFist interviews Henry Rosenthal, producer of "The Devil and Daniel Johnston"...

This week's big excitement? A tipster tells us TomKat's in town -- and we get in Defamer! And the New York Times! (Okay, the online version -- but hey, we'll take it.) We love you, tipster! Let's hear the money quote from our tipster one more time! "Jesus, he drags her pregnant ass everywhere, doesn't he?" What else happened this week? Sheesh. Lots of commuting woes this week, most dramatically the Gitmo protest at Market......

With January's merger between AMC and Lowes theatres, the company they became, AMC Entertainment Inc, is required by U.S. Department of Justice and the attorneys general of California to sell the Kabuki and 1000 Van Ness theatres. While the Van Ness property remains available, today the long-rumored purchase of the Kabuki by Robert Redford's Sundance Cinemas was officially announced. Expected to become "a state-of-the-art independent movie house", Sundance plans on beginning renovations to the......

Rather than give up the act, the JT Leroy crew clings desperately to the blonde wig and sunglasses look at Sundance. Stephanie Tanner from Full House is recovering from a meth addiction, which Dave Coulier could drive anyone to. Thomas Hawk pens an open letter to the folks who don't want any pictures taken of the On the Road manuscript. And if you've ever wanted a DJ Q-Bert plushie, now's your chance to buy......

We have to admit, we weren't buying it two weeks ago when the San Francisco Film Society invited us to a pre-Sundance rally at the posh Adagio Hotel. The haute couture, the DJ, the tiny appetizers and free beer -- "surely," we thought, "this must be nothing more than an excuse to have one of those bourgeois parties we're always protesting alongside our Communist friends." But no! No! Just like when we famously predicted that......

SFist interviews the director of New York Doll, Greg Whiteley...

Our pals at Larsen Associates have come through again, giving us run of engagement passes for Reel Paradise, which opens tomorrow at the Lumiere in here in the city, the Act in Berkeley and the Rafael in San Rafael. John Pierson, author of Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, moved his family to a Fijian to operate a movie theater for a year. Documentarian Steve James (of Hoop Dreams renoun) joined the family to chronicle......

Odessa . . . Odessa! is a beautiful piece of film -- it takes you to places that are haunting, joyful, and wistful. Mostly, though, this journey from Odessa, Ukraine to Brighton Beach, N.Y. to Ashdod, Israel imparts the feeling that something's missing -- that the lives the film is showing us are somehow incomplete. The film, director Michale Boganim's look at Jews from Odessa, premiered at Sundance last winter. The narrative begins in......

It would be easy to associate the subjects of the documentary Transgeneration with the people in other docs about self-reinvention -- the realness-craving drag kids of Paris is Burning, for example, or the folks who role-play as animals in Born in a Barn. The four transgender college students profiled in Transgeneration are uncomfortable in their physical and social skins; they risk ostracism; and they look back on the lives into which they were originally......

SFist interviews Miranda July...