by Lou Ye

1. Find an attractive female lead who is willing to take her clothes off. A lot. Also, make sure she knows how to French inhale.
2. Shoot various cast members having sex.
3. Shoot various cast members brooding.
4. Shoot various cast members smoking.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have no more film.
6. Edit the footage into the following sequence: brooding, smoking, brooding, brooding, sex, brooding, smoking, sex, brooding, sex, sex, smoking, sex, sex, sex, brooding, brooding, smoking, brooding, sex, brooding, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, smoking, sex, brooding.
7. Add voiceover to the brooding and smoking so that the audience understands that the sex is just an expression of how deep and pained the characters are.
8. Watch test print of movie. Realize just what a steaming pile of panda shit you have made. Panic briefly.
9. Go back and splice in random news clips about Tiananmen Square in 1989. Do not be surprised when you and your film are banned from China by the Communist Party.
10. Watch as resulting controversy carries your film to acclaim at Cannes and other festivals. Try to contain laughter as festival promoters declare your work a masterpiece.

No, I really don't hate everything. I actually liked his two previous movies.

Last year, my friend Jesse moved his Midnites for Maniacs film series to the Castro. 10 bucks gets you in to see three films that haven't seen the big screen in two decades.

Jesse gives an energetic and fascinating intro for each film - you can't help but start to love and genuinely appreciate these goofy movies as much as he does (even if you're laughing at them at the same time). Plus, there are trivia games with amazing prizes.

If you live in SF, you owe it to yourself to go check them out. And you have a great chance tomorrow night at 7pm: Breakin', Beat Street, and Cool as Ice!

Went to see Deerhoof play play the soundstrack to films by Harry Smith at the Castro on Thursday night.

I hadn't known anything about Harry Smith, but he seems to have been quite a fixture of the conterculture/avant garde in the Bay Area in 60s. The feature presentation, Heaven and Earth Magic, is black and white stop-motion animation using photographic cutouts. It's a bit like the animated segments on Monty Python, but about 100x stranger.

I'm not quite sure what the movie was about. There seemed to be a narrative thread in there somewhere, but I couldn't quite tease it out. I'm not sure you're supposed to, though.

It was pretty amazing. You just don't see stuff like this anymore, never mind with a live soundtrack by an amazing band. Deerhoof added some sections of retro-electronic chirps (it often looked and sounded like Donkey Kong on acid) as well as some hits from their records. Good good.

The tragic accident on Castro had occurred just a few hours before. After the movie, we emerged onto the street to see burned-out husks of cars and motorcycles and cracked and singed storefronts.