March 15th lets meet up to watch a movie I'm in at the Castro : Fruit Fly

This should be fun and I'm hoping to get a big crew of friends to hang out for. Its my first and only big screen moment ( so far) and I doubt if it lasts all that long, so lets make it an event!

Pictured above is the bar dance and song routine I'll be best known for years to come ( I bet). As well as the only one I also bet. I've circled my self in yellow to make it easy to find me.

I'm in a pretty silly sing and dance routine in the movie and if a bloopers roll happens I'm in that for sure. The blooper scene is even more fun, as I can be very obviously be seen saying " Oh Shit" as I realize a really obvious misstep and forget the words of the sing along in one dance number. All while in the front row. The director HP told me it is pretty hilarious. Which I agree. That particular dance number takes place in a bar.

Maureen Keating and my pal Larry Edelstein are extras as well. You can see Larry ( and me) in the shot I used from the trailer. Note that I am in the back row of this take. Far left. Nearly cropped out. ;-) Fame is so fleeting. Still it was fun.

Tickets info: $!5 plus 1.50 per ticket
filmguide.festival.asianamericanmedia.org

Movie trailer :
www.hpmendoza.com/fruitflyfilm

So the plan is meet up for the movie at 6 pm on Sunday the 15th, then drinks afterwards. I lean towards getting tickets early, but at $16.50 it is a little steep I'll readily admit.

I'm thinking of doing a group buy. Let me know via email for a reservation by Saturday the 7th.

Movie dets:
Fruit Fly
Centerpiece
(USA | 2009 | 94 mins | VIDEO)javascript:document.managePost.submit()
In English & Tagalog with English subtitles
VIDEO
World Premiere
Directed By: H.P. Mendoza
Exec. Producers: Center for Asian American Media
Producer: Don Young
Producer/Writer/Editor/Music: H. P. Mendoza
Cinematographer: Richard Wong
Cast: L.A. Renigen, Mike Curtis, Theresa Navarro, Aaron Zaragoza, E. S. Park

If there's one thing this festival needs, it's a toe-tapping musical, or a tribute to San Francisco, or a young Filipina American seeking her true self, or a nice tune about versatile bottoms, or maybe a crooning love-duet between a man and his Macbook image, or especially a song filled with enough unprintable slang to burn the ears off of every Prop-8'er in the state. Fortunately, all of that, and a thousand things more, is what FRUIT FLY supplies, and for that we have resident boywonder H.P. Mendoza to thank.

The composer and co-star of festival hit COLMA: THE MUSICAL (SFIAAFF '06) returns with a solo directorial debut that aims his poisoned pen and catchy Casio keyboards toward that never-dead city to Colma's north, San Francisco. Here we discover Bethesda (a radiant L.A. Renigen of COLMA fame), newly arrived from Maryland and Manila, eager to succeed in the performance art world and hoping to find her birth mother, who abandoned her as a child. ("Will that help with your show?," someone asks.) Her new flatmates, various artists united by their rootlessness (I won't be here long, is the whisper that lingers in these walls), soon whisk our young Dorothy over the rainbow and into San Francisco's alcoholic nights and hungover days, all filled with (of course) song and dance. Crawling through bars gay and straight, the still-disoriented Bethesda finds herself saddled with quite a few new identities (fag hag, homo honey, fruit fly, hack, slut, etc), but none that she actually wants; she's got plenty of places to go, but still nowhere to be for long.

Funded by CAAM, FRUIT FLY represents a new generation of Asian American filmmaking; its deceptively casual mash-up and embrace of ethnic and sexual identity politics is nuanced enough to fuel a masters' thesis, but one doesn't need a degree to understand what's going on. It's also textbook guerrilla filmmaking, a loud-and-proud, indie-Asian/gay hijacking of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG that turns the Mission, the Castro and more into an all-singing, all-dancing whirl of performance artists, thwarted lovers, sneering sideliners, punk lesbians, fag hags, leather bears and versatile bottoms, all ready to join you, ever so tunefully, in whatever journey you're on.

In Person: H.P. Mendoza, Richard Wong, L.A. Renigen
-- Jason Sanders