Welcome back to another edition of Five Minutes* You’ll Never Get Back, the occasional podcast wherein City Lights editor Mike Riggs and I probe the other’s psyche in an attempt to understand why the other person is the way that they are. I’m up first. Riggs goes next.

Topics discussed: Mike Riggs, Amanda Hess, narcissism, co-workers, Ernest, crippling embarrassment, horrific facial expressions, never smiling, worst part of Mike Riggs’ day, horrible screamo Soulja Boy musical outro that Mike Riggs chose and I had no involvement in.

* pretty close this time!

Your weekend guide to the 18th Annual Reel Affirmations Film Festival, by Amanda Hess and Tricia Olszewski.

This weekend: Catch The Secrets, Anyone and Everyone, and In Sickness and in Health. Skip The Sensei. And show up late for the Zombie Double Feature. Read the Washington City Paper’s full Reel Affirmations coverage here.

FRIDAY, OCT. 17

The Sensei, directed by Diana Lee Inosanto
5 p.m. at the Lincoln Theatre. Free.

Diana Lee Inosanto’s GLBT kung-fu flick may be the first of its kind (To Wong Fu… notwithstanding), but The Sensei doesn’t shy from treading some familiar ground—namely, the after-school special. The film begins with young gay martial-arts master McClain (Michael O’Laskey II) rescuing a black pastor and his sister from a carjacking at the hands of two neo-Nazi-type assailants. If the opening doesn’t provide the right clunky stereotype busting for your taste, The Sensei also traces the story of McClain’s martial-arts teacher—the beautiful Karen O’Neil (Inosanto), a woman who proves impressively melodramatic in the face of systemic discrimination. Set in small-town Colorado at the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic (early on, the camera pans to a newspaper scare headline telling you as much), The Sensei locates an intriguing intersection of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but Inosanto’s debut script (she’s spent most of her film career as a stuntperson) feeds on sweeping generalizations and doesn’t bother to fortify them with any realistic emotional base. The Sensei would have done better to bust a few genre conventions along with its stereotypes. —AH

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