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^ So I was at the festival for the full twelve hours. Lots of entertaining narrative shorts and a good variety of interesting documentaries, ranging in length from one to thirty minutes.

A few of my favorites:

Secret Decoder Ring (4:00) — A boy sends in his cereal boxtops for a prize with special powers.

CODA Pride (9:41) — A local 17-year-old filmmaker's documentary short about a community that I'd never really thought of before: hearing children of deaf adults.

Cycle (12:00) — A horror-comedy about a guy who gets attacked by his dirty clothes at the laundromat.

September Sketchbook (7:44) — An impressive experimental animation of flags of the world morphing into other designs and figures, made from over 5400 individual marker-on-paper drawings. I voted for this one as my favorite of the festival, partly because of my lifelong interest in vexillology, but it was a very tough decision.



Manga and anime expert Fred Schodt gave a lecture about the God of Manga, Tezuka Osamu, and showed three of his experimental films from the 1980s, including one of my all-time favorite animated shorts, Broken Down Film. It was cool to be able to see this program so soon after visiting the Tezuka Museum in Takarazuka earlier this month, and I got my copy of Schodt's Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics autographed.

Broken Down Film is just too good! And it gets the feel of watching old, completely trashed cartoons perfectly!

I saw Cinderella in Wednesday. It was soooo cute and classic but I have to admit Ella was just a tiny bit precious.

It's such a beautiful film.

Just saw Avengers Age of Ultron. It kinda felt like half a film. Also there was a really random romance subplot.

Sling Blade was on the DVR so I finally watched it. Good movie. The kid still looks and sounds the same.

At the San Francisco International Film Festival:

Wonderful World End (ワンダフルワールドエンド) (2015) — It's the story of Shiori (Hashimoto Ai), a wannabe model/actress, and Ayumi (Aonami Jun), a runaway schoolgirl who idolizes her. The festival program seemed to suggest that it's a Gothic Lolita version of All About Eve. Certainly it has those elements, but that's far from the full picture. It's one of those oddball films that has "Japan" written all over it.

Even though it's an avex production, our girl "Sayumi from Morning Musume｡ '14" gets mentioned in the film! (Shiori's actor boyfriend is a fan.) Unfortunately, in the subtitles she was merely referred to as "Sayu" with no mention of the group.

The Imitation Game (2014)

Here’s a movie for you mathematicians and computer nerds based on a true story.
Lot’s of stuff about WWII and England that I did not know.
trailer: https://youtu.be/j2jRs4EAvWM
Apple before Apple?

I just got home from a very cool program at the San Francisco International Film Festival, called Cibo Matto New Scene. It was a selection of short films with new musical accompaniment, composed and performed LIVE by Cibo Matto! It was an interesting mix of stuff, including recent animation, "Anémic Cinéma" (a 1926 Dadaist short by Marcel Duchamp), "Das triadische Ballett" (a 1970 film of Oskar Schlemmer's bizarre Bauhaus ballet, with amazingly weird costumes), and Yoko Ono's "Fly" (if you've seen it, you can imagine what a surprise it was for the uninitiated when you-know-what showed up on the Castro Theater's big screen! ).

I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron. It was okay, though it felt like, due to all the characters and events, the movie needed to be longer to accomodate everyone. Like, at some points of the movie, one or two characters just disappear for a decent period of time to just suddenly come back later after several events have taken place.

Apparently, though, the movie was originally an hour longer, but was cut short for some reason, so I am assuming that extra footage is going to be at a director's cut of some sort to be released on Bluray.

Just got home from seeing that myself. James Spader was an excellent casting choice for the voice of Ultron.

Is this the first time that Spader and Downey have been in a movie together since Tuff Turf, 30 years ago?