WaxWorks, a silent German Expressionist film from 1924 will be reimagined with a modern score of musical madness...

Honoring the long-held tradition of coupling together contemporary musicians with classic silent films, this year's SF International Film Festival has forged a psychedelic, improvisational aficionado dream team, sure to shock, scintillate, and maybe even offend.

Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, and Peeping Tom, among other strange sublime bands, has joined up with three genre-bending percussionists, Scott Amendola (Scott Amendola Trio, Nels Cline, Jeff Parker, Charlie Hunter), William Winant (John Cage, Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Lou Reed) and Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, The Book of Knots, Skeleton Key) to perform an original "score" for WaxWorks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett), a silent, German fantasy-horror flick from 1924.

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Since the beginning, artists have yearned to stop time, or at least to examine their nagging awareness that it's unstoppable. But only San Rafael native Christian Marclay has so successfully managed to turn the anxious sport of clock-watching into a weird and highly mediated form of transcendental meditation. He calls it The Clock, and it's simple: just a day-long movie made up entirely of clock shots from other movies, or shots of someone saying what time it is, synchronized to whatever time it really is.

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My older brother Jim once summed up the holiday season thusly: "Christmas is overrated, but the lights sure are pretty." I couldn't agree more, and however any of us feel about the Christmastime -- I'm not a big fan, personally -- odds are we enjoy looking at the lights. In more recent years, we've all seen the YouTube videos of houses with elaborate lights timed to a song. Didja know there's one that's timed to "Gangnam Style?" Of course there is.

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The Fabulously Gay Liberace Entertained -- Unironically -- in 1954 Christmas TV Episode

Things That Really Exist: Marlo Thomas in a Second-Rate 1977 Version of It's a Wonderful Life

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When my girlfriend Marta and I saw Lincoln in the theater, we stayed and watched all the credits, as is our wont. When I saw Ben Burtt got a "Sound Designer" credit, I was all "Ooh, Ben Burtt did that sound!" That's the kind of thing that makes me excited, even after the movie is over. I hadn't given much thought to the sound during the film, but that's also the point: Lincoln had an immersive soundscape, one that drew you into the film's world without calling attention to itself. That's just Ben Burtt doing his job -- and he got his start in the business on the original Star Wars.

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Retro Nerd Alert No. 3: Bob Wilkins Talks Hardware Wars & More on Creature Features

Retro Nerd Alert No. 2: Bob Wilkins Interviews Star Wars' C-3PO on Captain Cosmic

Retro Nerd Alert: Bob Wilkins' One-Hour TV Special, The Star Trek Dream

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So, after years of legal and logistical wrangling in which director Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema were suing each other over royalties from the Lord of the Rings movies and whether he'd direct the not-really-necessary The Hobbit, followed by Guillermo Del Toro signing on to direct and then dropping out again and Jackson finally signing on to direct what was only intended to be two movies -- whew! -- part one of the pointlessly three-part Hobbit saga is finally here. Just two more of them to go, and we can put it all behind us.

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How Much of The Hobbit Can You Read During the Running Time of The Hobbit?

Licensed to Blecch: Mad Magazine's James Bond Parodies

In Space, No One Can Hear You Blecch: Mad Magazine's Alien Parodies

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Longtime residents often grouse about how much cooler San Francisco used to be, usually around the time they moved here. But what about the city before any of us arrived, or were even born? Now in its seventh year, archivist Rick Prelinger's "Lost Landscapes of San Francisco" series makes a strong case for the coolness of the city in the early to mid-20th century, captured almost incidentally at the time in primary sources such as newsreels, industrial films, home movies, and studio outtakes.

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The Roxie, S.F.'s Longest Running Theater, Needs Our Help

Holiday Gift Guide: 10 Picks from S.F. Booksellers

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The new James Bond movie Skyfall has been out for a few weeks now, grossing nearly $789M worldwide and getting a healthy 91 percent on the Tomatometer. That's a damn shame, too, because it means that hundreds of critics were denied the opportunity to write "Skyfall? More like Skyfail, amirte?"

Under normal circumstances we could count on Mad Magazine to pick up that particular slack, but oddly enough, it hasn't spoofed a Bond film for 30 years, and it only did three full-length parodies before quitting.

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In Space, No One Can Hear You Blecch: Mad Magazine's Alien Parodies

The Top 10 "Wait, What?" Moments from Bad Movie Night, Part 1: A - M

Retro Nerd Alert No. 3: Bob Wilkins Talks Hardware Wars & More on Creature Features

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The Rumpus, brainchild of local author Stephen Elliott, has always been a literary darling, publishing top-notch essays and interviews, incubating the Dear Sugar phenomenon, and single-handedly bringing written correspondences back en vogue with Letters in the Mail, where authors like Dave Eggers, Margaret Cho, and Jonathan Ames pen intimate notes to subscribers. Now The Rumpus is hopping into even bigger britches with the making of its first feature film, Happy Baby, based on Elliott's grim and affecting novel about growing up in the child welfare system.

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Kink.com Co-Stars with James Franco in About Cherry

Author Cheryl Strayed: on Dear Sugar, Keeping the Faith, and Palling around with Oprah

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Gil Riego

The Walt Disney Company purchased Lucasfilm Ltd (which includes LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound) from George Lucas for a cool $4.05 billion on Tuesday, Oct. 30. Along with the transaction came the announcement that Disney intends to release a new Star Wars film every two to three years, starting with Star Wars: Episode 7 in 2015.

"It's now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers," Lucas said in a statement. "I've always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime."

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20 Best Star Wars Costumes at the Giants Game

Star Wars Comic Book Artists Speak on the Birth of an Empire

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They're watching you.

The uninitiated moviegoer might toss out a dig at silent films, and be heard speaking dismissively of black-and-white movies. It's a juvenile offense. But nobody jokes about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Weine's 1920 horror film and an early gem of German Expressionism. That influential movement sought to convey mood, emotion, and psychology through the lighting and sets, an approach that directors of film noir copied a couple decades later.

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Mrs. Doubtfire (The Horror Film)

Siouxsie and the Banshees' Steven Severin Scores Horror Classic Vampyr

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