SIFF 2004: The marathon is nearly over

Seven movies in 25 hours. Hardly a record, and considering that this last weekend of the 2004 Seattle Film Festival is just about over (torrow is the finale), hearing people talking about seeing 100 or more films in 22 days is nothing special.

And I haven’t seen anything that has been all that great. I keep wondering, where are all the films like “Trainspotting,” “Run Lola Run,” “The Usual Suspects” or even Michael Haneke’s creepy “Funny Games”? I feel as if I’m living a 1960s protest song: “Where have all the great films gone, long time passing?”

But I have gotten my foreign film fix. The order so far has been Cuba, Spain, Japan/Thailand, Argentina , Korea and Mexico . That’s a year’s lineup of foreign-language movies for a guy from Spokane. Somebody send me a translator… no entiendo nada, ‘mano.