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The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

We've had it all wrong: The greatness of a film is not measured by who is playing the lead, but what that person is wearing. That's right, we're talking about fashion. Mise en scène, the intricate design aspects of a film, is positively crucial when narrating the storyline. A pioneer in the world of haute couture, Jean Paul Gaultier, transcended the fashion world and participated in films that feature some of his most stunning pieces of wearable artwork. The Jean Paul Gaultier Fashion Film Series, Thursday and Friday at the Castro Theatre, presents these handsome pieces in the state Gaultier initially intended for them.

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In The Family, a film about a gay Asian American man in Tennessee fighting for custody rights of his deceased partner's son, was one of the great indie success stories of 2011. It played at film festivals in Hawaii and San Diego after being rejected by some 30 others. But since then, the film had picked up a stream of rousing raves from the likes of Village Voice, Variety, and the New York Times, and it has been nominated for an Independent Spirits Award. Last week the film also won the Narrative Jury Prize at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. It is scheduled to open at the Metreon next month.

We recently spoke with director/producer Patrick Wang to get his insights on the unusual path he took to get the film a nationwide release, a rare thing for a self-funded, three-hour film.

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Twin Peaks was just the start for Joan Chen.

Christine Kwon is managing director for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which starts tonight (Thursday) and continues through March 18. The opening night movie, White Frog, is about a boy with Asperger's syndrome starring the San Francisco resident and international star Joan Chen, B.D. Wong from Law and Order, Harry Shum Jr. from Glee, and BooBoo Stewart from the Twilight movies. Other offerings include a documentary about a Hawaiian ukulele player, and a closing night "performative cinema" event called Prison Dancer that features video, live performances by cast members, and audience participation. It's put on by the Center for Asian American Media.

We spoke with Quan about Asian Americans in politics and popular culture, replacing panel discussions with interactive features, Joan Chen, and open relationships.

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Jeff Ross

Jeff Ross founded the San Francisco Independent Film Festival 14 years ago as a way to give his friend Rand Alexander a place in town to show his movie Caged. What started as a four-day event now lasts two weeks. It has more than 80 films, including horror movies, documentaries, love stories, comedies, and shorts. It opens tonight (Thursday, Feb. 9) at the Roxie Theater. After the movies, you can hang out with filmmakers, maybe at the roller disco party, or dressed as your favorite Big Lebowski character. The festival opens with Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh (who stars with Willem Defoe) plan to attend.

Ross took a break from planning to talk to us about showing a non-cheesy romantic comedy, how putting together a festival is like curating an art show, and the importance of shared experience.

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Two of Samuel Fuller's best are screening tonight (Wednesday) on a double-bill at the Castro as part of Noir City X, the 10th annual San Francisco film noir festival. This is a rare chance to see two of Fuller's more ambitious and vibrant films on the big screen.

Set in post-war Japan, House of Bamboo (1955) doesn't look like a noir picture, even though its character and story elements fit that descriptor. That's because, shot in Technicolor and Cinemascope by Joseph MacDonald, it's one of the most beautifully photographed films we've seen. Japan was rebuilding its cities and national identity in the post-war years, and Fuller made excellent use of Bamboo's locations during that fascinating transitional moment.

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The Knowles Gallery / Flickr

Change is the only constant, and every movie marquee provides incontrovertible visual evidence: new movies, promising debuts and fresh succes de scandales, as well as vintage revivals and retrospectives. The silver screen winks and flashes at us, then moves on. Let's stop to acknowledge the year in Bay Area film, one of loss as well as reinvention.

Counting up in order of significance, here are the Top 10 events in Bay Area film for 2011:

10. The Galaxy Theatre is torn down. We begin the roller-coaster ride that was 2011 with bittersweet but hardly terrible news. Shuttered since 2005, the landmark at Van Ness and Sutter had shabbily devolved from a poignant reminder of good times movie-going and the lifespan of "modern" movie houses to an embarrassing homage to 1980s architecture. Even after the curtain rises on whatever takes its place, that corner will always be home to celluloid ghosts.

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Not many people think of the stretch of suburbia between I-280 and U.S. 101 as a hub of underground cinematic activity, but there is a film festival to prove us wrong. Hosted by an all-volunteer run organization called South Bay First Thursdays, the Movie Mini-Fest tonight (Thursday) brings together works by nine Asian American digital filmmakers to show that the creative vein runs deeps among the residents of the 650 and the 408. Don't believe it? See the trailer for yourself:

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Animation used to be the province of the fantastic and the impossible: dancing hippos, futuristic planets, talking rabbits, and psychedelic forests. We're still inundated with anthropomorphized animals and (less grating and more gratifying) worlds too imaginative and expensive to depict in live action. But animation has emerged in recent decades as a potent medium for depicting reality as well as evoking the littered, off-kilter landscape of the mind.

Eric Leiser's Glitch in the Grid (its trailer is above) is one such film. It opens the San Francisco International Animation Festival tonight at SF Film Society | New People Cinema. In it, Leiser imagines the neuroses and frustrations of a remote hermit lured by well-meaning relatives to pencil-sketch-shallow Hollywood. Pushing the already fluid bounds of animation, the filmmaker meshes stop motion with live action to convey his protagonist's yearnings for deeper connection and purpose.

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The 3rd i San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival is in its ninth year. It includes a documentary about the ascent of a Bollywood star, a film on sarod master Ali Akbar Khan whose famous school is located in San Rafael, and a work on the nature of time. The feature films include a family drama set against India's largest kite festival that Roger Ebert raved about, as well as a thriller about the rise of a gang lord in the slums of southern India. Films come from countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tibet, the U.K., and the U.S.

The festival's artistic director is Ivan Jaigirdar, who pulls it together with the help of associate festival director Anuj Vaidya and about 150 volunteers. Jaigirdar talked with us about going for controversy as well as eye candy, the importance of hearing from filmmakers and writers, and how accounting and Satyajit Ray drove him to film.

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