Appreciate the work

Director Mike Leigh and his film Topsy-Turvy (one of my favorites) get some film festival love. (House Next Door)

"Why would he pick Topsy-Turvy,” the woman standing in front of me in line at the Castro Theatre asked with genuine puzzlement. Mike Leigh was being honored at the San Francisco International Film Festival last Wednesday, and it was safe to assume he would be reviving many of the same questions he was asked when the film, his selection to be shown at the evening’s event, first came out in 1999. Coming from the maker of High Hopes, Naked, and Secrets & Lies, a plush costume drama set in the 1880s and focusing on the genesis of a Gilbert & Sullivan comic operetta seemed like a perverse curveball.