Admiral General Aladeen: Kill 'em with kindness.

After slaying international audiences with his Ali G and Borat characters, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest feature film The Dictator finds him in a new role as Admiral General Aladeen, the surprisingly lovable leader of the Republic of Wadiya. It's a comedy capable of inducing raucous laughs, particularly for people who recognize the sick humor in totalitarian regimes masquerading as democracies.

There might be some slight spoilers ahead, but without giving away too much of the film, here are the five lessons real tyrants could learn from the machinations -- or bumblings -- of Aladeen:

1. Change all key words in the mother tongue to be that of the leader's surname.

It might be a confusing (and frequently deadly) proposition to narrow down millions of terms to just the one, but starting your assertion of total dominance with the country's basic lexicon shows that you really mean business.

2. Make sure all weapons of mass destruction look as menacing as they actually are.

One simple tip to remember: Pointy corners on missiles are scary. Round ones, not so much.

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Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha

In the ever-expanding supernova of subsidiary content in the Star Wars universe (action figures, Lego sets, video games, novels, TV movies, cartoons, and theme park rides), comic books hold a special place. One reason is because the first of Marvel's six-issue comic adaptation of the original film hit stands just a month after the movie was released.

Marvel made a good bet on Star Wars. The 107-issue series continued for nearly 10 years. Despite pauses to adapt the stories of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, most issues contained original stories -- the first body of derivative Star Wars story material ever released.

Two key contributors to the early days of this run, penciller Howard Chaykin and inker Steve Leialoha, appear tonight at the Cartoon Art Museum for the event Celebrating 35 Years of Star Wars Comic Books to mark the 35th anniversary of the first issue's release.

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Pioneer for freedom of speech

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a pioneer in the business of bookselling (City Lights was the nation's first all-paperback retailer), and he turned the literary world on its head by publishing the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady, Burroughs, Bukowski, and himself among others. Any good San Franciscan knows this.

What we might not know (or remember) is Ferlinghetti -- who turned 93 in March -- has never strayed from the principles that drove him and the other writers and artists of the beat movement, and he has influenced generations of writers who came after him through writing and activism. In recent years he has spoken out in support of progressive initiatives such as demolishing the Central Freeway and limiting the number of chain stores in the city. He has derided the "ludicrously named" Blue Angels and their "annual attack on the city" during Fleet Week as antithetical to the local poetic culture he helped foster. Hear from the man himself -- in interviews and poetry -- as well as those around him tonight in Christopher Felver's 2009 documentary Ferlinghetti/Ferlinghetti, tonight (Tuesday) at Meridian Gallery.

The film includes footage of some of the original cast members who populated North Beach in the 1940s and '50s, as well as modern-day literary icons.

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San Francisco Film Society

The Waiting Room

Medical professionals at Oakland's Highland Hospital emergency department see about 80,000 patients a year. The hospital also has northern Alameda County's main trauma center, so during the year, more than 2,200 severely injured patients go there, whether they have health insurance or not. Documentary filmmaker Pete Nicks' wife works as a speech pathologist at the hospital, so for years he heard stories about the patients at Highland. He wanted to make a film where the voices of the uninsured would be heard. The finished product is The Waiting Room, which screens this week at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

The film tells the stories of patients including a financially strapped carpet layer with bone spurs, a young man with a testicular tumor, and a child who has a high fever and can't talk. Along with the film, Nicks also created a website that includes more stories from the hospital, and he plans to make it interactive so patients to share their experiences.

Nicks talked with us about getting access to the hospital, the power of asking people to tell their tales, and the amazing staff at Highland.

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San Francisco Film Society

Intouchables

At a Tuesday night San Francisco International Film Festival screening of Intouchables, the projectionist found an apropos time to stop the film. Just as protagonist Driss was corralled by cops after a bout of Steve McQueen-like driving and exclaimed "Merde!" the screen went black.

The problem wasn't Driss saying "Merde!" The problem was the subtitle noting its English equivalent. There was none. In fact, the film fest had been mistakenly sent a copy of the movie without subtitles, according to festival staff. But the crowd didn't know this as several attempts were made to remedy the problem. Certainly it turned out to be a boon for the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas' concessionaire.

In the end, the crowd was offered a deal: Stay and watch the film or get a refund/exchange for the ticket. It very quickly became obvious who was and was not a French speaker, as a large portion of the audience filed out.

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John Waters

John Waters' reputation precedes him -- and we bet that gives him no end of glee. The Baltimore native featured the plentiful drag queen Divine in many of his early features, and he took on topics such as baby farms, an adult who lives in a playpen, and a competition between two people to be the most disgusting human on the planet. Waters makes San Francisco his home -- at least part time. He calls his residence in the city "the apartment that Hairspray bought me," referring to one of his biggest commercial successes.

Waters appears tonight (Wednesday, April 25) at the California College of the Arts, screening his 2004 film A Dirty Shame and answering audience questions afterward. We spoke with him several days ago about censorship, bad taste, and what he likes about San Francisco.

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San Francisco Film Society

Alps

A great thing about film festivals is seeing films before their wider release, and in new and intimate settings. Over the weekend we screened Giorgos Lanthimos' film Alps, the follow-up to the strange yet much-loved Dogtooth, in the San Francisco Film Society's New People Cinema. The film turned out to be a perfectly bizarre and endearing study on authenticity, control, and groupthink. It's final screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival is tonight (Tuesday) at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

A little background for setup: I once had a business idea to be what I called a conversationist for hire. My dad thought it sounded like prostitution. In Alps, the main characters perform an equally questionable service, though much more extreme and terrifically morbid: They temporarily stand in for deceased loved ones through carefully practiced re-enactments as a paid service for the grieving. Mont Blanc, the ringleader who named the group as something irreplaceable and unidentifiable (Alps), is their pimp, and the others, strictly nicknamed and managed as smaller mountains in the range, indulge their clients' erotic fantasies to keep the dead alive, if only through menial activity and tired dialogue.

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Tommy Lau

Words on film: Jonathan Lethem

At last year's San Francisco International Film Festival, indie producer and invited speaker Christine Vachon embarrassed her hosts with a sloppy and unprepared "State of Cinema" report. To erase the lingering memory of that lowbrow disaster, organizers lured another New Yorker, best-selling novelist and professor Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude), to the big house at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas over the weekend to deliver the annual address. One could say the festival rode the elevator from street level to an upper ivory-tower floor, with appreciably better (though not-quite-scintillating) results.

Conveying a casual likability -- maybe it was the untucked shirt under the gray sportcoat, or the gray shoes with green laces -- Lethem acknowledged the performance requirements of his assignment by beginning with a five-minute "joke" and maintaining a high level of energy and enthusiasm throughout his 45-minute talk. But Lethem is a writer, not a speaker, which is to say that his litany of ideas, feints, parentheticals, and digressions would be better served by reading it on the page than by hearing it delivered. (The festival has posted a video the essay -- a more descriptive word than "speech" -- which you can see here.)

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Mikki Willis

James Brandon as Joshua in Corpus Christi

Back in 1985, Jean-Luc Godard released a movie called Hail Mary that made Catholics breathe fire. (Paradoxical metaphor noted.) It was a modern-day retelling of the immaculate conception where a woman named Marie gets pregnant even though she is a virgin. But it was also a French experimental film, so Marie has a number of unholy attributes, including a rather foul mouth. She uses words such as "cunt" referring to her own anatomy, and she appears wholly (not holy) unclothed. (Oh, the blasphemy!) I saw Hail Mary at the Roxie in 1985. Why? Because the Catholics were out in force trying to steer people away from it. Would I have seen it otherwise? Not a chance. Did I like it? Not really (hey, I was 18), but I liked seeing it because I got to cross a picket line of religious zealots and tell them just where they could stick their thought-policing.

The Catholics protesting a documentary called Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption could take a lesson from this: They risk sending more people to see the film by making noise about it, especially in San Francisco, a city that contains Catholics who are openly queer and don't feel one bit guilty about it. (Now there's a stand-off we'd love to see: red-state Catholics vs. San Francisco out-and-proud Catholics.)

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