The film “Ready, Set, Bag!” (formerly titled “Paper or Plastic?“) will be shown tonight at the Roxie Theatre in a benefit for the San Francisco Food Bank, the city’s non-profit group that helps feed thousands of families every week using groceries and produce donated by stores and growers. The program starts at 7:00 pm.

The film follows the finalists in the National Grocers Association Best Bagger Championship, which is exactly what it sounds like, I guess. Also on the program is a short, Leonardo, by Pixar animator Jim Capobianco.

Speaking of the Food Bank, VISA is doubling donations to the group right now. So go to their website and give ’em some money. The Food Bank is a great community organization.

Wish I’d been paying attention to this before it happened so I could have gone, but the account by Bob Calhoun on the Open Salon site of the showing of Night of the Living Dead on the scoreboard at AT&T Park last Friday is still totally worth reading. Check out the appearance of Judith O’Dea, the film’s dumb blonde, who was interviewed at the event.

Five years ago, the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis looked at the career of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and how he consistently managed to field a competitive team in one of the smallest team markets by drafting for certain types of impact players, as measured by statistics.

Now Stephen Soderburgh has signed to direct a film of the book, and Brad Pitt has signed to play the A’s GM.

Here’s Beane on the left, the other guy on the right:

One of the most critically-acclaimed films of the great era of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, will be adapted for television by AMC, the same network with the hit Mad Men.

The 1974 film, starring Gene Hackman as a nerdish, inhibited surveillance expert, was shot entirely in San Francisco, and features extensive scenes in the pre-remodeled Union Square, the newly built Embarcadero Center, and the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Van Ness, then called the Jack Tar Hotel. The plot concerns Hackman becoming overly-interested in a conversation he’s recorded on behalf of shadowy corporate figures. As in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (and its American adaptation, Brian DePalma’s Blow-Out,) Hackman’s interest in small, unnoticed details of his record of the meeting get him into trouble.

The series would be set in the early 1970s, the same era as the film, according to the news report. Whether it would also be shot in San Francisco remains to be seen. AMC’s Mad Men, set in early 60s New York, is filmed entirely on a Southern California movie lot (as shown in this blog entry by Mad Men cast member Rich Sommer).

The historic Castro Theater, which for decades has shown a mix of film festival fare, rep-house classics and prestigious European and Asian works, will step out of the past and show a summer blockbuster.

Judging from the widely-disseminated publicity photo (left), the film “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” has something to do with a rugged older man initiating a pretty young boy in a leather jacket into the mysteries of a deep, dark hole, making it perfect for the Castro.

The film opens tomorrow, Thursday, May 22.