by Joe Devlin

December 2011—Another year has gone by for the Coastside Film Society. The society doesn’t screen films in December but will return in January with a lucky Friday the 13th Silent Film Night.

Details about the January program should be up on the Film Society’s website by the time you read this. Rest assured we have once again booked El Granada’s own Shauna Pickett-Gordon to write the music for the night and hired her to perform her score live on the piano that night. Original live music and classic films! Don’t miss it.

My Film Night Favorites from 2011

Our January 2012 screening will be the 111th film night in Half Moon Bay. That’s a lot of film nights and a lot of great films. Fortunately, some of these films are now available on DVD — so if you missed them during one of our screenings go out and rent them. It’s not the same as seeing them on the big screen with an audience. But these four films are worth watching in any venue.

3 Idiots: Three engineering students battle bureaucracy in modern day India. 3 Idiots is a great comedy, a great coming-of-age drama, a morality tale, and a musical — all rolled into one. There is a good reason why this has become the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever made.

Last Train Home: This aching documentary depicts the stresses imposed on family life in modern China. Mike Scott of the Times-Picayune called it “The best kind of documentary filmmaking … transportive cinema, taking viewers to a place they never much considered and immersing them in experiences they never knew existed.”

Electric Shadows: A troubled young woman attacks a bicycle delivery boy in modern Beijing. Thus begins an emotionally compelling homage to Chinese movie making and a study about how film helped soften the blow of the Chinese cultural revolution.

Sita Sings the Blues: Director and animator Nina Paley juxtaposes the story of Sita and King Rama from the Hindu epic the Ramayana of Valmiki with the story of her own divorce, creating “the greatest break-up story ever told.” The movie uses different styles of animation to depict different types of scenes. The musical score jumps back and forth between traditional Indian instrumentals and the smoky 1920s American Jazz vocal used to give Sita voice when she feels blue.