San Francisco International Film Festival

By Sara Schieron

Kitty-corner to Blue Bottle Coffee -- the place NYTimes said had the best coffee in the country -- is ezzanine, the homesite for SF Film Society's regular Film + Club events. This past Tuesday night, Ill Billy and a mad-wild cast of friendly associations corralled at said venue to celebrate the completion and premier of their thirty-odd minute film Evolution: The Musical. At once a deliberately wrong headed treatise on the stupidity of both Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Evolution refuses to take either side seriously enough to make a direct message. It's brilliantly democratic and takes no prisoners.

Prior to the film, Andrew Bancroft and Kenny Taylor (Ill Billy masterminds) addressed the crowd - or I should say, they asked the single women to stand up. These guys are seriously high energy (must have had a pot at Blue Bottle) and commit to their shtick like you wouldn't believe. It'd be reductive, especially after seeing the massive collective effort involved in Evolution to say Ill Billy is just comprised of two men. Formerly of comic troupe Killing My Lobster, Bancroft and Taylor have been working under the title Ill Billy for a few years now. And it's clear from their film efforts these hyper-comic-songsters have loads of friends by the bay.

Among those friends has to be Sean Uyehara. Programmer of all things music + film, it wouldn't be too much to call Sean visionary. He set up these regular goings on at Mezzanine, which btw, happen monthly and throw in all kinds of pomo charm. The film + club presentation of R. Kelly sing along was THE event of last season. Seriously, people still discuss and interstitially hum "Chocolate Rain." This night the crowd was on. Give them "Live" cinema or give them "death."