The San Francisco International Film Festival has been great fun, even though the city has been unseasonably warm, which has made me miss a few screenings. Who wants to go indoors on days like these? Still I've seen some great movies, and I think there are more to come before the festival wraps up on the 29th.

Here are some observations about a few of the movies, some of which I'll turn into capsules on this site, eventually.

• Super Size Me — Morgan Spurlock's entertaining film documents the 30 days that he spent eating all of his meals at McDonald's. It's funny and disgusting, and it deals with a hot-button topic of the day — our unhealthy diets and the companies that profit from them — but much of the movie's impact is deadened by what feels like a publicity stunt. [full review].
  
• Coffee & Cigarettes — Jim Jarmusch's latest project is a collection of eleven shorts that he made over the last 18 years, all about people who are chatting over cigarettes and coffee, or occasionally tea. It's funny, and the patterns that develop when you see them back-to-back like this are surprisingly rich, surprising only because I expected this to be an easy throw-away movie, and while it's not as dense as something like Dead Man or Ghost Dog, it's a clever puzzle of interlocking pieces. When I try to decide which segments are my favorites, I can only narrow it down to about six or seven, but I will say that the ending with Taylor Mead is quite sublime.
  
• The Saddest Music in the World — Guy Maddin is some kind of genius, but his short movies still feel a little long. I've only seen this one and Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary (which was on my list of provocations last year), and both of them are densely constructed out black-and-white, sometimes tinted images that seem like they're 75 years old, like they were rescued from the floor of a film vault. But of course they were all shot recently. The Saddest Music in the World is weirdly funny, like something out of a Robert Coover novel. It's the story of a contest to find which nation has the saddest music, a hilarious competition with arena buzzers that mark the beginning of each bout and a flume down which winners slide into a beer bath. It didn't leave me with much to think about and it gets a bit repetitive, but it's fun to watch the huckster in charge of the American team, played by Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall, cherry-pick the best musicians from the other countries and concoct a kind of feel-good sad music that leaves the audience stomping for more. Plus, he's sleeping with the judge, Isabella Rosselini, who incidentally walks around on glass legs filled with beer. But I'm sure you already guessed that.
  
• Last Life in the Universe — Pen-ek Ratanaruang's latest movie is a very nicely paced story, beautifully shot by Christopher Doyle (who also shot Hero and many of Wong Kar-Wai's movies) in pale blues with a gently drifting camera. It has some obvious but well-executed dramatic parallels — a neat-freak lonely guy meets up with an outrageously messy girl — but in the end I felt like the movie was too satisfied with some simple irony and surface-level loneliness. It's pleasing to look at, but it's more clever than insightful.
  
• Control Room — Jehane Noujaim, one of the directors of Startup.com, was in Iraq before, during, and after the war. Her beat wasn't the war itself but the journalists covering it, specifically Al Jazeera. Control Room is the documentary that she made from the material that she gathered there, and it provides a great opportunity to hear the Al Jazeera editorial team talk about their decisions. Noujaim interviews producers and reporters from the network, plus CNN reporters and a US military media liason who is surprisingly frank about his struggles as the man in the middle. A particularly ironic scene shows Donald Rumsfeld chastising Al Jazeera by saying that people who lie on TV are bound to be found out because the truth eventually wins. Indeed it does. There's a lot of good information here, but most importantly, it's a first-hand look at some of the ways that news is malleable in the hands of militaries and news outlets alike, and it's a look at the passions and loyalties that drive some of the people standing between us and the streets of Baghdad. The movie is more balanced than you might expect, but it's the unabashed story of Al Jazeera, a network that has been kicked out of most Arab countries at one time or another for broadcasting "American propaganda" but that still reaches some 40 million viewers in the Middle East. It's a source of information that we ought to know more about, more than the blanket statements made by our secretary of defense, anyway.
  
• Metallica: Some Kind of Monster — This enjoyable but overlong documentary is so ill-paced that the rousing conclusion seems to come out of nowhere, a minor hurdle cleared by fidgety, easily irked millionaires on the way to their next album. Veteran filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky who made Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost could learn a thing or two from rookie Sam Jones who made his feature debut a couple of years ago with a similar documentary about Wilco that puts this one to shame. As a fan of Wilco and not Metallica, I may be biased, but I truly am fascinated by the idea of high school friends whose ability to get along is at the center of a multi-million-dollar organization ("a monster"), so I went into the theater ready to learn all about how in the world they resolve their personal issues. A good documentary is buried here, I'm sure, and there are good scenes scattered here and there, such as when the band, uneasy with the idea of recording a radio promo for a chain of stations, hams up the recording session. But the documentary entertains far too many tangents and takes a wishy-washy attitude toward the touchy-feely therapist who works with the band. The most interesting discussions in the movie are about how to get rid of this guy who's milking the band for $40,000 a month. It's a problem shared with the filmmakers — how should they wrap up this movie? Has the goal been accomplished? Can they put a Behind The Music, triumph-over-adversity bow on the band's recent problems and call it a day? Hanging over the entire project is an unstated recognition by everyone involved that such a story is good for the movie, good for the album, and good for the multi-million dollar rock monster, but it produces a less than forthright documentary. In a Q&A after the screening, the band said that they no longer meet with their therapist regularly, although he stood next to them while they answered questions.
  
• The Green Butchers — Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have already demonstrated that you can make a good black comedy about a butcher shop that puts people in the meat. It's called Delicatessen. But when it's the core of a contrived, melodramatic thriller — complete with a movie-of-the-week score — the same premise is ridiculous. The first half hour has a few laughs, but that's only because the audience hasn't yet learned that the filmmakers intend to treat the butchers, and the young girl who works at the sanatorium, and the deep dark secrets of the brooding lead actor, seriously.
  
• That Day (Ce jour-là) — This movie feels like it was made by a 20-something director who's full of vigor and brimming with ideas. It's wickedly funny, complex in character, plot, visual detail, and mise en scène. And it was made by the 60-something Raoul Ruiz, his 90th movie, but sadly the first I've seen. It's a movie whose plot unfolds so carefully that the less said the better. One character is insane but loveable, and this day is the most important in her life, a fact that she knows in advance. She comes across another character who's insane but scary, but that's before we get to know him. The pairing is sweet, despite the murders, the blood, the pile of bodies, and the glucose meter that keeps things in check, or so we're told by one of the insane. The police have a devious plan to do nothing but sit in a restaurant all day where forkfuls of food are framed so perfectly that they're as big as the patron's heads. The restaurant's tables lack a particular condiment, and even this is part of Ruiz's grand scheme. It's a real trick to make a movie that feels both perfectly worked out and sharply spontaneous, a paradox that's obvious throughout the movie but especially in an exquisitely choreographed chase through hallways, where the camera moves with graceful but tentative tracking, forward and backward, and seems as unsure about where to look next as we are, yet it always manages to frame the action just right. That Day is a lovely movie that I can't wait to see again.
  

I also had the opportunity to spend some time with Doug Cummings, who you know from filmjourney.org and Masters of Cinema. Doug was up from Pasadena for the festival, so we caught a screening of Back to Kotelnich, which I'll have to include in the next batch of observations. We also had a few good meals and a few good chats about movies and criticism and blogs and festivals and adoption, strangely enough.