Goodbye, Dragon Inn
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Movie Reviews of Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Movie Review: absurd
Summary: 4 Stars
of course, this film has the dubious distinction of being tsai's most absurd, non-narrative, and slow film to date. that need not condemn it as film, but does as entertainment. it's this caveat that those who might consider watching any of tsai's work, but particularly this film, should keep in mind. that said, like everything else by tsai, the film appears random but is formally well-wrought. moreover, it manages to say something very important in a cinematic medium about the role of cinema and also time, in the context of a national imagination. is it a mistake that 'dragon inn,' the martial arts film, has movement but 'bu san' is pervaded by an eternal present, a frozen time? the contrast of the two is precisely part of the point: an elegy for cinema, 'bu san' is also a memory of another time, one in which there seemed to be a future. rather than be annoyed that tsai fails to entertain us, we should relish our distraction, annoyance, and boredom as having their own pleasures. or share an ironic connection with those who don't get tsai's point but are willing to speculate on itMovie Review: An anti-film
Summary: 3 Stars
This is the kind of film you see at an art film festival at some inopportune time after you've already watched twenty films. You start watching it and it seems so boring that you know it can't be THAT boring. You're missing something. You sit up and you concentrate. Nothing happens. There is this woman with a club foot. She sways and totters up and down like a boat caught in waves as she drags her foot down a sparsely-lit corridor. The camera is at one end of the corridor and it records her progress. Then after she is gone, the camera holds on the empty corridor for some long seconds, make that literally minutes, and then cuts to another scene.
This time the camera is looking out into a darkened movie theater. There are only a couple of people seated in the red seats. Finally some dialogue. It's from the movie being shown, a kind of sword and warlord melodrama set in the Ming Dynasty. (Actually it's King Hu's Dragon Inn (1967), a martial arts epic--hence the name of this movie). The camera watches the face of one particular viewer. He is just sitting there watching the movie. The camera watches him watching the movie. It watches him watching the movie for a long time.
At some later point the guy goes to the bathroom. He's actually a Japanese tourist. He stands next to some other guy at a urinal. Another guy comes in and stands at a third urinal. One guy smokes a cigarette. Some time passes. Then there is another scene. The woman with the club foot is in the bathroom. She opens one stall and flushes the toilet. She opens another stall and flushes the toilet. The camera stays on the scene until she has flushed the last toilet, and then holds on the empty bathroom...
At this point you figure out what is going on. This is an anti-film. Everything is backwards. The film maker (Tsai Ming-Liang) is not trying to entertain you, to impress you, or to excite you, or rally you to some cause, dazzle you, invoke your tears, uplift you, scare you, redeem you--no, the film maker is doing exactly the opposite of what film normally tries to do.
And then there's another scene, as if to confirm your interpretation. The one guy and another stand in the corridor smoking cigarettes. There is after a bit some words from the second man. He says this theater is haunted. There is no response. He says "Ghosts." No response. The camera now gets a little closer so that you see the men from perhaps a few feet away. Their heads are turned away from the camera so that only the back of their heads and a little bit of the sides of their faces can be seen. The camera holds. No one says anything.
And finally near the end of the film after the theater has been closed for the night (actually forever, as this is about the death of the movie house), one guy puts his palm on a fortune telling machine. The machine says, "Enter your question." He punches a button. After a bit, the machine says, "Please take your fortune." A pause, and then the machine kicks out the fortune on a strip of paper. The guy takes it and reads it. And then he leaves. The camera does NOT show his fortune.
The part you like best comes at the end as a woman sings a Chinese song about "Half was bitter; half was sweet." Her voice is gorgeous and the melody is engaging. And then the title characters run down the screen.
Okay, this film really IS boring unless you are a true student of film, and then you can see that this anti-film about people watching a film is a statement about the film-maker's art. As you leave the theater, now having seen twenty-one films, you declare that this was very interesting, and you know you are going to vote this one higher than some of the others because it so deliberately bored you that you were not really bored at all, compared to some other films that took themselves too seriously and really did bore you. "Interesting," you say to your companion. "Really makes a statement," he says. "Beautiful in a way," you say. "Yes," he says.
Suddenly you have an angle on the film. You're thinking, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" somehow reminds you of the lyric from the Elton John song about Marilyn Monroe. The lyric is, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." Same thing, you think--or at least the same melancholy idea.
Movie Review: Very hard work
Summary: 2 Stars
I do not have anything much to add to the other reviews. This is a dissappointing film. It has one prizes and i watched it waiting to find out why. It is pretty but extraordinarly slow. It contains one idea, no plot and no dialogue. We seem to be invited to accept that this patent lack of substance in fact reflects a reality. Well perhaps it does not but not one that is worth spending more than an hour watching.Movie Review: another pretentious, bored-you-to-death film from the same director
Summary: 1 Stars
what a torture to watch this deadbeat film. every frame in this movie was just like a picture frozen in time. the screenplay writer/director tried so hard to waste the film as long as they could. they tried to give you a helpless, dreary, melancholy, nostalgic backward of the old time, used a movie they thought representing the golden era of taiwanese wu-xia movies. what we got here were nothing but: the constantly coming and going audience in the theatre, a guy shifted around among seats to look at other viewers who were actually those characters in that movie, all the has-been and the have-been wash-up old timer. what we got here was the camera shot an object or a meaningless character, froze there, shot at them with nothing to tell and nothing to happen; we got the crippled mama-san eating bum, drinking tea, climbing up and down staircases in the theatre doing the meaningless chores, washing her hands in the movie theater's restroom for at least 3 minutes with nothing to tell, then limping around. then back in the showing room, people coming and going, eating, smoking, putting stinking barefeet onto the front seat back, endless guys moving around in the dark, sound track from the screen.....yeah, very deep, very philosophic, got lot things to tell and certainly you understood them all.
this director from taiwan is one of the worst and the most pretentious director who could do nothing but continuously produced absolutely clueless and pointless movies. the only thing he might have achieved was the film manufacturers rally like this customer, because every time he shot a movie, miles of miles film would be bought to fulfill his empty vanity.
strongly recommeded to avoid this movie and all the movies thoughtfully directed by him.
Movie Review: The most boring film ever made
Summary: 1 Stars
I have written this to cathartize the feelings of annoyance I had that I even bothered to watch a single scene of this movie.
And I am no philistine, I love many art house movies.
If you liked "Watching paint dry" you will like this film.
One tip if you make the mistake of getting this out of your local library, let alone the appalling gaffe of buying it: watch it at 4x or 8x speed, then you will get the whole picture with less time wasted. Watch a few snatches at normal speed (eg one of the many scenes of the managaress limping painfully down long corridors, or men peeing for so long they must have advanced prostatitis) and you will be able to tell anecdotes about how you watched the most boring film of all time.
I suppose the director and the "emperors' new clothes" critics who raved on the cover thought this was a clever way of showing how dreary real life is really like. Maybe life is like that for film critics.
However, I really don't think it is that dreary for more than 0.1% of the human race, most of whom would be living in mental hospitals suffering from terminal depression, just waiting for that chance to steal a hospital dinner knife and end the torturous bordeom of it all.