three press screenings, two appointments
Today I went to three press screenings; "J" stayed home because she had an appointment (a contractor estimate) during the third film, which was the only one that she thought sounded tempting from the description.
The 10 am film, Mr Long, is a Japanese drama about a Taiwanese hitman who holes up in a Japanese village after a job goes wrong, meets a little boy, helps the boy's junkie mother get clean, and with the support of people in the neighborhood, opens a successful noodle pushcart. But he can't hide in plain sight forever. The opening and closing action scenes are solid fight choreography (and the opening had a fantastic score), but the long drama in the middle was the core of the film. If you're in for the action, it might be a disappointment, but I thought it was very good.
The 12:15 pm film, Lane 1974, was adapted from a fairly well-rated memoir, The Hypocrisy of Disco, with influence from the writer-director's own experiences as the child of hippies. I only attended because it was positioned between two films that sounded good, so I went in with low expectations - and even so the film fell short. I'm sure some people will like it, but other than a lot of nice scenery shots I can't find anything good to say about it.
The 2 pm film, At the End of the Tunnel, is a brilliant piece of Spanish neo-noir drama. The main character is a computer nerd who uses a wheelchair, and discovers that his new neighbors are digging a tunnel under his house to break into a bank safe-deposit vault. Around the same time he takes on a pair of boarders: a sexy woman and her six-year-old daughter, who never speaks. The film is tense throughout, and in spite of the complexity of the plot I found no plot holes except a small one that showed up only in the epilogue scene. This is one of my favorites of the year.
After the three films, I couldn't catch any regular SIFF films, because I had to give "J" a ride to an appointment in Woodinville. I'm not sure I had the energy for more movies anyway, and it would be hard to find something to top Tunnel.