SFist reviews "Indestructible" the autobiographical account of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) sufferer Ben Byers....

We volunteered to meet and greet sell Noise Pop merchandise to festival attendees who often ended up spending all their money on band merch (as if) and/or beer (or more specifically in Cafe Du Nord's case -- Fernet Branca and Poppy Jaspers). It was quite a fun experience though, and we highly recommend it. Contact them about volunteering at next year's event! Tuesday: Our first Noise Pop night was on Opening Night at the Rickshaw......

While we can't agree with Grandma Joy on her dismissive review of There Will Be Blood, because our love for self-indulgent vanity pieces knows no limits, we can agree that "Movies With Grandma Joy" is adorably informative, addictive. She even reenacts a violent scene from the PT Anderson gem, so be sure to check it out. While you're at it, Joy also reviews Juno and No Country For Old Men -- perfect viewing before......

Q.) What are theees "Queens Of The Stone Age?" A.) That'd be a band that makes hip-shakin' heavy rock 'n roll for adults....

Without a doubt, we think that every Australian in San Francisco was at Bottom of the Hill last Wednesday to rock it out with Australia's hit band, Eskimo Joe. We speculated when we first walked in but weren't positive - the "background" music was too loud to actually positively i.d. an accent. Halfway through the show the lead singer, Kavyen Temperley, asked for all the Australians in the house to scream. We were the only......

Our hockey correspondant Ian continues his look at the Sharks season with player reviews....

Jumping into a quickly growing crowd, we looked down at our watch and it said 8:45pm. What was Ingrid Michaelson already doing on stage? Right before leaving our house, we checked the website: 8pm - Doors Open, 9pm - Show Starts. Boy, were we surprised to find out Michaelson had already been playing for 15 minutes. Maybe it's fate, karma or maybe just bad planning but this is the second time we've missed Michaelson's full......

We'll admit, with a bit of shame, that the first time we became aware of Nick Drake, it was during a lame commercial for the VW Cabrio. Except, the commercial wasn't lame because the song in it was so awesome. We didn't buy a Cabrio, but we did buy some Nick Drake CDs, and that's pretty much the only thing we've ever been thankful to Volkswagen for. Nick Drake is the subject of Jeroen......

Now this is why we love DocFest so much! Eat At Bill's is a completely charming love letter to the famed local organic Monterey Market in Berkeley and its perpetually-cheery (and perpetually-free-sample-eating) owner Bill Fujimoto. The movie's set up in a series of small vignettes -- from the hotly-anticipated arrival of cherry season, to a tour of the back room where the chefs get first pick of the boysenberries and mesclun, to a tour......

The Mission's an interesting place to screen a movie about gentrification, filmed from the eyes of the gentrifier -- so there was certainly no shortage of things to think about at last night's showing of New Urban Cowboy for DocFest at the Roxie. New Urban Cowboy is a documentary about Michael Arth, a kind of hippie-dippie former resident of Santa Barbara who moves to the small town of Deland, Florida, near Orlando, and more......

Sean Penn isn't the only person who was captivated by the Chris McCandless story (first made popular in the Jon Krakauer book, "Into The Wild," and now a major motion picture directed by Penn, promoted on Oprah, and playing at a theatre near you.) In the early '90's Chris McCandless abandoned all his worldly goods, took on the name Alexander Supertramp and embarked upon a Thoreau-esque adventure trekking around North America, ultimately perishing in an......

SFist Mihi runs with the canines! There's nothing like a celebrity appearance at a film festival, and Sunday night at the Roxie Theatre, the crowd went wild when it was announced that two of the wiener dogs who star in "Wiener Takes All: A Dogumentary" were in attendence. The Doc Fest crowd started oohing and ahhing and craning their necks as if Paris freaking Hilton herself had dropped by. Apparently, competitive wiener dog racing is......

SFist Wendy goes off the grid, and then comes back to the land of electricity to tell us all about it! We welcomed the return of DocFest, your local indie documentary festival, last night with Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa. It wasn’t clear we were actually going to make it in to the theater until about two minutes before it began. There was a long line for the film, which was showing in......

Let's make this short and sweet: Sara Bareilles is incredible. Not only do we love her rich yet effortless voice, but her clever music is indeed what pop music needs right now. We don't need another bubble-gum star who masks their voice through electronic mechanisms, or wears little or no clothes while shaking their ass on MTV (Not that we don't appreciate an ass shaking -- we just don't need another one.) See, Bareilles......

Seeing as how the Summer of Love was the single most important event in the history of time and space, we thought it would be delightful of us to review a smattering of Summer of Love anniversary reviews for you. In no particular order, discover the music, elderly genitalia, and abundance of ATMs you missed. -- Beyond Chron: Goes into detail about that guy who sang that anti-Vietnam war song prefaced by a spelling lesson......

SFist Wendy's back at the theater! Even though there's no film fests in town, we stopped by the movie theater and checked out American Fusion, which opened this past weekend at the Sundance Kabuki. This film totally reminded us of a Jimmy Kimmel Patton Oswald joke we heard a few years ago that references the breaks one gets upon growing older. Well, the wickedly funny Taiwanese grandmother, played by Lan Yeung, was not 100 (which......

Sorry we're a little late putting up SFist Mihi's last SFJFF review! Judith Schaefer's movie, So Long Are You Young, screened at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley on Tuesday and when the lights went back up, the crowd of mostly senior citizens were on their feet wildly applauding the filmmaker. The gray-haired lady sitting in front of us was shouting, "your movie is a gift! It's a poem!" Shaefer's documentary is itself the story of......

SFist Mihi warns you that this preview clip above may be dull. Sidewalk, the documentary we saw at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley on Sunday for the SF Jewish Film Festival, was billed as a "wry and hilarious" examination by filmmaker Duki Dror as he follows kids on their daily journeys to and from school. "Dror has the same wondrous gift of bittersweet nostalgia that cartoonists Charles M. Schulz and Lynda Barry have," said......

Someone from the same security company outside the Hitler satire movie we saw the day before was outside the Castro for last night's SF Jewish Film Fest movie too, which was Hothouse, a Sundance award-winning documentary about Palestinians incarcerated in Israel for terrorist crimes. It was a stark reminder of the human cost of the subject of the movie (and we are extremely grateful that we live in a place where one security guard is......

Question: Is the world ready for a German-Jewish black comedy mercilessly satirizing Adolf Hitler? At yesterday night's screening of My Fuhrer (Mein Fuhrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit uber Adolf Hilter) at the SF Jewish Film Fest, the mood of wicked glee was somewhat sobered by the person that we abruptly realized was security standing in front of the theater. (Nothing happened, though, as far as we know.) The premise of the movie is that......

No, not these Chosen Ones (white Christian gospel choir) or these (psychic powers): this Chosen Ones is a documentary about the Jewish music scene in New York by a German filmmaker/tourist, which had its world premiere at the Castro for the SFJFF on Monday night. Sigh -- what can we say here? Well, because we like to keep it positive, here's the good things about the movie: it was interesting seeing a diverse group......

Every tale about the band Slint begins with retrospect. A couple guys who’d known each other a long time got together in Louisville, KY, to make a band named after a goldfish. On their second album they created one of the greatest LPs in rock music, Spiderland. They came through Bimbo’s in North Beach last Monday....

Cue Sex In The City theme music here, as SFist Wendy struts on down to the Castro! We headed to the Castro on Sunday evening for the SFJFF's Gorgeous! (exclamation included in the title), sort of a Desperate Housewives meets Sex and the City, featuring four women, some single, some married, some divorced, but all Jewish and all uniquely Parisienne. Instead of NYC, the film’s set primarily in a beauty salon in Paris owned......

SFist Wendy skips Harry Potter for the SF Jewish Film Fest! Who woulda thought. . . . we weren’t the only ones not completely immersed in isolation with the final Harry Potter book this weekend... although we did see a couple books neatly tucked under the seats at the Castro Theater on Saturday at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. If you weren’t there, well, then you missed out on a couple of good romantic......

Yay! SFist Mihi's back on the scene, covering the opening night festivities for the SF Jewish Film Fest! The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) is the first and only Jewish film festival in the world. At least that's what the President of the SFJFF said at the Castro Theatre last night when he introduced the opening night movie, Sweet Mud. This is the kind of thing that makes us so proud to live here.......

Did you love Rivers and Tides and its idyllic aesthetic view of the world? Well, take that and give it a twist of despair -- famous art photographer Edward Burtynsky went to China to take some beautiful pictures of the horrors of mass industrialization, and they've made a documentary about his work, called Manufactured Landscapes. The movie is supposed to be absolutely amazing. If you're interested in seeing it, it's opening at the Lumiere......

SFist reviews Band of Horses at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco...

We've been meaning to try Mission Pie since we read about it in the Chron -- it's a homey dessert cafe (which we need more of in the Mission!), whose pie ingredients are grown by Mission High students at a local organic farm, to teach them agricultural, environmental, and nutrition skills. The students then staff the cafe behind the counter. (The pies themselves are currently baked off-site, but they're hoping to get a professional pastry......

SFist Julie continues today's burger theme! Another stop on our East Bay tour of the best burgers made from "naturally-raised" meat: Luka's Taproom & Lounge. Just look at the picture. Need we say more? Note the little cup of garlicky-mayonnaise. That's 'cause these fries are Belgian. Speaking of which, want some Belgian beer ON TAP to go with 'em? No problem. They've got a selection. (Hence the name, "Taproom.") After the jump: Salads, oysters, and......

For feminists of a certain age (i.e., ours), the Frameline film fest closing night movie Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a deeply, deeply embarrassing movie to watch. Remember when we all used to say things like "smash the state!" and write incoherent pro-girl messages on our stomachs and arms? And sing along with Bikini Kill? And talk earnestly about smashing the master's house with the master's tools and apply postmodern Foucauldian analysis to Beverly Hills......