After a flurry of one-off events and opening-weekend guests, the 60th SFFILM Festival settles into a more familiar rhythm this week. Well, only at venues other than the Castro Theater, which hosts super-special shows every night. Musician (and actor) Will Oldham and a cabal of cohorts provide improvised accompaniment to a trio of local experimental filmmaker Jerome Hiler’s impressionistic works tonight in a program called “Parallel Spaces.” Another match of live music with film, Asian Dub Foundation with George Lucas’s 1971 sci-fi saga THX 1138 (with glimpses of the then-brand-new BART system), packs the house on Tuesday (Apr. 11).
Geremy Jasper’s Sundance sensation, Patti Cake$, receives its Bay Area premiere as the fest’s centerpiece presentation on Wednesday. Another pulse-quickening marriage of music and film is on tap for Thursday when DeVotchka lays down tracks under Dziga Vertov’s astonishingly fresh 1929 blend of documentary and fiction, The Man with a Movie Camera.
How do you top that extravaganza? An in-person salute to Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Kahn on Friday night, capped by a screening of the 2010 epic, My Name is Khan. Still holding out for your favorite song? Turn on, tune in and drop in Saturday evening at the Castro for the Bay Area premiere Amir Bar-Lev’s four-hour Grateful Dead doc, Long Strange Trip. As the Dead sing in “New Speedway Boogie,” “Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack, if you got nothing new to say.”
