SIFF, Part 3: “The Drummer” and “Half-Life”

After seeing three of the SIFF films over four days, I wanted to take a break, so except for Monday’s "Song Sung Blue," we didn’t see any films during the week. But by Thursday or so, I was starting to go into withdrawal; I missed going out to the movies. Fortunately, on Saturday we made up for it with our most aggressive schedule yet: "The Drummer" at 11:00 at Pacific Place Cinema downtown, and right after that, "Half-Life" at 1:30 at the Harvard Exit in Capitol Hill, a little over a mile away.

We went with our friends Angela and Sean; Angela used to work in my department on the same floor as I did back in San Francisco; then, last year, the department moved into a new building and I lost track of her. It turns out that she and Sean moved to Seattle last year just a few months before we did so that she could take a job at Amazon, which I only discovered because Angela and I ran into each other on 3rd Avenue one day last winter on our way to our respective bus stops. Small world! (Or maybe just small West Coast.)

"The Drummer" (Hong Kong, director Kenneth Bi) is the story of a gangster’s son, Sid (played by Jaycee Chan, Jackie Chan’s son), who plays drums in a rock band and has the poor judgment to sleep with the girlfriend of a powerful mob boss. To protect him, his father sends him into hiding in Taiwan, where he stumbles upon a community of Zen drummers who live and train in a kind of monastery in the mountains. Enthralled by the sight and sound of them, he persuades them to let him stay with them, but this spoiled kid has a lot to learn about humility and discipline before he can be a real drummer. It’s a familiar story, but "The Drummer" provides a nice treatment of it. The drummers (both male and female) in the film are the actual members of one such community, and they are beautiful to watch, both in their drumming and in the way they interact with one another. Jaycee Chan has much of his dad’s charm and gift for comedy. And of course, having done taiko drumming for a couple of years with San Francisco Taiko Dojo, I appreciated seeing the art form portrayed on the screen. Although I thought it lacked the originality of vision to be a great film, I still enjoyed "The Drummer" and was glad I saw it.

With less than thirty minutes to get to the Harvard Exit, we had to race to make it to "Half Life" in time (fortunately, Sean and Angela had their car) and just barely succeeded. The film itself was disappointing. The blurb in the SIFF program had sounded intriguing; in the world of the very near future, global warming has passed the tipping point, creating unrest both in the larger world and in the immediate world around the Wu family. Although there were some interesting visual effects, and I enjoyed the familiarity of the setting (Diablo Valley, inland from San Francisco Bay), the story was weak, and I thought the film failed to make a meaningful connection between the global warming framework and the domestic drama.

After "Half-Life," David and I were done for the day, but then, we’re just amateurs; Sean and Angela had two more screenings planned for Saturday (or was it three more?), including one midnight screening. Hard core! Not us; we had to rest up for Sunday…(to be continued)