The Jetpacker

On a whim we decided to drive up to San Francisco for the weekend to watch some bizarre movies at a horror, sci-fi and fantasy film festival called Another Hole In The Head.  Here’s what went down…

Day 1

The plan was to hit the road by 7 a.m., but after watching a Slap Chop infomercial for the third time in the middle of the night, it was clear we weren’t going to get any sleep.  So we packed up, added some road trip songs to the iPod, and left around 4:30 in the morning.

Once past the Grapevine, a steep strip of highway that winds through the mountains and dumps you in flat farmland, there’s nothing interesting to see for about five hours.  Unless you think cows are interesting.  I find them more interesting between buns.

There aren’t many billboards along the way, but the one I find strangely fascinating is for a place called Andersen’s.  Apparently their claim to fame is pea soup.  I don’t know of anyone who craves pea soup, so I find it odd that they advertise their pea soup over 200 MILES AWAY.  Who, for the next four hours of driving, will seriously be salivating over the prospect of eating a food that resembles vomit?  I could MAYBE understand if it was proven to be the best pea soup in the entire world.  But it turns out it’s just a tourist trap and the food is terrible.  Yet somehow Andersen’s has been successfully fooling people for 86 years.

When we finally arrived in San Francisco, it quickly became apparent that we should have checked the weather report.  You think California, you think summer, you think warm.  NOT the case.  It was cold and cloudy and all we packed for footwear was flip flops.

We stayed at Broadway Manor Inn.  The name is deceptively classy.  And the Ferrari parked in the garage would suggest it was a 4-star hotel.  In reality, it was a typical 2-star Travelodge-type place without the prostitutes doing crack in the stairwell.  But it was cheap and it was one of the few hotels still vacant last weekend.  We didn’t mind the paper thin walls and outdated decoration, we just wanted to sleep after being awake for over 24 hours.

After a long nap, we hailed a taxi driven by a certified hippie: long gray hair, long beard, and a slow, surfer voice that sounded exactly like the sea turtle in Finding Nemo.  After we told him where to go, he replied, “Alright, man, let’s check it ouuuut.”  At every stop light, he would jot incomprehensible thoughts into his notepad with a writing system that resembled hieroglyphs.

We ate dinner at a gastropub called The Monk’s Kettle, a tiny, crammed eatery conveniently located right next to the movie theater where we would soon spend six hours.  The food was expensive (as expected), but the place had amazing reviews and even appeared on Food TV.  We shared a fresh baked pretzel with two dipping sauces (the cheese sauce was awesome) for an appetizer and had the mac ‘n cheese with bacon for our meal.

Then it was off to the film festival.  If you’re not the type of person who appreciates weird, off beat movies with titles like Ticked Off Trannies With Knives or Dr. S Battles The Sex Crazed Reefer Zombies, you wouldn’t want to endure the nerd fest that is Another Hole In The Head.  Here’s what we saw on Friday:

Symbol — a Japanese film about a man who wakes up in a mysterious white room.  The walls are covered in buttons (I kid you not, the buttons are angel penises) and each time he presses one, an object drops into the room that may or may not help him escape.  Meanwhile, there’s an alternate storyline about a Mexican wrestler preparing for an important match.  Eventually these two storylines converge in a bizarre but poetic way.  The last 15 minutes have been described as “mind-blowing”.  I wouldn’t go that far, but I will say that the slow build up is worth it for an end sequence that is fascinating and worthy of a “what does it all mean” discussion.

Robogeisha — over-the-top, silly B-movie about two geisha sisters turned into robots by a malevolent corporation.  A movie with machine gun breasts and ass-swords and a geisha turning into a tank sounds like it should be awesome, but the filmmakers ditched the hokey fight scenes and dragged out a boring storyline that was supposed to mock Japanese melodrama, but became one instead.  The trailer is entertaining (NSFW)… the movie is not.

Tucker & Dale VS Evil — by far the most fun film we’ve seen in a long time, this comedy-horror can basically be described as one big misunderstanding.  A group of college kids suspect two hillbillies of killing their friend and spend the rest of the movie trying to kill them.  But the hillbillies actually saved their friend and are completely oblivious to what’s going on.  Really funny movie that MIGHT come out in theaters.

Day 2

Started off the day with lunch at an Asian fusion restaurant with really good reviews called So.  People raved about the wings and after quickly ingesting half a dozen like a vacuum, I can totally see why: juicy, flavorful, spicy, and lots of garlic.  As always with wings, it was a messy affair.

We dropped the car off back at the hotel to keep one of the few parking spots available and decided to walk two miles to Coit Tower.  That walk alone was enough to motivate me to start P90X again.

Along the way, I couldn’t help but wonder why someone decided to build a city on land covered in steep hills.  Seems like an inconvenience from the get go.

However, the long climb to the top of Telegraph Hill was worth it for a stunning panorama of the bay.  Coit Tower, a 210-foot tall monument dedicated to the firefighters of San Francisco, sits at the top of the hill and is one of the most recognizable symbols of the city — you can see this phallic symbol from practically anywhere in the city.

The line to see the 26 murals inside Coit Tower and the elevator ride to the top was too long, so we instead walked down to Washington Square, a popular park where homeless people mingle with picnickers and nobody seems to mind.  If you’ve seen Dirty Harry, you’ve seen this park.

It wouldn’t be a normal day in my life without an embarrassing moment.  We were sitting on a bench, watching people walk their dogs, when a lady walked by with an adorable dog that looked just like a fox, except without the creepy eyes.  I said, a little too loudly, “Look at that fox!”  I didn’t realize until after I said it that that comment could be construed as me talking about the girl instead of the dog.  But, seriously, when was the last time a guy called a girl a fox and didn’t do it in an Austin Powers voice?

From there we took a cab to a Mayan-Mexican restaurant called Poc Chuc.  This place had one of the best tacos I’ve ever had in my life.  But this was no ordinary taco.  It was a turkey taco.  The turkey was everything you don’t expect from turkey: tender, juicy, citrusy, and totally addicting.

Keeping with the theme of weird and unexpected on this trip, we stopped for dessert at an Indian ice cream shop.  Sure, they serve normal flavors at Bombay Ice Cream, but I was way more interested in the unusual stuff, like saffron pistachio and cardamom rose.  Both flavors were rich and bold, but not refreshing like you would want ice cream to be.

We walked just around the corner to the Roxie Theater for the last film of the trip: A Serbian Film.

It’s already the most controversial movie of the year, and likely will become one of the most controversial of all time.  Some have even called it a dangerous film because a guy at Cannes fainted at a press screening and broke his nose.  On every filmic level, A Serbian Film is a good film, but it’s a film you CAN’T like and will probably never watch a second time because it’s not enjoyable.  It’s really, really, really dark, graphic and disturbing.

A Serbian Film is about a former porn star struggling to raise a family who is pulled out of retirement by a mysterious producer who promises to pay the man a large sum of money to star in his latest movie.  The catch is, he can’t know any of the details about the movie and he can’t back out.  That should be the cue to run away fast, but the guy needs the money, so he takes the job.  It would be an understatement to say that winds up being a bad idea.

After the movie, we decided to clear our minds with one last meal.  The taste of Indian food still lingered in my mouth from the ice cream, so we went to a place nearby called Asalam’s Rasoi.  The food was good but unreasonably expensive (apparently it’s not easy to find a cheap meal in San Fran).  We came to the conclusion that Indian food isn’t photogenic — it actually looks like colorful animal gruel — so just take our word that Indian curry is delicious if you’ve never had it.

It was a quick one and a half day excursion, but I think we got a lot done and I learned a lot of lessons along the way: climbing a hill in San Francisco is just as rewarding and just as exhausting as climbing Mount Everest, alcohol makes bad movies good (the drunks in the crowd loved Robogeisha), and you will ALWAYS look like a pervert if you say “Look at that fox!” out loud.