“This idea originally came up a couple of years ago,” explains musician and part-time rock god Robert Trujillo, “the question of what films the different members of Metallica all like—and which ones we’d pick to put into the festival if we were asked. When the question came up again this year, my choice was pretty simple.”

Metal heads and cineastes may now throw up the horns in appreciation

Yes, Metallica (who debuted their 3D concert extravaganza Into the Never at last year’s Mill Valley Film Festival) is back again. And this year, they’ve been named 2014 Artists in Residence at the annual October event, which ranks amongst the most distinguished non-competitive film events in the world. As Artists in Residence, each member of Metallica—currently ruling the planet as the biggest heavy metal band this side of the Great Beyond—has been asked select a film to run in the festival, and to introduce the movie with a few choice words about how that film inspires or intrigues them.

As might be predicted, the band’s choices are wildly varied.

Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, a lifelong fan and collector of giddy-cool horror movie memorabilia, will be hosting a late-night screening of the uber-gory 1971 schlock spectacle Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (Oct. 6, 10pm), featuring Lon Chaney Jr. as a mutant ax-murderer. Drummer Lars Ulrich, known for his maniacally physical performance style, has picked a brand new film about very different, similarly driven, albeit fictional, young drummer. A hit at Sundance, Whiplash (October 7, 7) follows an ambitious young drummer and conservatory student, who locks horns with his ruthless and abusive music teacher.

Lead vocalist James Hetfield indulges his own taste for classic westerns with a fully restored, pristine print of Sergio Leone’s masterful poem to moral ambiguity The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Oct. 9, 7pm), featuring Clint Eastwood as the iconic Man with No Name.

And for Trujillo, bass player for the band since 2003, his choice of film was especially clear.

The emotionally stirring, eye-opening documentary Jaco (Oct. 6), about the pioneering bassist Jaco Pastorius, has Trujillo as one of its producers. An advance “rough cut” of the film, co-directed by Paul Marchand (The 50 Year Argument), will be followed by a musical celebration of Jaco, at the Sweetwater Music Hall, featuring a lineup of musicians including Trujillo and band-mate Hammett, Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction), Roderigo y Gabriella, and members of the Pastorius family, all celebrating the music and indelible spirit of a true American original.

“The timing was right to present this to the world, to finally tell Jaco’s story, which is really a pretty amazing story,” says Trujillo of his choice to screen his mostly-but-not-quite-finished film, which will be released by Passion Pictures, which made a splash with the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugarman.

“We’ve had about ten different cuts of this film,” Trujillo says. “We’d think we were finished, and then some new treasure comes along, something we just had to put in the movie.”

Trujillo admits that some people are surprised when they hear that a member of a major heavy metal band is also into jazz, but points out that Jaco’s music spanned a much wider canyon than can be summed up in a single word.

“I’m gonna be 50 years old this year,” he says. “I’ve been around, I’ve heard a lot of music, and I appreciate everything from Beethoven to flamenco—and I was very lucky to have seen Jaco perform four times before his death. To me, I never looked as Jaco as just jazz. To me, it was a very personal thing. To me, he was always rock ‘n roll.”

Film, as MVFF has demonstrated annually over the last 37 years, is both widely universal and deeply personal. As Metallica’s choices illustrate, one film means different things to different people. In the course of single festival—this one features over a hundred features, shorts, documentaries, parties, panel discussions, and onstage interviews in eleven days—an audience’s reaction will be as rich and varied as possible color combinations on a painter’s palette.

In addition to the Metallica selections, this year’s festival includes The Theory of Everything (Oct. 9, 7pm), a moving filmic biography of physicist Richard Hawking. Another high-profile, math-themed film is The Imitation Game (Oct. 4, 5:45 p.m. and October 6, 4pm), featuring Benedict Cumberbatch about mathematician Alan Turing and his efforts to crack Nazi codes during World War II.

This year’s event seems to have a number of films with science, math or nature as a major theme, including the festival closer, Wild (Oct. 12 5pm), featuring Reese Withrspoon in the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s bestseller about a woman hiking the wilderness alone.

“You can learn a lot from a film, seriously,” says Trujillo. “I’ve learned so much from making Jaco—and now I can’t wait to share it with a few of our friends.”

Actor-humorist Nick Offerman rattles off a list of North Bay spots he and his wife, actor Megan Mullally, like to visit when they’re in the area: Canoe trips in the Russian River, dinner at Peter Lowell’s in Sebastopol, a drive along the coast. “My wife and I are very big fans of the area,” he says. “We are crazy about the whole coastline.”

A North Bay visit for the couple always involves “some sort of intoxicant” says the co-star of NBC’s hit sitcom Parks and Recreation. “We like to renew our vows whenever we get the chance.”

And those North Bay adventures are all undertaken in the nude, correct?

“Absolutely,” Offerman says. “Full nudity” is one of the many entendres on display in Full Bush, his one-man show coming to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa on Oct. 3.

“If we can learn to cast off the oppressive social norms we’ve been brought up with, it leads to a happy and successful life,” Offerman says. “Don’t be embarrassed, go into things full bush. Sure, you’re going to be in a compromising position at times, but you’ll get a whole lot more done.”

A follow-up to his American Ham show, Full Bush, says Offerman, will offer audiences songs of ribaldry, “rife with chuckles and chortles.”

Offerman, a skilled woodworker, will be playing those songs on a ukulele he made himself.

“I am taking the opportunity to talk to the American audience about the things we can all be doing a better job of to try and keep ourselves ahead of those rascally Chinese,” he says.

This involves “promoting good manners, and a rather natural lifestyle.”

Offerman’s had a busy few years, starting with his 2009 breakout role on NBC’s Parks and Recreation as Ron Swanson. He published a book earlier this
year, Paddle Your Own Canoe:
One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living, and is working
on another one.

Parks and Recreaction placed Ron Swanson into the pantheon of super-memorable sitcom characters for the ages: the hilarious hyper-libertarian with the outsized moustache and wood-working obsession.

The 44-year-old, farm-raised humorist from the Midwest might be thought of as a grunge-generation Garrison Keillor.

“I’m not wild man,” he says. “I grew up in the country, and we loved to spend time in the outdoors, and I love the woods, I love canoeing. But I live in Los Angeles and I get out into nature for my escape and to daydream about a place in the woods to retire. I found a lot of happiness in the urban centers that I dwell.”

Offerman says he tries to maintain his survivalist edge by cooking “a lot of meat on the open fire, and I let the beard grow.”

His schtick rides roughshod over down-home territory with a wisdom that can be as biting as it is wistful. Some of it’s corny, but when he brings the dirty, that can be pretty corny too.

Offerman has, in previous shows, mined matrimonial turf for territory, a comedic tradition that runs from Henny Youngman to Howard Stern to Louis CK and beyond. Yet there’s nothing degrading or weird about his wife-related material.

“I tried to mine some comedy from how much I enjoy my marriage and how much I worship my wife,” says Offerman. “And that always goes over very well, because it’s sincere, but I don’t want to come across as saccharine.”

Offerman’s “Rainbow Song,” for example, “is a pretty, lovely song, but there’s a little bit of anal sex in it.”

Mullally and Offerman have on-again, off-again plans to tour with their Summer of 69, No Apostrophe show. It got put off this year when Mullally joined Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick in Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, now on Broadway.

“I’m on my own for the fall,” says Offerman.

In the meantime, there’s his tour and his next book, where Offerman says he plans to address the “consumerist polarization of political practices.”

“The channels are steering us to purchase their products and consume everything from morning to night,” he says. The list extends from food, clothes and cars “to the president we choose.”

“I’m really fed up with the rut our nation has found itself in,” he says. Everyone’s comfortable, soft and tuned in to their affinity channel.

“I’m as guilty as anybody,” he says. “I tune in to Colbert or Jon Stewart to find out what I think, and I think the other side, such as they are, tune in to Limbaugh for what they think, who to vote for, who they think is an asshole.”